This week's update on Your Tax Dollars At Work.

Chapter 1: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is still at war against "the grizzlies." Also, still an incomprehensible dolt. From The New York Times:

Such a move appears to be unprecedented, reversing a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weapons. And it would also undermine efforts by Congress to restrict the use of federal funding on guns. As recently as March, Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms. But the department is eyeing a program in federal education law, the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, that makes no mention of prohibiting weapons purchases. That omission would allow the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to use her discretion to approve any state or district plans to use grant funding for firearms and firearm training, unless Congress clarifies the law or bans such funding through legislative action.

As you can imagine, actual education experts find this proposed program to be less than optimal, school-wise. Also, sanity-wise. From The Washington Post:

JoAnn Bartoletti, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, condemned the use of the grant funds — called Title IV in federal education law — for firearms. “It’s a perverse distortion of Title IV’s goal of enhancing student learning,” Bartoletti said. “Under the guise of flexibility, the secretary continues to abdicate her responsibility to advance sound, research-based efforts to safeguard students.”

George Frey Getty Images

Parents with tragic expertise in school shootings also are not enthusiastic.

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., reacted angrily to the suggestion that federal education funds would be used to buy guns.“Devos, after my daughter was murdered, you yelled ‘Don’t talk about guns, talk about mental health,'” Guttenberg posted to Twitter. “Your brain dead plan will pull money from mental health.”

Chapter Two: This guy's salary. From Mother Jones:

Scott Lloyd’s anti-abortion crusade began when, as a young man, he found himself faced with a partner’s unexpected pregnancy. Many years later, Lloyd would take his battle to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, where, as its leader since March 2017, he has personally intervened to block teenage migrants in federal custody, including at least one rape victim, from accessing abortions...

Today, after a career spent harnessing the law to restrict abortion access, Lloyd oversees the lives of nearly 12,000 migrants under the age of 18, most of whom were detained after crossing the border without proper papers. As their legal guardian, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is charged with housing them in federally funded shelters and providing them with health care, including reproductive services. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, ORR routinely permitted abortions sought by undocumented teens who obtained private funding for the procedure. But after President Donald Trump appointed Lloyd to lead the agency last spring, he quickly changed this longstanding policy, requiring any teenager in ORR’s custody seeking to terminate a pregnancy to get his direct approval.

OK, so far, that's par for the course for this administration*.

Scott Lloyd Drew Angerer Getty Images

However, MJ got a hold of an essay Lloyd wrote as a law student at Catholic University, and it's something of a doozy. It seems that Lloyd's anti-choice fervor is based on an episode in which his partner got pregnant and sought, and obtained, an abortion.

Since that day, Lloyd wrote, “I’ve realized that absolutely every single reason to support an abortion is a distortion of the truth. Two steps beyond all of them is a proper investigation of the matter, and two steps back reveals the fear and selfishness behind them.” Lloyd also describes his embarrassment at later recalling this experience to a different woman who would go on to become his wife. Lloyd argued that women who aren’t willing or able to give birth should abstain from sex: “If a woman needs to defend so fiercely the ‘one thing they can call their own—their body,’ then they shouldn’t be so careless with it as to have sex when they are not ready to be pregnant.” And he attacked Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion in America, homing in on its discussion of the potential negative consequences to unwanted pregnancies.

"Roe v. Wade points to the mental and financial troubles a pregnant woman faces. It doesn’t speak highly of women to assume that they can’t handle the pressures of being a mother, and that they need a procedure that is so directly opposed to femininity. Ask any of the female deans or professors at our school how much abortion was a factor in their success as a female professional. Ask them if having a child spelled mental and financial ruin. I sort of doubt that abortion was a key step on their path to success. Is abortion a choice we should endorse in an effort to make women a more successful segment of society?"

The essential misogyny in this essay leads us inevitably to...

Chapter 3: This guy's salary.

Andrew Kloster is the legal adviser to the general counsel at the Department of Transportation. Everybody needs a gig, right? But Kloster also is fairly active on the electric Twitter machine. And if you can figure out what the hell his take on the Asia Argento story is about, you're a smarter person than I am—or than Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, who called attention to the tweet, is.

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👇Legal Adviser to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation

(h/t @JSwiftTWS) pic.twitter.com/Ea1fWE9Fjl — Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) August 22, 2018

Nothing but the best people is never not going to be hilarious.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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