Wonkette
R.I.P. SENATOR PELL: One of Rhode Island’s awesomest former senators has died at the age of 90. Claiborne Pell was a big fat liberal and a millionaire who was obsessed with UFOs and jogged around Newport in his old Princeton letter sweater and drove a Mustang with a roll-bar because he was such a bad driver. He helped create the NEA but didn’t like modern art. He also pushed for federal subsidies of higher education, later renamed Pell Grants, without which your editor would have had to join the circus or go to work at the renderer’s. Senator Pell was a comical character straight out of a Fitzgerald novel, and it is really too bad that they don’t make rich people like that anymore. [New York Times, Providence Journal]
Ah yes, the man responsible for the education I received. Here I am twenty years later learning that Pell referred to a person rather than a corporation. Hopefully it worked out better for other recipients of his good will. I do owe him thanks, because I learned proper English just in time for “the” to become “teh,” all grammar to be cast out the window, and “evil” to become “Cheney.”
I always assumed Pell was an acronym for “Progressive Elitist Liberal Latte-sippers”, because that’s obviously who these socialist subsidies were meant for.
Yeah, it’s funny, I never knew “Pell” was an actual person, either. He sounds like a great guy. But he needed better PR!
The tag line (great Rhode Islanders) calls for the subhead: a very small group.
Oh, and Ms Smith: thanks for entertaining us on this holiday.
V572625694: Well, there’s Seth McFarlane, and James Woods, and Commodore Perry. That’s about it, I guess.
SKS, the bearded lady or one of those contortionists a la Cirque to Soleil? Just kidding.
Interesting guy though.
Shit, I thought I got a PRELL grant! I’ve been using that shitty shampoo for years! Forget it, that joke sucks.
jagorev: What about H.P. Lovecraft? After all, his (non-bullet pointed) gravestone says I AM PROVIDENCE, and he wrote about the nameless, ageless horrors lurking just under the streets of that city - as opposed to the very corporeal horrors to be found in Buddy Cianci’s office.
That’s the head shot Pell used to get on The Edge of Night
All the great “characters” in the US Senate are long gone (especially those plummy East Coast liberal Republicans…like Lincoln Chaffee, R-RI). Now, it’s a bunch of dull insurance agents (like Harry Reid, D-NV…who you’d think would be a gamblin’ man or more like Wayne Newton). Even the scandalous, like Larry Craig, are dull and sad in their own dull sad way.
RIP Claiborne Pell, we’ll not see your likes again…
jasonelias: Nice reference, thanks for making Diet Coke shoot out my nostrils
smellyal8r: Pell was a Democrat…sorry, sorry…mea culpa, etc.
Claiborne Pell’s middle name was deBorda.
/snark
El Bombastico:
Could have been worse. It could have been a Krell Grant and then your ID would have gone on a killing rampage.
/SF Nerd humor… Sorry.
I knew he was a real person, just didn’t know he was still alive….
I got a Pell grant but still had to works in slave labor (dishwasher @ JC Penney restaurant,various fast-food joints) in college.
2druk2phluq:
“President George W. Bush signed a bill into law [in 2007] that would raise the maximum Pell Grant award by $260. The increase is effective at the start of July, bringing the maximum award [from $4,050] to $4,310. [i.e. 7/10ths of a percent.]”
http://media.www.thequindecim.com/media/storage/paper618/news/2007/02/28/News/Bushs.Plan.To.Raise.Pell.Grant.May.Be.Misleading.For.Students-2750039.shtml
2/28/07
But in order to pay for his possible increase [to $5400 over the next
5 years], which has a five-year cost of about $19.8 billion, Bush has proposed the elimination of the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program.
********
Pigs is pigs.
His family, the Pells, and himself, summered in Fort Ticonderoga, New York. They bought up the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga in the 1900s and have kept it up since. It’s the best historical site in the US, the Gibraltar of America.
jasonelias: I lol’d.
This crowd is probably too young to get that. Heck, I’m too young!
“Pell spoke with an aristocratic tone but was an unabashed liberal who spent his political career championing causes to help the less fortunate.”
It went something like this:
“If we don’t educate these ignorant, knuckle-dragging Hottentots, then God knows where One is going to find someone to repair the children’s private merry-go-round! (Sniff!) We’re my bloody tea!?”
Cape Clod: Cute, asshole. More accurate, “There but fortune go I.”
Pell was another elitist in the categorgy as TR, FDR, JFK and Jack’s brothers. The recognition of social advantage (and duty) was lost on GWB, too stupid to accept that was due to the inheritance from those who came before him rather than a free-market economy.
jagorev: Didn’t the Talking Heads form in Rhode Island, at RISD, or something?
smellyal8r: Heh heh, thanks!
cal: Ha! Now I feel old, j/k.
I owe this man my education and I’m deeply grateful for it.
I knew it all along: something like a Pell Grant could not–ever–have come from a motherfucking Republican. Thank you, Senator Pell.
alt text:
so you’re saying that not all of the senators in the olden days were like Jesse Helms?
Ah, the infallible NEA. How long before they feel the pain of their unsustainable compensation?
S.Luggo: Lighten up, Sluggo. I live in a place where politicians legislate for your benefit but treat you like shit in person. Kinda like John Cleese as Robin Hood in the ‘Time Bandits’ movie. I’ll vote for them, but don’t expect me to kiss their ass.
Cape Clod:
“Thank you very, very, very much! Awful people.”
Pell is gone, but Cheney still walks the earth. There is no god.
Does this guy have anything to do with the Pell certification on helmets?
Good guy. Pity he was from Rhode Island, not South Carolina, where his corpse could serve another couple of terms.
got one his grants once. currently rethinking the ‘renderer’ option, career-wise…
what about PERKINS! no one talks about that homeboy, ever.
S.Luggo: Holy crap, I managed to sign in for the first time in months! And now I actually have to quasi-defend Bush in my return. That’s a 7 percent increase, not .7 percent.
Just had to proudly show the dead retired Senator that, even though I blew his grant $$ on beer balls and ramen noodles, I do know the mathz.
This means I don’t have to repay my student loans, right?
President Beeblebrox: There is absolutely no proof of Dick Cheney ever living in Providence.
This just proves my theory that angry, sarcastic, vaguely anarchistic writers made the best obit writers, because when they say nice things about dead people, you know they really mean it. Well done.
Hope you make it to heaven, Senator Grant Pell. Er, Claiborne? Can we posthumously rename you Grant? K, thx.
nbawriter: You are aware, I’m sure, that ramen noodles have been the savior of roughly 72% of the world’s poor-to-less-poor-ish American college students, and that money spent on ramen is never wasted as I believe they, like Twinkies and roaches, will survive a nuclear apocalypse. Now although this makes your point less funny, I feel compelled to say at the good Senator’s passing that it is still nice to see that at some point in American history, people of all political stripes were recipients of the government’s largesse.
Oh hey! ALSO, he is a hero for teh gayz, according to Wikipedia:
“In 1993, during the bitter confirmation battle over Roberta Achtenberg, a lesbian, as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Pell stated that his daughter was a lesbian, and that he hoped that it would not be a barrier to federal employment for her; Achtenberg became the first openly gay person to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.”
Sen. Claiborne Pell, your life=WIN FOR AMERICA!
CORRECTION: Also…I know my first sentence in the comment above was weird in the tense sense…I meant “make the best obit writers” because they still do…Ms. Smith, especially.
S.Luggo: A 5-year cost of $19.8b? What a waste. The Big 3 can blow through that in a couple months, and if we are lucky we can get that syrup warmer innovation lanuched in cars. What did edumicated students ever do for us besides communist revolution by inalling N0obama into power?
josereyes.theroof: yes, the Talking Heads did go to RISD. And their incendiary lyrics in ‘Burnin Down the House’ and anti-GOP ‘Girlfriend is Better’ is exactly why we cannot promote education in young people. There are all ready more than enough jobs in Alaskan fisheries and oil fields - what more do they need?
Yeah, I owe this old man. Thanks to him, I got to college and ended up being able to talk about stuff my relatives don’t understand, therefore making them suspicious that I think I’m better than them.
Tragically, “Little Rhody” is best known today for Macfarlane, especially since the Farrellys’ career is in the crapper. People of taste prefer The Simpsons, but if you say that out loud, you’re a fogey. Better to try to conceal your age, a policy that obviously worked for this statesman.
Servo: “Is it really necessary to hit the poor?”
Senator Pell was one of the last of the old money Yankee’s with noblesse oblige. You can call him elitist, or snot, or whatever but he used his money and power to help those less fortunate. Socialism? Perhaps. But lately unbridled capitalism has not worked has it? The Bush Clan used to have some old money class in Prescott but the current cabal acts like Dallas new money uppity white trash. Pell’s lot is now sadly gone.
I heard on NPR this morning that he used to jog in a tweed jacket! Jogging! In a tweed jacket! Not even Terence Trent D’Arby is that cool.
assistant/atlas: He started the NEA so we know he is for the gays-unlike Dick Cheney who hates the gays although his daughter is one.
assistant/atlas: Off topic, but are you THE assistant atlas, as in “Poop on Ryan Seacrest’s Star on the Walk of Fame Contest” atlas?
loquaciousmusic: I heard that, too! It must be nice to be a millionaire, because then you get to be whacko and call it eccentric. But he was a really great person, and I, too, benefitted from a Pell Grant.
Bostonian_Queer_in_Dallas: 1st stringer replacement for Pell? None other than Ned Lamont! Rich? Check (demi-robber baron gramps a principal/partner in J.P. Morgan, pre-pre…-current economic shitstorm). Noblesse oblige? Out the wazoo.
Besides, he’ll be the one to kick Connecticut’s current shitstain of a senator, Josephus Lieberman, out in the next election cycle.
Oh noes! Who will champion federal subsidies for Uri Gellar’s spoon bending experiments now?
http://www.randi.org/jr/2007-02/021607failure.html#i9
Rest in peace, Senator.
Not a lot of people know this, but he also founded his own clothing line.
S.Luggo: I see you’re the person who put “orgy” in “categorgy”. Well done. Freud is beaming at you from Psychoanalyst Heaven.
My few visits to Free Republic have led me to believe that this country needs more Spell grants. I believe that there are still bluebloods like Pell out there but that they avoid politics like the plague. Or is it the plaque? I’ll apply for that Spell grant.
Wait. you mean I didn’t have to join the Army for an extra year to get a guarantee to be in the medical field so I could get some college money without getting killed by some little guy in pajamas, be forced to live in the slums of El Paso where I got burglarized, robbed, beaten with sticks, learned to drink excessively and snorf whatever was around, got divorced, got in constant trouble, finally got discharged, stumbled home a half-shell of a man, then struggled through four years on beer and potatoes on the GI Bill to get a college degree that only allowed me to nudge my way into miserable, low-level jobs until finally I got sick of the whole thing and moved into a whole new career, which required that I more or less start my education all over again and left me poor as a college student for the next two decades, until finally I could pull my shit together and find a decent gig…?
You mean they were giving out GRANTS for college? I could have just stayed home and gotten a GRANT?
I gotta go lie down.
i bet more wonketters got pell grants than not, i could be wrong, but i sure did appreciate the ones i got. rip mr. pell, we need a replacement.
For whom the pell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Thanks for the grant back in the day, Mr. Pell. Rest in peace!!!
Cape Clod: We don’t mind, we’re used to it.
Got any spare change?
Cape Clod: Ha ha, except not. The guy actually spent his life helping people who didn’t have what he had; most rich people don’t give a shit and spend their lives demonstrating it.
A great American that many of you twits can thank for your educations, though most of you misuse it.
And “awesomeist! is an insane word to use, ever. Awesome is a word to be used once in a lifetime. You obviously misused your Pell grant!!