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Daily Bafflements

Revisiting Amway, protesting the inauguration, and Rick Perry’s sorrow

• Betsy DeVos’s hearing was fraught with controversy and moments of complete idiocynot to mention a brief discussion about bears. The billionaire and education “philanthropist” proved to be incapable of answering basic policy questions, all the while demonstrating little-to-no knowledge of basic educational terms. She sounded like a hack, no doubt—a fact that makes a lot more sense when you recall her family connection to Amway. As Matt Roth asked in Baffler no. 10, “if Amway isn’t a scam, why did it seem so much like one?”

• In her second installment of Interviews for Resistance, Sarah Jaffe discusses goals and strategy with Legba Carrefour, an organizer with DisruptJ20. Last night, DisruptJ20 kicked off their pre-inauguration direct action with a dance party outside of vice-president-elect Mike Pence’s house. 

• “The fact that ObamaCare — a reasonably good-faith effort to make the system better — did not stop the vicious cruelty of medical billing, and in many ways only added to the system’s psychotic complexity, ought to weigh on us all.”

• Today in news: Rick Perry is capable of feeling sorrow—and even of admitting wrongdoing