How to Woo The Turtle

Okay, I admit it: I have no idea how these things usually go, so I might be the weird one here. But I couldn’t help noticing a tiny little detail buried deep in the recent New York Times exposé of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and I just gotta ask–Is this how DC people really do things?

Sorry, Scoob…I’ll need ten grand.

The article as whole is worth reading. In case you were worried that Trump has put together a scandal-proof administration, Secretary Chao’s story puts those fears to bed. Her connections with her family business and its super-sweetheart deals with the Chinese government are astonishing.

mitch-mcconnell

Shell-shocked.

None of that truly shocked me, however. What did wow me was this lil nugget buried way at the end of the article. Secretary Chao is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, aka “The Turtle.” And dig this:

In 1989, shortly after their first date (at the Saudi ambassador’s home near Washington), Mr. McConnell was preparing for a re-election campaign. Greetings from Ms. Chao came in classic Washington fashion: a string of campaign donations, totaling $10,000, from Ms. Chao, her father, her mother, her sister May and May’s husband, Jeffrey Hwang, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Is THAT how these House-of-Cards types date? …really?

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I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Lynching creationists, confirming judges, and much more. Here are a few of the stories that marched across our desk this week:

Creationist school board candidate runs a terrible ad, at FA.

swung by neck not tail

???

Sam Wineburg: New media literacy law won’t work, at WaPo.

Jon Shields on the decline of the conservative professoriate, at NA.

if one wants to be exposed to a broad spectrum of political ideas, it is still far better to attend Notre Dame or Baylor than Berkeley or Cornell.

More spoof articles get accepted by academic journals, at NR. HT: MM

a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.

Kavanaugh Karamazov? Comparing the trials of Brett and Dimitri at PD.

Trials are not the place for working out our social grievances and anxieties.

Call Obi-Wan: The US Navy now has real ray-guns. At Cosmos.

ray gun

>>pew pew<<

Did Common Core change teacher behavior? Larry Cuban says kinda.

Professor under fire for hateful comments about the Kavanaugh hearings, at IHE.

Does this flyer count asliberal indoctrination” by a public-school teacher? At PI.

pa liberal indoctrination

Civics ed? Or sinister indoctrination?

Taxpayers fund a school field trip to the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, at LHL.

Mitch McConnell as Hindenburg, a “gravedigger of democracy,” at NYRB.

What’s the big IDEA with this fast-expanding charter network? At Chalkbeat.

Ah, fresh air! A pop history of baby cages at GH.

baby cage

You can forget those “free-range” child-rearing practices…