Betsy DeVos Casually Reframes Segregation, Calls Historically Black Colleges 'Pioneers of School Choice'

Here’s all the shit we couldn’t cover today:

• Betsy DeVos, drumming up the insane logic of a racist billionaire who has never opened a history book that doesn’t include a chapter on Noah’s Ark, called historically black colleges and universities—founded because black students during the Jim Crow era were excluded from segregated white schools—“real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” She later published some garbled tweets that I guess were supposed to clarify something? [New York Times]
• Attorney General/menacing leprechaun Jeff Sessions, who is suuuper anti-regulations except for all the times he isn’t, appears to be readying a crackdown on marijuana—even in states that have legalized it. Sessions (who, if you’ll recall, has said of the KKK: “Those guys were OK until I learned they smoked pot”) warned yesterday: “Experts are telling me there’s more violence around marijuana than one would think and there’s big money involved.” And today: “I’m not sure we’re going to be a better, healthier nation if we have marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store.” [Huffington Post]
• Actually, Donald Trump doesn’t want to fill those thousands of government job vacancies! They are “unnecessary,” okay? [Twitter]
• Hacked texts appear to show Andrea Manafort, daughter of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, sharing concerns about her father’s “blood money.” [Politico]
• Trump signed an executive order today directing the EPA to reconsider the Obama administration’s Clean Water Rule, because honestly, who needs clean water? I guess no one in the Trump administration, who, to be fair, were all forged out of swamp gelatin in the pits of Mordor. [The Hill]
• Trump blamed the military for Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens’ death during a botched raid in Yemen last month, which is sure to go over extremely well. [Huffington Post]
• Welp, tourism is down! Somewhere in the West Wing, Stephen Miller allows himself a brief congratulatory thigh clench. [The Guardian]
• Relatedly, a Bloomberg feature on Miller summarizes the steps to Miller’s success, and the grounding ethos of the blowhard would-be autocrats currently running our country: “To win favor, you must amplify Trump’s belief that he’s already accomplished great things; defend even his most outrageous claims as self-evidently correct; and look sharp, while projecting unshakable self-confidence.” [Bloomberg]
• Trump welcomed governors and “their wives and their daughters” on Sunday night. Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: “It was weird.” [Huffington Post]
• “I constantly see propaganda everywhere,” says a shirtless Alex Jones, top conspiracy theorist to the president, tells Der Spiegel. Here’s a snippet of this insane profile, God help us all: “He piles up food onto a plastic plate, and then he suddenly takes off his shirt without explanation. With his bare torso, he sits there and shovels meat into his mouth, a caricature of manliness, but also a show of power to the reporter sitting in front of him. He can do as he pleases. Then Jones gets up and holds out a sausage. ‘Wanna suck?’ he asks.” [Der Spiegel]
• Relatives of Americans who were reportedly killed by undocumented immigrants will be attending Trump’s first address to Congress tonight. Yes, you are correct, this is going to be terrible! [The New York Times]

Here are some tweets that the president was allowed to publish:

No tweets! None! Not one! Am I dead?