Drop These Words from Your Vocab, Period

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The not-vaunted, totally non–Ivy League Lake Superior State University has dropped its annual list of banished words, and you should 100% exile them from your vocabulary for the duration of this era, period.

First utilized in 1976 as a cringe-worthy publicity stunt to promote the little-known bastion of higher education by its public relations director, W.T. “Bill” Rabe, a Detroit-area PR guru (can we please banish that phrase?!), the list was released “as a safeguard against misuse, overuse, and uselessness of the English language.” The list was a game changer for LSSU, and has netted the university publicity for half a century.

Here’s the 2025 list of banished words:

1. cringe
2. game changer
3. era
4. dropped
5. IYKYK (if you know, you know)
6. sorry not sorry
7. skibidi
8. 100%
9. utilize
10. period

When it comes to this list, IYKYK, and if not, sorry not sorry, so go flush these overused and abused terms down your skibidi toilet and be done with them.

Trump Inauguration Grift Nets $170 Million

Buck Banks

$170 million

“President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee is no longer selling tickets for major donors to attend his swearing-in and accompanying private events in Washington,“ the New York Times reports. “The committee has raised over $170 million… The haul is so big that some seven-figure donors have been placed on wait lists or have been told they probably will not receive V.I.P. tickets at all because the events are at capacity.”

Just Another Day for the Chaos Monkeys in Washington

Buck Banks


Playbook: “The simplest and most important reason for the country’s expected return to a peaceful transfer of presidential power is that Trump actually won this presidential election, unlike the last one. As a result, he and his Republican allies have not mounted a public campaign of lies in an effort to mislead his supporters into thinking that he won, and they haven’t lobbied Republican elected officials to try to get them to throw the election to him anyway, as they did after the 2020 election. (Oh, there will also be much more security tomorrow, too.)”

“But even if tomorrow’s congressional certification goes off without a hitch, there is no question that the events on Jan. 6 four years ago — and the legal system’s response to them — will continue to loom large in American history and politics, and that they will continue to shape our perception and understanding of some major political figures.”

The Tech-Bros at Home

Sung to the tune of 'Old Folks at Home' or 'Suwanee River'

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(With apologies to Stephen Foster and thanks to Paul Krugman for coining “Muskaswamy”)

Way down upon the Muskaswamy
Far, far away,
That’s where my H-1B visa takes me —
That’s where the tech-bros play.
Outside the techno-libertarian coalition,
MAGAs sadly roam,
Stuck in mediocre stultification,
Far from the tech-bros at home.

(Chorus)

All along the Muskaswamy,
Brilliant immigrants roam,
Oh, MAGAs how your hearts grow weary,
Far from the tech-bros’ new home.

Alabama Can’t Quit Enslaving People

The state profits from leasing prisoners to private companies, including Best Western, Budweiser and Burger King

Pensito Editors
Source: Alabama Political Reporter

AP: No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.

Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks.

[…]

Poll: Anti-Education Politics Risks Brain Drain from Southern Schools and Universities

Sixty percent of southern academics "could not recommend their state as a desirable place to work"

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Nature Magazine: A survey of faculty members working in US southern states shows that a significant majority frequently witness or experience political interference that affects morale and is causing many to look for positions in other regions or to leave academia altogether.

The survey, which ran in August 2024, was distributed mostly by the southern regional chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and garnered responses from 2,924 self-selected participants. Of these, 51% identified as female, 17% identified as non-white and more than 60% held tenured positions. The survey found that nearly 60% of respondents could not recommend their state as a desirable place to work. Nearly 50% said that politics and policy changes had reduced the numbers of job applicants to their institutions.

“This is an issue that faculty members are worried about, and that’s going to become a bigger problem for state institutions in large parts of the country,” says Amy Reid, who until August led New College of Florida’s gender-studies programme in Sarasota.

House MAGAs Kill Musk-Trump Spending Bill – Gov’t Shutdown Looms

38 Republican House members give voters a taste of chaos to come

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AP: The House of Representatives has rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s new plan to fund federal operations and suspend the debt ceiling a day before a government shutdown.

Almost three dozen Republicans joined Democrats to vote against Trump’s sudden demands and the quick fix cobbled together by GOP leaders. The bill fell 174-235, failing to earn even a majority of votes.

Time Magazine Fact-Checks Its ‘Person of the Year,’ Donald Trump

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The Associated Press published a piece about its fact0-check of the lengthy interview it conducted with Donald Trump for its “Person of the Year” issue:

Time magazine gave Donald Trump something it has never done for a Person of the Year designee: a lengthy fact-check of claims he made in an accompanying interview.

The fact-check accompanies a transcript of what the president-elect told the newsmagazine’s journalists. Described as a “12 minute read,” it calls into question 15 separate statements that Trump made.

It was the second time Trump earned the Time accolade; he also won in 2016, the first year he was elected president. Time editors said it wasn’t a particularly hard choice over other finalists Kamala Harris, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and Kate Middleton.

Time said Friday that no other Person of the Year has been fact-checked in the near-century that the magazine has annually written about the figure that has had the greatest impact on the news. But it has done the same for past interviews with the likes of Joe Biden, Netanyahu and Trump.

A Song for Our Times: ‘There Ain’t No You in United Health’

Pensito Editors

There’s No You in United Health

There’s an office in a building and a person in a chair
And you paid for it all though you may be unaware
You paid for the paper, you paid for the phone
You paid for everything they need to deny you what you’re owed

There ain’t no you in United Health
There ain’t no me in the company
There ain’t no us in the private trust
There’s hardly humans in humanity
[…]

Christopher Wray Sticks It to Donald Trump

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By resigning as FBI director prior to the end of his 10-year tenure, Christopher Wray has thwarted Donald Trump’s plans to install the odious Kash Patel as FBI chief.

New York Times: “By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a ‘legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.’”

“Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.”

“Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1.”