About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

Ah, the webs they weave

Posted on November 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Networks of opportunists betray the meaning of friendship

Joseph Weber

At Mar-A-Lago in 2000, source: The Guardian

So, a couple pieces in The New York Times and The Atlantic set me to thinking about friendship. Just what is it and what is it not?

One thing friendship most certainly is not was membership in the network of the rich and powerful that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein crafted. The NYT piece, by Anand Giriharadas, spells out what that ugly lattice was about.

Giriharadas calls the Epstein network “a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.”

In other words, the people Epstein counted as “friends” were a bipartisan array of movers and shakers at the very top reaches of American society. The bizarrely varied ranks included Donald J. Trump, of course, but also Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard president Larry Summers, Trump plotter Steve Bannon, pseudo-mystic Deepak Chopra, Libertarian and J.D. Vance-backer Peter Thiel, leftie academic Noam Chomsky, former Prince Andrew, top bankers, lawyers, etc., etc.

Just how many of them knew of Epstein’s vileness is hardly clear (except, perhaps, for Prince Andrew and, by the dead Epstein’s account, Trump). Still, so many luminaries were drawn like moths to the loathsome financier – apparently an extraordinarily charming conman – that one has to wonder a) what drew these people, mostly men, in? and b) how could Epstein so easily take in so many seemingly smart folks?

Was it friendship that built this network? Hardly. Instead, point to mutual opportunism, greed and a craving for status as the obvious culprits.

In some ways, some high in the network seemed to be birds of a feather — whether they descended as low as Epstein or not. The sexual escapades of Clinton and Trump are well-known, of course. Lesser known is an attempted misadventure by Summers who, while married, sought Epstein’s advice in 2018 and 2019 on how to persuade a young academic in his orbit into bed. Epstein called himself Summers’s “wingman.”

Fully a decade before, in 2008, Epstein was convicted on felony sex charges involving a minor and got off with a light sentence. The Florida prosecutor in that case later became Secretary of Labor in Trump’s first term. Epstein killed himself in jail in August 2019, awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.

Whatever Epstein’s appeal to powerful men, his knack for collecting friends is reminiscent of at least one other famous network-builder. Long before he took flights on Epstein’s Boeing 727 to places such as Bangkok, Brunei, Rwanda, Russia, China and elsewhere, in 2002 and 2003, Clinton was well-known for his opportunistic friend-collecting.

From his earliest days as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Clinton gathered friends who could help further his lofty ambitions. The F.O.B.s, or Friends of Bill, included such folks as Strobe Talbott, who went on to become a Time Magazine journalist and later a diplomat under Clinton; Robert Reich, who became a distinguished academic and Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and author and health-policy expert Ira Magaziner, a presidential adviser, among others over the years.

Like Epstein, Clinton had a knack for gathering talented and well-placed people he thought could serve him. Such backers helped him get elected first as attorney general in Arkansas and then as the state’s governor and, ultimately, helped him vault to the White House.

But Clinton drew the line on what passed for him as “friendship” if it got in his way.

While he rewarded many of the F.O.B.s with jobs in Washington, the president and his wife, Hillary, were notorious for ruthlessly dropping people no longer useful to them. When Zoe Baird’s failure to pay taxes for a nanny became a liability, Clinton abandoned the well-connected Washington lawyer’s candidacy for U.S. Attorney General, for instance. And when Clinton’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Yale Law School chum Lani Guinier, stirred up dust for advocating for more minority representation in voting rights, Clinton dumped her.

As seems the case with Trump, loyalty was a one-way street with Clinton. Betrayals were common, according to James B. Stewart, author of the 1996 book “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries’.’

‘’It was a very consistent theme that I kept hearing,’‘ Stewart, told The New York Times. ‘’The Clintons’ personal advancement took precedence over anything else. There were so many people who were at one point or another considered close to the Clintons who felt betrayed one way or another.’‘

Does this sound anything like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the current president? The soon-to-be-former-Congresswoman – once Trump’s most fierce defender — had the temerity to press for release of the full Epstein files. She was among a trio of Republican women who demanded that, forcing Trump to acquiesce and leading to the vote for such a release. And for her sin, Trump threatened to primary her out of office at his next opportunity.

“I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day,” Trump said on Nov. 14 on his social-media platform. “I understand that wonderful, Conservative people are thinking about primarying Marjorie in her District of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her and her antics and, if the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support.”

As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, Trump called her a “traitor” on camera and shrugged off the death threats she received. Efforts to recruit a primary challenger to her accelerated, the journalist reported, leading to her resignation announcement.

Of course, the network of supporters – “friends,” perhaps – of Trump has long been an easily frayed thing. Those from his first term who turned on him includes such boldface names as former Vice President Mike Pence, former Attorney General Bill Barr, former secretaries of defense James Mattis and Mark Esper, his chairman of Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, his presidential transition team leader Chris Christie, and on and on. Before last fall’s election, CNN toted up some 24 people who found him repulsive after once enthusiastically serving him.

Frum’s argument in The Atlantic is cynical about Washington politics in general. He quotes a lobbyist from the 1990s and early 2002 who argued there were two kinds of people in D.C.: those who “got the joke” and those who didn’t. “Those who got the joke understood that all of the city’s talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense,” Frum writes. “Those who didn’t, didn’t.”

But he’s particularly sharp about Trump’s extraordinarily self-enriching crowd. Congresswoman Greene, Frum contends, never did get “the joke that MAGA is about anything more than manipulation, exploitation, corruption, lust, and cruelty. She seems to have sincerely believed the lies that shrewder players merely mouthed. She gained her own millions without appreciating that her allies were scheming for billions.”

Giriharadas, in the Times, broadens his scope to damn a whole class of elites, the wealthy who run society and who appear in the Epstein emails released so far. That may not be surprising, since he wrote the 2018 book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”

“The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is,” he argues. “The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers.”

The vast majority of us, of course, don’t move in such gilded circles. Sure, many folks turn to old school chums and professional colleagues to help them advance in mutually beneficial relationships. One would hope that many of the folks in those ranks may be real friends, rather than just helpful cards in power Rolodexes (not that anyone uses those anymore).

Still, it is sobering to think that right now in some of our best universities, in the penthouses of our leading cities and in important corners of Corporate America, young people may be imitating the Clintons, Trumps, Summers, et al. They may be building their own networks of supposed friends to help them reach whatever towering pinnacles they are aiming for.

One wonders: do they recognize that this is not friendship? One hopes that the young opportunists now see the collapsing networks some of their elders have built for the hollow and empty webs they are. Can they build better ones with ends that go beyond mere self-enrichment and political, social or business advances?

The geriatrics who inhabit the Epstein and Trump networks, thankfully, will be gone someday – preferably sooner rather than later. Will what comes after them be more of the same, as Giriharadas and Frum may imply? If so, that’s hardly a friendly thought.

Who is the real swine?

Posted on November 19, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s misogyny may — at last — be catching up with him

Joseph Weber

Nov 19, 2025

Just over a century ago, in 1920, the 19^th Amendment gave women the right to vote in the United States, after an effort that took more than 70 years. And just over half a century ago, in 1963, author Betty Friedan bemoaned the lack of progress for women, writing in “The Feminine Mystique”: “In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens.”

Now, we have a president telling Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey, “Quiet, Piggy,” for asking about the Epstein files, the sordid documents that mention Donald J. Trump multiple times. And we have Trump lecturing another woman that she was “a terrible reporter” for asking questions about the savage 2018 murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi and the Epstein papers. The president castigated ABC News journalist Mary Bruce for asking a “horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.”

“Insubordinate?” That’s right up there with other phrases Trump has used in dealing with female journalists, as reported by The Atlantic: “Keep your voice down.” “That’s enough of you.” “Be nice; don’t be threatening.” “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

All are reminiscent, too, of an infamous comment by another Republican, then-Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. He silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren in an argument over and Attorney General nominee in the first Trump term, in 2017, saying: “Nevertheless, she persisted.” That became a rallying cry for feminists.

So, one has to wonder: just how far we have come? And how much are we being set back?

Yes, four of the nine Supreme Court justices are women. And, yes, voters in New Jersey and Virginia installed women as governors earlier this month, for the first time in Virginia. Thirteen states now have women sitting at the same time in their governor’s chairs, something NPR last year celebrated as a new record.

And yet, since 1872 scores of women have sought and been denied the U.S. presidency. This was even after one, Kamala Harris, won the vice presidency and became the second woman, after Hillary Clinton, to carry a major-party banner into elections.

Of course, Trump’s misogyny is an egregious exaggeration. Like so much about the man, it is so extreme as to be aberrant. His history of mistreating women stretches back at least to the 1970s, through the late 1980s when he started palling around with Jeffrey Epstein, into the 1990s, when he assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, and into the 2000s, when he bragged about grabbing women by the genitals at beauty pageants. At least 27 women have publicly complained about Trump over the years.

But he and his minions are having a corrosive effect on society, certainly in some of our institutions.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who paid a woman $50,000 to keep quiet after she had accused him of sexual assault, has been driving women out of the military, for instance. After Trump removed Linda Fagan, the admiral who ran the U.S. Coast Guard, Hegseth purged another admiral who was the Navy’s first female chief, reassigned the woman vice admiral who ran the U.S. Naval Academy, fired another female vice admiral who worked with NATO, and pushed out a woman lieutenant general who headed of the Defense Health Agency. Hegseth, who has mandated that every combat soldier meet “the highest male standard” for fitness, also quashed the elevation of a woman slated to head the Navy’s SEAL program. That officer, a captain, had been awarded a Purple Heart for her time in Iraq, during which she was injured in an IED attack, and was the first female troop commander to serve with SEAL Team Six.

Organizations such as the National Organization for Women are documenting the numerous ways that the Trump Administration has been setting women back. These have included mandates that gender not be considered in military academy applications, widespread assaults on diversity and equality efforts, the gutting of the Office of Civil Rights, assaults on the rights of transgender people, and much more.

Even before his election, experts warned about the threats Trump posed to women, setting them the context of the rise of authoritarianism generally. In a November 2024 piece headlined “Why Gender Is Central to the Antidemocratic Playbook: Unpacking the Linkages in the United States and Beyond,” a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace set Trump’s sexism in a broader context. Saskia Brechenmacher wrote of how “a significant body of evidence shows that right-wing authoritarian views—which are associated with an embrace of traditional values, submission to authority, and a perception that the world is a dangerous place—are linked to both paternalistic attitudes about women (‘benevolent sexism’) and feelings of antipathy toward women who seek equality (‘hostile sexism’).”

Every month since Trump assumed office, it seems, we have seen fresh examples of authoritarian actions – consider the rampages of ICE, the unilateral dismantling of the Department of Education, the firings of government employees, the persecution of political opponents, the harassment of universities, and on and on. And, not coincidentally, we see Trump’s continuing verbal assaults on women.

We have at least three more years during which we’re likely to see more such outrages. Just how much damage will they do?

Congresswomen Mace, Boebert and Greene; source CNN

Still, it seems significant that some women in the GOP appear to be souring on Trump’s vileness. A New York Times opinion writer, Michelle Cottle, wrote of how much of a difference three Republican House members — Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina – have made. They stood up to others in their party and to the president in demanding release of the full Epstein files, forcing Trump to belatedly echo their call.

“Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made possible Tuesday’s vote to compel the administration to come clean about the web of degeneracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein,” Cottle wrote. “This victory speaks to the value of having women’s voices, and strength, inside the Republican echo chamber, a place that can still be tough for women to navigate.”

Might that signal the start of a feminist rebellion or something even broader? Betty Friedan in 1984 struck an optimistic note, writing: “I cry for all the years of women’s struggle and sacrifice to get to this place. I cry for joy and pride at the power that we women have found in ourselves and given to each other to make this moment possible. And I cry with sheer excitement at the amazing grace of it all – the sense of new political hope, of democracy moving again after all the years of cynicism.”

The setbacks that Trump represents – and foments – make such optimism tough now. But, if the three dissident Republican congresswomen signal anything, it’s that the fight isn’t lost yet.

Is “intellectual diversity” really diverse?

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Joe Weber

An Indiana case tests what intellectual exchange means in the Trump era

Joseph Weber

Nov 14, 2025

Ah, the hypocrisy.

Indiana last year passed an “intellectual diversity” law. It requires its public universities to develop policies that ensure that faculty foster a “culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

As reported by Insider Higher Ed, schools must consider whether faculty members have “introduced students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks” when deciding whether to give bonuses or renew contracts.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

But then, enter Jessica Adams, a lecturer at Indiana University’s School of Social Work. Adams was suspended from teaching a graduate-level class titled “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” after a single student objected to a graphic she showed in class.

The graphic described the phrase “Make America Great Again” as socially acceptable covert white supremacy. The term was listed right up there with Confederate flags and denial of white privilege.

A controversial view? No doubt. The sort of thing that might merit a full-blown discussion, one involving pro and con arguments? One might think so.

But after the student complained to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, the Trump-allied senator contacted IU. He got Adams barred from the course and landed her in the middle of an investigation of whether she broke the new law. Even though she continues to teach three other courses, she now worries that her job is in jeopardy.

No discussion. No truly diverse viewpoints here, it would seem.

The graphic that Adams used appears to have been updated from one created about 20 years ago by the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence of Boulder, Colorado. Its criticism of the “Make America Great Again” phrase, while something that would certainly offend some folks, is hardly singular.

For years, some critics have seen the term as code for, “Make America White Again.” That’s certainly what former neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini contended in 2017, when he said rightists believe that’s exactly what the phrase means. Indeed, polls have shown that while most Trump supporters see America’s greatest days as in the past, many Blacks disagree.

The “again” part of that phrase seems to evoke far different responses among Blacks and whites, especially at at time when racial resentment seems rampant.

In a 2022 book, “Racial Resentment in the Political Mind,” a dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author argue that many whites believe Blacks are unfairly advantaged in scholarships and jobs — a view likely not uncommon among Trump supporters. “In that context, any racial progress today is perceived as coming at the expense of whites,” argues the dean, David C. Wilson, a political psychologist.

That’s where the “again” part comes in. Let’s go back to the good old days when any such preferences didn’t exist, it suggests.

What’s more, at least one would-be politician in Tennessee in 2016 ripped off the Trump phrase to explicitly call on voters to “Make America White Again.” That candidate lost, certainly an encouraging sign.

Wouldn’t all of that be worth discussing in a university classroom? Adams certainly thinks so. “I feel this is an important issue to talk about — censorship, stifling of academic freedom and this real overreach through this legislation,” Adams told The New York Times.

But, for his part, Sen. Banks seemed to think that anything that makes even a single student twitchy has no place in a lecture hall. “At least one student in the classroom was uncomfortable, and I’m sure there are more,” the senator argued. “This type of hateful rhetoric has no place in the classroom.”

So, in other words, “intellectual diversity” means no one should be made to feel anxious. No instructor, regardless of any evidence she could cite, should suggest there might be racism in the term “Make America Great Again” or, perhaps, among those who embrace it.

Presumably, however, it would be acceptable to praise the “Make America Great Again” phrase and the movement and president who use the term. Just don’t criticize it.

To be sure, lots of controversial ideas merit discussion. Students such as the lone objector in Adams’s class should be free to air their views and, perhaps, bat them back and forth with others who may disagree. Such disagreement would seem to be just what should go on in a classroom, especially a graduate level one, wouldn’t it?

As it happens, last night I attended a “Clean Speech” discussion in Denver where disagreement was tolerated, even encouraged — so long as we all were civil and respectful. At my table, we discussed one of the most contentious issues around: whether there should be a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Not all of us agreed on everything, but all of us learned things.

Isn’t that the sort of thing that should be promoted in university settings, too?

Not to Trumpists, it seems. To them “intellectual diversity” means firing, cancelling, purging those who disagree with them. As summarized well by U.S. News & World Report, their war on higher education has stretched from attacking Ivy League and other schools financially to trying to dismantle tenure and drive out faculty that offend them, often under the guise of combating antisemitism.

Trump has claimed that college campuses have been “infested with radicalism like never before.” He and his allies aim to purge the “woke” agenda wherever they find it.

Adams is just the most recent faculty member to fall prey to the effort,

When the Indiana “intellectual diversity” law was debated, IU law professor Lea Bishop condemned it as “a blank check to fire any faculty member for any reason, at any time, regardless of tenure.” She added it was “radical” and “un-American.”

Many academics slammed the bill. The faculty senates and American Association of University Professors chapters at Ball State, Indiana, Indiana State, and Purdue Universities opposed it. So, too, did the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.

But the critics are fighting an uphill battle with powerful opponents.

When the Trump Administration attacked Harvard in the spring, it cited “viewpoint diversity” as one of its goals. Its letter to the university demanded that it hire a federally approved external party to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity.”

And it minced no words. “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It called even for admitting “a critical mass” of viewpoint-diverse students, whatever that means.

If the Indiana case is an example, “viewpoint diversity” seems to mean little more than excluding certain views that powerful people don’t like. Is that what universities should be about?

The poor shall always be with us

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Joe Weber

But, in time and with the right change, they could fare better

Joseph Weber

Nov 13, 2025

Deuteronomy 15:11 offers a sobering observation for us all.

“For the poor shall never cease out of the land; therefore, I command thee, saying: ‘Thou shalt surely open thy hand unto thy poor and needy brother, in thy land,” the verse goes. And that idea is later repeated by New Testament authors Matthew, Mark and John, who separately quote Jesus echoing the theme.

Last night, as a group of us packed hundreds of bags of food for the needy in our generally well-off county, I was struck by how many poor folks – especially working poor folks — struggle in some of the most affluent areas of our country. Here, in Summit County, Colorado, where a single-family home just sold for $6.5 million, an interfaith group I’m involved with expects to distribute grocery gift cards to nearly 1,500 families for the coming holiday season, up from just under 1,200 last year.

And the group we worked with last night, Smart Bellies, gives food to needy children in our schools year-round. Last year, it distributed more than 47,000 weekend bags of food, up 39.2 percent from the prior year. It also provided nearly 130,000 snacks for classrooms in 13 schools in Summit and Lake counties, a 44 percent rise from the year before.

So many hungry and needy people.

Fewer than 31,000 people live in Summit County, high in the Rockies in the ski country. Most are well off, able to afford nice mountainside homes with stunning views of some of the most beautiful land in the country. And yet, there are so many folks who can barely get by here.

As our county commissioners reported recently, more than 700 households in the county rely on the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. Nearly one-third of some 1,400 individuals involved are children.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing is how invisible these folks are. It’s easy for many of us to go about our days — hiking, skiing, shopping, etc. – and not realize that many among us too often go hungry. While a handful of people beg on a few street corners at times, they are a minuscule fraction of those on the streets in Denver and other cities.

Our poor, typically, are hard-working people who don’t wear their relative poverty on their sleeves. As a colleague on the Summit Colorado Interfaith Council put it, they are our teachers, ski-lift operators, restaurant workers, caregivers and others. In a place where the median income tops $106,000 and the median cost of a home is $1.3 million, their modest pay levels don’t square the circle.

Nationwide, the situation may be similar. Nearly 42 million Americans — or more than 12 percent of our fellow-citizens — depend on SNAP. That suggests something is systemically awry. It suggests a need for change.

On one level, Scriptural admonitions about the poor, and the need to care for them, are simply truisms. They describe reality as it is, even in the most affluent country in the world. They suggest that the feeding programs we have are essential and always will be.

But, as we see widening gaps nationally between haves and have-nots, the verses offer no comfort. As we see billionaires multiplying their wealth – and attending Gatsby-themed parties in high places — while so many struggle to house and feed themselves, such counsels amount to painful slaps in the face. They seem inadequate when we see a government giving billions in tax breaks to the ultrarich and corporations.

Almost certainly, it will take political change, at levels from the counties on up to the White House, to help bring the poor up the ladder. Encouragingly, our local commissioners stepped in when SNAP benefits became a Republican bargaining chip in recent arguments in Washington. They allocated funds to help people who could have been denied aid.

But, as so many people are not feeling the booming economy the president continues to cite, as he points to our frothy stock markets as proof, needed changes could be on the not-too-distant horizon. The poor may always be with us, but if they and those who help them decide that we’ve all seen far too much neediness, even desperation, their lot could be easier in coming years.

There will always been a need for relief efforts by private groups such as Smart Bellies and the Summit Colorado Interfaith Council. Government can do only so much, and it may be spiritually healthy for groups such as those to lend a hand to those in need. And yet, does anyone doubt that government could do far more than it is?

Unfit to serve

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Joe Weber

Donald J. Trump tarnishes Veterans Day

Joseph Weber

Nov 11, 2025

Draft dodger Donald J. Trump in 1964; source: BusinessInsider

The satirist Andy Borowitz hit just the right note in a post about Veterans Day and Donald J. Trump.

“Reporting” on how the president laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist, Borowitz “recounted” that Trump tearfully thanked “fallen foot specialists” who bravely helped those ducking service in the military. Borowitz “quoted” the president as saying, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”

The piece, of course, was a sendup based on deferments that kept Trump out of Vietnam.

Though he was a healthy and athletic 22-year-old who attended a military-style boarding school from 13 through high school, Trump gave Selective Service officials a podiatrist’s note in 1968, claiming bone spurs disqualified him. He had passed earlier military physicals, but avoided service with four educational deferments before getting a temporary 1-Y medical classification that ultimately was switched to a 4-F.

Recall that this is the same Trump who five decades later, in 2018, called fallen service members “losers” and “suckers” as he refused to enter a military cemetery in France. And it is the same Trump who declined to be seen in the presence of military amputees because he said it didn’t “look good” for him, as recounted by John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff and a former Marine general.

As we honor the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform – past and present – today, it’s worth noting the deep flaws that mark their current commander-in-chief and his deputies. He has long had those flaws on display.

John McCain after his release from a Vietnamese POW camp

Remember that Trump in 2015 disparaged the late Sen. John McCain, who had spent more than five years in a Hanoi POW camp where he was tortured. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in an Iowa gathering. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

And take note that Trump today is misusing active duty and National Guard troops. He has sought to station them in American cities in bizarre displays of force, aimed variously at supporting roundups of migrants or combatting crime.

So far, Trump has deployed National Guard and/or active-duty soldiers to five major cities across the U.S.: Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon and Memphis, Tennessee. He has threatened future military interventions in several cities including Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco and St. Louis.

Encouragingly, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut – a Trump appointee – on Nov. 7 ordered the military out of Portland, Oregon. In her 106-page ruling, the judge noted the concerns of the nation’s founders that have kept presidents from misusing our military. Citing other court cases, she said the Founders “embodied their profound fear and distrust of military power . . . in the Constitution and its Amendments,” … which has lived on through the decades as “a traditional and strong resistance of Americans to any military intrusion into civilian affairs.”

But there has been no check, so far, on Trump’s misuse of the military to attack boats in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela. His administration has killed at least 76 people in such attacks so far while offering no proof that they are involved in the drug trade, as Trump has claimed. The usual practice had been for the Coast Guard to capture such boats and their crews, rather than killing people without evidence or any legal process.

In other words, Trump is ordering our military to murder people in at best dubious circumstances. “There has been no armed attack. There is no organized armed group [and] there is no armed conflict,” Cardozo Law School Professor Rebecca Ingber, a former legal adviser at the State Department, told The Christian Science Monitor. “Under international law, we’d call the targeted killing of suspected criminals an extrajudicial killing, and under U.S. domestic statutes it’s murder.”

When Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command, raised questions about the deadly military strikes on the boats, he found himself on the wrong side of the Trump Administration. The admiral abruptly announced last month that he was stepping down, less than one year into what is typically a three-year assignment.

Holsey appears to be a casualty of a broad purge of the military by Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. He’s far from the only one.

The New York Times reported that Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals over the past nine months, ranging from Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to top intelligence officers. One senior officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey A. Kruse, a 35-year Air Force intelligence officer who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, was forced from his position after his agency cast doubt on Trump’s assertion that U.S. airstrikes in June had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

So much for respect for our military.

Recall, too, that Hegseth, following a Trump executive order, is driving transgender soldiers out of the military. More than 4,000 such soldiers are being forced out, including many with long and distinguished service records. For instance, they include Navy Commander Emily Schilling, a 19-year veteran who told CNN that her two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan included 60 combat missions.

The services will suffer without many of those soldiers, Schilling argued. “We see this with all of the troops that are deployed across the world today, already embedded in combat units,” Schilling said. “We have lawyers, doctors, special forces, rangers, and they’re all there today filling critical roles. If we yank them out, it will take decades to fill.”

Schilling was among plaintiffs who sued early this year to overturn the Trump Administration’s anti-trans policy. The plaintiffs won their argument with a federal judge in Washington state, George W. Bush appointee Benjamin Settle, who found that the administration’s contention that gender dysphoria was a disqualifying medical condition was essentially a ruse motivated by hostility towards transgender people, as reported by NPR.

But the Supreme Court paused Settle’s order against the policy in an emergency decision. It allowed the purge of transgender soldiers to proceed, even though it may revisit the case.

Finally, remember, too, that Trump is shrinking the Veterans Administration, threatening the care our veterans will get. As Newsweek reported, the administration has allowed staff to take voluntary early retirement as part of a plan to reduce VA staff by nearly 30,000 employees by the end of fiscal year 2025, which has sparked concerns about the department’s ability to administer healthcare.

No one should be surprised that some veterans are fighting back. “Vets Say No” protests, organized by About Face, a movement of post 9/11 veterans, and May Day Strong, a self-described anti-authoritarian movement, were scheduled on Nov. 11 in several cities.

Between his disdain for our soldiers and veterans and his misuse and abuses of them, Trump has hardly earned the right to lay wreaths anywhere on Veterans Day. Borowitz got it right.

A harvest of worry

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Joe Weber

Israel’s intractable conflict hits home with a daughter’s visit there

Joseph Weber

Nov 07, 2025

Settlers harass peace activists in the West Bank; source: Times of Israel

What is a parent to do when distant violence gets personal?

For me, the question has not been abstract. My younger daughter, Rabbi Abi Weber, felt a moral duty to join a group of fellow rabbis in Israel and in the Palestinian West Bank. They joined in the annual olive harvest, helping protect Arab farmers facing assaults by Israeli settlers.

So, on Nov. 4, Abi was among about 30 such activists when settlers buzzed them with a drone. After the drone fell and cut one of the women on arm, a couple armed settlers in military fatigues came to retrieve it. They pointed a gun at the activists – at fellow Jews – and then fired into the air.

Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt, as happened just a couple weeks before. Then, a settler repeatedly clubbed a 55-year-old Palestinian woman after chasing farmers through olive groves near the West Bank village of Turmus’ayya. The woman was hospitalized with a brain bleed.

And, thankfully for our family, our daughter was not harmed in the drone assault – just appalled. “It was not the most pleasant set of interactions,” she put it in a characteristic bit of understatement.

Earlier, when Abi was visiting shepherds, she explained her reason for being there in a short video. She said the herders had been harassed and sometimes assaulted by settlers. As she provided what she called a protective presence, she said, “I believe as a rabbi that my Judaism calls me to prevent violence and to provide the opportunity for coexistence.”

Well, okay. But, two years after the horrors of Oct. 7 and after tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, peaceful coexistence seems like an impossible dream. Only some 21 percent of Israelis polled by Gallup between June and August believe peace is achievable. Only 23 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem agree. The figures are up slightly from recent years, but not by much.

Indeed, in the West Bank violence in the annual olive harvest has been growing. As Reuters reported, Palestinian monitors have counted 158 attacks across the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the harvest began in early October. Activists and farmers say the violence has intensified since Hamas triggered the war in Gaza.

The settlers target the harvest because Palestinians depend on it economically and see olive trees as symbols of their connection to the land. As NPR’s Daniel Estrin reported from the West Bank, the U.N. says this season has been the most dangerous in five years, with settler attacks in 70 towns and villages and more than 4,000 olive trees and saplings vandalized.

For us in her family, Abi’s choice to put herself on the line to help the West Bank Arabs was not a welcome one. The danger was obvious and the gain elusive. The effort by her colleagues in Rabbis for Human Rights and the liberal rabbinic group T’ruah seemed at best idealistic and at worst provocative, even though the RHR has been doing this for some 20 years.

But to be a rabbi, perhaps, is to be an idealist. Taking on the role of a religious teacher may demand a certain Utopianism, requiring that one believes he or she can make a difference in the world. So, my daughter is consistent.

Still, she stepped into one of the most fraught arenas in the world. In a sad coincidence, the day of the drone assault, Nov. 4, marked 30 years from the date when a Jewish extremist assassinated then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. As former Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross recently wrote in The Atlantic, Rabin “was the rare Israeli statesman who understood that Israel can advance its interests and address the Palestinian cause at the same time. Indeed, he was killed because of his efforts to broker peace, a prospect his killer couldn’t tolerate.”

The assassin, like many on Israel’s right, was enraged by Rabin’s support of the Oslo Accords. Those agreements were aimed at creating a two-state solution. They called for Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, which was anathema to rightists who argued that no part of G_d-given lands could be surrendered to non-Jews.

Yitzhak Rabin, source: ReformJudaism.org

While condemnation of Rabin’s assassination was swift and widespread, it was not universal. Some right-wing rabbis contended that Rabin’s death was a legitimate, even a religious goal. They argued that Jew-on-Jew violence could be acceptable, with some rationalizing that a Jew who sought to yield any of the Biblical land of Israel had given up his Judaism.

For instance, the late Rabbi Abraham Hecht, then head of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, held that surrendering any land violated Jewish religious law. Thus, assassinating Rabin and all who assisted him, was “both permissible and necessary.” Hecht in October 1995 told New York Magazine: “Rabin is not a Jew any longer …. According to Jewish law, it says very clearly, if a man kills him, he has done a good deed.”

A decade ago, the American Council for Judaism published a piece that spelled out such sentiments. In a review of the book, “Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel” by journalist Dan Ephron, it reported: “The assassin was not a lone psychotic gunman but, instead, was a young man nurtured within Israel’s far-right religious institutions. After the murder, he was hailed as a hero by many, not only in Israel, but among kindred spirits in the U.S.”

Moreover, since Rabin’s killing, the politics in Israel have moved relentlessly rightward. The settler movement – which Rabin once called “a cancer” — more than doubled in size in the 20 years after the assassination. And the killing of the peace-seeking prime minister set the stage for today’s government.

“Assassination is an unpredictable act,’ journalist Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker. “Yet the killing of Yitzhak Rabin … bids to be one of history’s most effective political murders. Two years earlier, Rabin, setting aside a lifetime of enmity, appeared on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat … to agree to a framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories … Within months of Rabin’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu was the new prime minister and the prospects for wider-ranging peace … were dead.”

In Rabin’s pocket at the time he was shot was a blood-stained sheet of paper bearing the lyrics of an Israeli song, “Shir LaShalom“ (”Song for Peace”). The song, which had been sung at the rally, focuses on the impossibility of bringing a dead person back to life and, therefore, the need for peace. This reasonable, if idealistic, tune mirrors the efforts of my daughter and her groups.

But, given the realities of Israel today, it would seem that such groups at best are tilting at windmills, at worst courting disaster for themselves. Yes, they garner a few headlines. And, yes, they show both Israelis and Palestinians that some are interested in getting to a meaningful and enduring peace.

Indeed, most Israelis want peace above all else. Some 66 percent of Israelis polled in September wanted an end to the war in Gaza, including 93 percent of Arabs and 60 percent of Jews. And in mid-October, tens of thousands of Israelis celebrated the return of hostages in the deal brokered by President Trump. While my daughter was being harassed by settlers, some 80,000 people attended a memorial rally on Nov. 4 in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

And yet, we’re a long way from peace.

A family murdered at Kibbutz Nir Oz, source: Abi Weber

My daughter’s trip ended with visits to the massacre sites in southern Israel where Hamas killed some 1,200 innocents, taking a couple hundred more hostage in the worst attack on Israel since the 1948 war. As a Jew committed to Israel, she mourned those losses, recounting an emotional tour her group was given by a guide at the Nova concert site whose two best friends were murdered by the terrorists there. At Kibbutz Nir Oz, she saw a photo of a couple and their three young kids, all killed when their home was burned.

Our family rabbi is idealistic, but not naïve. She knows that the ugliness of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has persisted for more than a century, marked at its beginning most starkly by the 1929 Hebron massacre. Nearly 70 Jews were murdered then and dozens more were injured by their Muslim neighbors after the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spread lies that Jews wanted to take over the Al Aqsa Mosque. Many more attacks have occurred since then, which may partly explain the fevers that drive the West Bank settlers.

Soon after the Trump peace plan was signed by many countries in the region experts differed on whether it has a prayer of success.

“This is a deal reluctantly agreed to by still-irreconcilable foes,” noted Shibley Telhami of The Brookings Institution. And the institute’s Hady Amr argued that “seeking peace without equality is an illusion. Israelis today enjoy security, freedom, and one of the world’s strongest economies—wealthier per capita than France, Japan, the UAE, or the U.K. Palestinians live under military control and are 20 times poorer. That immense imbalance in a tiny territory the size of New Jersey is a recipe for recurring conflict.”

But others cautiously applauded the moves. “Trump and his team of real estate wheeler-dealers broke that stalemate with creative and energetic diplomacy,” argued Suzanne Maloney. “For the plan to succeed, Washington will have to invest even more energy and political capital in advancing the next phases of the plan.”

Will Trump and his aides make such investments? The president is fond of photo-ops that make him look good, but does he have a capacity and persistence to see his 20-point plan to fruition?

More recently, with bloodshed continuing anew in Gaza, albeit at lower levels, a resolution seems even more distant. Will Hamas disarm, as the plan demands? “The more likely view is that Hamas is unlikely to fully relinquish its arms, according to people who have studied the group and understand its psychology,” London-based writer Akram Attaallah wrote in The New York Times. “It would cut to the core of its identity. For a movement that built its legitimacy around what it called resistance, giving up its weapons is not just a tactical concession; it is an existential unraveling.”

On the Israeli side, some on the far right want full-scale war on Hamas to resume, especially in light of Hamas dragging its feet on returning Israeli bodies and faking the recovery of at least one of them. “The fact that Hamas continues to play games and does not immediately transfer all the bodies of our fallen, is in itself evidence that the terror organization is still standing,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli security minister. “Now we don’t need to ‘extract a price from Hamas’ for the violations. We need to exact from it its very existence and destroy it completely, once and for all …”

Recall that Trump’s peace deal was trumpeted just under a month before settlers menaced my daughter and her group. Their goals and that of groups such as my daughter’s still couldn’t be further apart. So, unless miracles occur, I dearly hope she feels no need to return to the West Bank for next year’s harvest.

The Big Loser

Posted on November 5, 2025 by Joe Weber

As Dems sweep the election, a red-faced president proves indecorous

When George W. Bush’s Republicans took big hits in the 2006 midterms, the president acknowledged that the election was a “thumping” for the GOP. He said he wasn’t about to hold grudges for it but would work with Democrats “to get things done.”

Four years later, Barack Obama felt chastened by Democratic setbacks in that year’s midterms. He called GOP victories a “shellacking,” and added: “The responsibilities of this office are so enormous [that] sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place.”

So, now that Democrats in at least seven states gave Donald J. Trump and his party a bright blue middle finger in this year’s off-year pre-midterm races, how does he react? Humbled? Contrite, as he looks toward the fall Congressional midterms? Accepting responsibility, as prior presidents have?

Fuhgeddaboutit.

“‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,” the president wrote on Truth Social. And, even before the California redistricting vote went against him, the president called it a “GIANT SCAM” and “rigged,” promising a “legal and criminal review.” After the results came in – which could help Democrats flip the House next fall – he mysteriously threatened: “…AND SO IT BEGINS!”

Of course, we could have expected no better from Trump, who still insists his 2020 defeat was invalid. Just recently, he has been pressuring the Justice Department to find the fraud he insists cost him the White House that year.

Still, none of his absurd rhetoric could outweigh the anti-Trumpist results in California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia and Mississippi. And, despite the president’s claim that he wasn’t on the ballot, he and his party surely were on voters’ minds – certainly on the minds of the political victors.

Promising to “usher in a generation of change,” for example, self-proclaimed Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in his victory speech as the next mayor of New York City called on supporters to “respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

Even as Trump has threatened to withhold federal funds from the city, Mamdani looked beyond the 79-year-old president.

“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said. “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up. We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks.”

Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill; source: People

Echoing the view that the elections were a mandate on Trumpism, Democratic Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said voters sent a clear message. “We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” she said. “We chose our commonwealth over chaos.” Then, she laughed when a supporter urged her to run for president.

In New Jersey, Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill pointed to the Trump administration’s moves to cut federal food assistance to 42 million Americans, halt federal subsidies for Obamacare, and cancel the Gateway tunnel project. She promised to “fight for a different future in New Jersey.”

Throughout her campaign, the New Jersey Monitor noted, Sherrill worked to nationalize the race, painting it as a choice between democracy and the MAGA movement, reminding voters that Trump endorsed her Republican opponent. She echoed that in her victory speech, saying New Jersey residents “take oaths to the Constitution, not a king.”

The repudiation of Trump spread deep and wide including in a couple Trump bastions, as NPR reported. In Georgia, a couple Democrats were tapped to serve on the state’s five-person public utility regulator after earning roughly 60 percent of the vote. It’s the first time Democrats have won a nonfederal statewide office there since 2006.

Pennsylvania voters chose to retain three state Supreme Court judges who were first elected as Democrats, despite millions of dollars in spending driven by conservative billionaire Jeff Yass‘ efforts to reshape the state court’s politics. Democrats also won special elections for a seat on Pennsylvania’s Superior Court and a seat on its Commonwealth Court.

Also in Pennsylvania, Democrats swept the top “row offices” in Bucks County, electing the county’s first-ever Democratic District Attorney and defeating an incumbent Republican sheriff a year after Trump narrowly won there. As NPR noted, Democrats similarly notched commanding victories in county executive races in Erie, Lehigh and Northampton counties, all bellwether counties in recent presidential elections.

And in Mississippi, Democrats broke a GOP supermajority in the state Senate after flipping two seats there and picked up another state House.

Now, of course, as it prepares for the fall midterms and beyond, the Democratic Party has to figure out what course it will rally around. Does it go mainstream, embracing the center as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden did?

Or does the party embrace the policies of the 34-year-old naif, Mamdani, as GOP pundits and right-wing media enthusiasts hope? The incoming mayor has promised to freeze rents in rent-controlled housing, raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, eliminate fares on buses, create government-run grocery stores, offer free child care and pay for it all with stiff hikes in corporate taxes. Will the party endorse the Muslim mayor’s denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and accept his reluctant repudiation of the term “globalize the intifada?”

The party could, instead, move toward the self-proclaimed moderate stances of Spanberger and Sherrill, women with powerhouse resumes far more substantial than that of the incoming New York mayor. Mamdani, a Bowdoin College graduate, worked as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor for an advocacy group, as a community organizer and then on several political campaigns before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020.

For their part, Spanberger and Sherrill lived together as members of the U.S. House, beginning in 2018, and were part of a group of Congresswomen who called themselves the “Mod Squad.” That was a centrist alternative to the leftist “Squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Certainly, their backgrounds scream “Establishment” and “accomplishment.” Spanberger, 46, attended the U.S. Capitol Page School, has a B.A., from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Purdue University, and worked as a teacher and postal inspector, and, for eight years served as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. In her agency work she dealt with foreign nationals, meeting people undercover at times, and she carried five different passports at one point. She then served three terms as a Representative in Congress.

Sherrill, 53, is a Naval Academy graduate and former helicopter pilot who served nearly a decade in the military. She earned a master’s degree in global history from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a law degree from Georgetown University. After serving as a federal prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, Sherrill served four terms as a Congressional representative.

States breaking Democrat or Republican in redistricting; source: Democracy Docket

As for the GOP efforts to undermine elections and redraw maps to lock Republicans in safe districts, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insisted to reporters on Election Day that it was “absolutely true that there are [sic] fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact,” Leavitt told them. “Fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in, in the names of other people, in the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections. There’s countless examples, and we’d be happy to provide them.”

She provided no evidence and, when asked for it, Leavitt again responded, “it’s just a fact.” She also said Trump is mulling over an executive order “to strengthen our elections in this country, and to ensure that there cannot be blatant fraud, as we’ve seen in California, with their universal mail-in voting system.”

Already, the California GOP has filed suit to block the redistricting, despite the nearly 64 percent approval vote state residents delivered. Trump’s party alleges that the maps were redrawn in a racist fashion, an argument apparently designed to meet Fourteenth Amendment concerns regarding racial gerrymandering.

Never mind that Trump got the gerrymandering ball rolling by ordering redistricting in Texas. He got it there and from GOP leaders and in Missouri and North Carolina. He’s likely to get his wish, too, in Indiana, which is planning a redistricting special session.

As Democracy Docket reported, two other GOP-led states have passed gerrymanders, but not solely at Trump’s request. Utah’s redraw was court ordered, and the new map, which is still being fought over in court, doesn’t net any gains for the GOP and could allow Democrats to pick up one seat. In Ohio, lawmakers were required to do a redraw and a new map passed last week could flip two out of five seats currently held by Democrats.

To be sure, the GOP gerrymandering efforts face legal and other challenges. Virginia Democrats plan to put the matter before voters next year and Missouri voters are organizing a citizen-led vote referendum on the matter. Overall, however, pundits say the battles could boost the number of GOP seats to entrench Trump’s party in the House, even as the map mischief disenfranchises minority voters and unfairly advantages one side or the other.

Much will happen between now and next November, of course. The economy could thrive or tank, inflation could rise or fall, international relations could improve or decline. If Trump were more of a rational actor and could take a lesson from this year’s vote, he could scale back on his overreaches — though that would hardly be in character. His inclination would likely be to double down and count on his party’s electoral map manipulations to bail it out.

For now, however, it seems clear that this election reflects disgust with Trump’s nine-month stint so far, which has earned him a 63 percent disapproval rating. As his niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, put it in a post on X: “Raging narcissist claims that an election that rejected everything he stands for wasn’t about him. Good try, Donald. Loser.”

An era passes

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Joe Weber

The death of a brilliant colleague highlights our losses in media

In the opening issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, a monthly published from January 1775 until July 1776 in Philadelphia, editor Thomas Paine wrote: “A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”

As a modern nursery of genius, there were few equals to BusinessWeek in its heyday, a couple centuries after Paine’s words were published. BW garnered National Magazine Awards four times between 1973 and 1996. From 1958 to 2004, it picked up nine Gerald Loeb Awards, regarded as the Pulitzer Prizes of business journalism, including five in the glory days between 1987 and 2004. Since being sold to Bloomberg News in 2009 and rechristened as Bloomberg Businessweek, it has picked up another couple NMAs and several Loeb Awards, including two this year.

Alums of BW – graduates of that “nursery” — have gone on to illustrious stints at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and The New Yorker, as well as online outfits including Poets and Quants, and elsewhere, including Bloomberg, of course. Some moved into substantial academic careers, including longtime editor Stephen B. Shepard, who founded and led a journalism graduate school at the City University of New York. Others have become novelists or gifted nonfiction authors. All of their work has been filled with wit and utility, indeed.

As someone privileged to work for the magazine for 22 years, until 2009, I was reminded recently of the place’s unique culture, sadly, by the death of a colleague there. Chris Power, a BW stalwart and international editor for most of the best years, died on Oct. 13 at 68. His passing drew more than 120 comments on a BW Friends site, most celebrating his wit, his skills, his easy way with people and his remarkable intellect. Some referred to his short stature – something he joked about – which reminded me of how a colleague once described Chris to me: “5-foot-3-inches of brain.”

Another coworker, a man I succeeded as Chief of Correspondents, described Chris as “an excellent editor who knew when to push fellow journalists to do their best work,” adding “he was always the gentleman.” Saying he was blessed to work with 35-year BW veteran Chris for decades, he added that “a key piece of what BusinessWeek was is now missing.” Yet another workmate called him “smart, fast and unflappable, no matter how tough the story or tight the deadline; all around one of the best.” Still another called him “the kindest, gentlest and cleverest editor I had.”

As Chris guided stories that a copydesk veteran called beautifully edited, he did so with style. “But most of all, I’ll remember Chris dropping by the desk and doing his soft shoe,” she wrote. “Even under the tightest of deadlines, he could lighten a heart.” At a goodbye party for a former top editor bound for Texas, another colleague reminisced about how the folks were all given hats. “When it was Chris’ turn to talk, he came up hatless and said, ‘When you’re 5’3”, you know better than to wear a cowboy hat,’” he wrote. Yet another former workmate wrote of Chris’s recipe for an extra-dry martini: “pour the gin, wave the vermouth bottle over the glass.”

Stephen Shepard, source: The Virtual Memories Show

The extraordinary outpouring of respect, affection and admiration for Chris reflected well on him, of course. But it also said a lot about the collegial and high-powered culture at BW, something that our top editor – Steve Shepard – fostered.

Sure, people brought a lot of brain power to the job. Our chief economist had a Ph.D. from Harvard, our finance editor earned his from The New School, others there had taught at Columbia, and the staff was filled with Ivy Leaguers of all sorts. As a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard who had been trained by Jesuits at Boston College High School, Chris fit in. He “was one of the gifted minds that made BusinessWeek BusinessWeek,” as one commenter put it.

But brains weren’t enough. To work at BW, you also had to be able to get on well, to work in a group, to produce the best damn stuff we could. When candidates interviewed for jobs, they would sit down with as many as a half-dozen people, I recall. The book, as we called it, was a team effort. “Chris was always smart, funny and – most vital to a young reporter trying to find her footing – helpful,” one former colleague wrote. “Farewell to a true gentleman!”

It was no wonder that BW won so many awards. It’s no wonder that it produced such good work.

Sadly, as veterans of the glory days are aging, we are seeing our numbers decline. The man who hired me (Keith Felcyn) died last year, as did a former assistant managing editor (Dave Wallace) and a former Tokyo bureau chief (Robert Neff). Earlier, we lost a former science editor (Emily Thompson Smith), a former managing editor (Jack Dierdorff), a much-respected Washington bureau chief (Lee Walczak) and a finance editor (Chris Welles). Such things are inevitable, of course, as the clock ticks on us all.

But, more than just the passing of such admired and often beloved people, these losses say something about the declines we are seeing all around in journalism. I can’t speak to the culture of Bloomberg Businessweek, but I suspect it’s rather different than the old BW (for one thing, Bloomberg let go or reassigned much of the staff and, for another, the magazine is entirely online now, so we don’t see the powerful blend of imagery and text that helped tell stories so well).

On a more troubling point, even with the exceptional journalism machine of Bloomberg News behind it, BBW and other magazines have lost the extraordinary power and reach they once had. It’s been a long time since they could make big-name CEOs and politicians alike anxious when that was appropriate, and their influence on public attitudes is dubious at best (as is the case with many newspapers).

Thanks to the Net and political changes, so many big-name publications in journalism have seen their influence shrivel. Organizations for which credibility, fairness and thoroughness were core values have lost subscribers and seen their staffs shrink, their economic wellbeing eroded. Today, lies from those at the top levels of politics gain traction because on the Net all voices seem equal and the loudest and least credible don’t even bother going through the responsible media. Instead, they take their distortions and distractions directly to the public.

Consider the appalling list of media outlets that have bent the knee to Donald J. Trump and whose inclination will be to pull punches. Paramount agreed to pay $16 million for a Trump library to settle an absurd CBS case and now the company and network are owned by Trumper David Ellison. He installed rightwing opinion journalist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News and is now pursuing an acquisition of CNN, jeopardizing its independence. ABC similarly agreed to pay $16 million to settle another dubious Trump lawsuit.

The broader media have similarly acquiesced. Facebook parent Meta agreed to pay $25 million and X $10 million, both related to lawsuits over the post-Jan. 6, 2021, suspensions of Trump accounts. Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube, agreed to pay $24.5 million to Trump and others over a similar suspension.

Encouragingly, Trump’s legal assaults on some media outlets have gone nowhere. This year, he sued The Wall Street Journal, a Fox property, in July over his 2003 letter to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a longtime friend of Trump’s. He’s seeking $10 billion. The president also sued The New York Times, demanding $15 billion for allegedly undermining his reputation with stories raising questions about his business acumen.

While he filed the defamation suits in federal court in Trump-friendly Florida, he’s been set back in both. Lawyers for the WSJ have filed for dismissal of that case, while Trump was forced to refile the Times case after a judge threw out his original 85-page complaint, saying it was laden with “florid and enervating” prose. The judge wrote: “A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective.”

But Trump has a long history of using the courts – or trying to do so – to intimidate the press. In 1992, a colleague at BW, Larry Light, got hold of financial information about Trump that showed he had a negative net worth. As recounted by another colleague, Light’s inquiries drove Trump to march into Shepard’s office at BusinessWeek. There, the future president (whose companies went through six bankruptcies) launched into a three-hour tirade that included an anti-Semitic gibe about Light (who was, in fact, Episcopalian). Trump also threatened to sue but backed off after our lawyer told him his finances would then be opened to public disclosure in court.

After Trump objected, Time changed a cover photo; source: Deadline

Our editors at BusinessWeek and its owners at McGraw-Hill were not cowed or beholden to Trump. Shamefully, some of today’s media leaders are. Consider, for instance, Time owner and billionaire Trump backer Marc Benioff, under whose leadership the magazine recently replaced a jowly cover photo of the president that offended him with a more complimentary one. Benioff, who acquired Time in 2018, recently flip-flopped on backing Trump’s since-abandoned plans to deploy National Guard troops to San Francisco.

Much has changed in the media since Chris Power and leaders of his caliber set a demanding standard at BusinessWeek. Some magazines – The Atlantic and The New Yorker, for instance – and newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal continue to prize careful and thorough, if critical, journalism. Indeed, I am indebted to The Atlantic for the Paine comment, which appears in its wonderful November issue, which is devoted to the founding of the United States 250 years ago next year.

But the ability of such outlets to act as a check on unbridled power-seeking and self-dealing by Trump and his minions has been gravely diminished as much of the public and GOP politicians seemingly turns a blind eye on the excesses. In their war on the press, the rightists have sadly succeeded in defunding NPR, a key source of independent news. And the marketplace has savaged the economics of so many other media outlets.

Will some magazines – whether online or in print – remain or ever again become nurseries of genius? Some may. But Chris’s passing is yet another troubling sign of the passing of an era.

In my little town?

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Joe Weber

Yes, ICE seems to be everywhere nowadays, including in small Colorado towns

Federal agents outside a Frisco, Colorado, restaurant; source: CBS

A half-century ago, Paul Simon wrote a few lines that may forever bounce about in the heads of many of us. The opening: “In my little town/I grew up believing/God keeps his eye on us all/And he used to lean upon me/As I pledged allegiance to the wall.”

Up here in Summit County, Colorado, many of us feel as divinely blessed as Simon might once have. High in the Rockies, ours is a place of mountains, streams, a stunning lake, ski resorts and the prettiest valleys of anywhere. Frisco, a little town in the county, has an Old West feel about it, even as its restaurants, shops and ski-and-bike outlets serve thousands of modern visitors each year.

So, are Frisco (pop. 3,100) and Summit County (pop. 31,000) places where one might expect brown-shirted armed government agents to show up at a local favorite eatery for a midday raid? Might we expect them to shut the business down by grabbing up its computers and other vital gear, putting the place out of business for an undetermined time? Is another smaller town nearby, Dillon (pop. under 1000), a place where a raid at a home is worrisome enough for administrators in an elementary school to put students into lockdown?

And are the towns places where we would see an uproar by residents, an outpouring of condemnation? Where even the county sheriff disavows any role in the federal actions? Where the county education superintendent bemoans them?

Sadly, in Donald J. Trump’s America, it’s not God who is keeping an eye on us all these days, it seems. Instead, it’s the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies that are doing so, even in little Summit County and even smaller Frisco and Dillon. Those agencies slipped into the area yesterday to pursue a restaurant that has served locals for over two decades, Hacienda Real, after a tipster claimed the place was employing undocumented workers.

“For several months we have been collaborating with the authorities and delivered all the documentation requested by ICE, fulfilling every requirement,” the restaurant said in a post on its Facebook site. “Unfortunately, this process has led to a broader inspection of the entire restaurant. As part of this investigation, our work team was removed, including the computers we use day to day, so we find ourselves in the need to keep the restaurant temporarily closed while everything is being reviewed.”

The statement added: “Thankfully, we have peace of mind in knowing that for over 22 years we have worked honestly, serving this much-loved community … We’re confident that we’ll soon be able to get back to doing what we do best: working and sharing our food with all of you.”

The raid even took local law enforcement authorities by surprise. As our county newspaper, the Summit Daily News, reported, county Sheriff Jaime FitzSimons said he learned of the operations through a dispatch when the agents arrived. The agents were serving “targeted, federal, criminal” search warrants, FitzSimons told the paper. He added that he knew no details.

Precious little information came from a spokesman for Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit involved in the raids. Talking with a reporter at the scene of some of the action, the spokesman said only that the agents were serving a criminal search warrant as part of “authorized law enforcement activity,” adding that the agency would issue a press release with more information at a later time. He declined to answer questions.

But the splashy headline-grabbing raid by the agents, some hiding behind masks, did not surprise some folks. Rumors of impending ICE actions made the front page of the Summit Daily News last week, so when the agents swarmed into Hacienda Real, people showed up with their phones to video the operation. Some blocked the authorities from moving through the parking lot, to no avail.

“Video of the confrontation shared with 9NEWS shows members of the public shouting at agents, telling them to take off their masks and pick up the excess caution tape they had left on the ground,” a Denver TV station reported. “Footage also shows people standing in front of the agents’ cars, blocking their ability to leave, a woman snapping the license plate frame on one of the vehicles, and what appears to be a man spitting in the direction of an agent getting into a vehicle.”

Spitting at law enforcement agents or interfering with them is a sorry reflection on the state of things nowadays. But it’s also not surprising in our very blue Summit County. Democrats swept all federal, state and county races last year, with Kamala Harris besting Trump by 11,762 votes to 5,244. Our sheriff is elected, so it’s not surprising that, as his office reported, he “did not provide any support or assistance” to the federal authorities, nor did those authorities request it.

Local residents who gathered at the restaurant during the ICE action included the county education superintendent, Tony Byrd. “People are going to live in worry, they were living in worry last week, the week before, pretty much forever and now more,” he told a reporter for the Denver CBS News affiliate. Byrd told one of the officials that they were disrupting the community, adding, “We have a lot of crying kids and families right now.”

Raid at the Dillon home; source: Summit Daily

During the raid at the Dillon home — presumably that of restaurant owner Luis Flores — officials at nearby Dillon Valley Elementary School kept children inside and planned “a controlled release” of them at the end of the day. While the reported immigrant population of the county is small – only about 15 percent of the number overall – the Spanish-speaking student population in the schools is much larger, over 41 percent compared with less than 54 percent white non-Hispanic.

This is a county, moreover, where some local churches have pledged to protect immigrants under threat of arrest, even to the point of breaking the law by giving them sanctuary from agents. With an unemployment rate last reported at 2.8 percent, it’s also a place that economically would be devastated without immigrants to work in the restaurants, stores, building industry and various other services.

The initial news reports said no arrests had been made at either the restaurant or the owner’s home. But a Colorado immigrant advocacy group, Voces Unidas, has since reported that a cook and a waiter were arrested, among others, basing its report on information in the ICE system. The group asked people with more details to contact it.

So, this raid leaves us with a lot of questions. First, was the owner of Hacienda Real, Luis Flores, guilty of anything? Did he hire undocumented workers? Did he underpay them, as sometimes happens with under-the-table staff? Did he treat them well or poorly?

We have no answers to those questions now. Indeed, the restaurant has a sterling reputation, repeatedly winning top honors in the Summit Daily News “Best Of Summit” contests. Its burritos and margaritas are top-notch, according to the paper’s readers.

And, among some 50 recent commenters on its website, condemnation of the ICE actions was universal.

“The last time I was at the restaurant they were donating a ton of food for a fundraiser at Silverthorne elementary,” one said. Another said: “You are loved by the community! For the anonymous caller, may karma get them!” And a third said: “The entire team at Hacienda Real is amazing and you are fully supported!!!! I’m so sorry some bigot racist made a false claim against your business and the livelihood of not only your family but the families of all of your employees.” Yet another vowed: “The community will support you and your restaurant!”

But let’s assume that Hacienda Real did hire undocumented Latin American workers. First, the chances are the food will be authentic. Second, and more important, these workers would be supporting their families and contributing to the economy. Are these bad things? If they are arrested – and if Hacienda Real is driven out of business – is this good for our town and county?

And let’s turn to economics for some insight, too. If the restaurant hired under-the-table workers and underpaid or overworked them, just how long would such workers stay at the place? The average wage level in the county tops $56,000 a year and, with the low jobless rate, help-wanted signs are common. Poorly treated workers would have plenty of other options.

The bottom line, of course, is that ICE isn’t welcome in Summit, Frisco or Dillon. By contrast, hardworking migrants are.

But, given these troubled times, we can only hope that other lines from the Paul Simon song are not apt. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town,” he sang. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.”

If ICE and its masters in the Trump Administration expand their immigrant roundups, as they plan to, and if they continue to do so in facilities that even ICE says violate dozens of federal standards, lyrics like those may only slightly overstate things all across America.

“The past always looks better than it was.”

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Joe Weber

Downton Abbey lets us escape for a while, but real history won’t.

Downton Abbey’s cast, source: tom’s guide

After feeling oppressed by all the ugly sturm und drang of our American life in the last week or so, it was a relief this weekend to enter a world where, as one character put it, the past is a far more comfortable place than the present.

I refer, of course, to a telling comment by character Harold Levinson, an American relative visiting Downton Abbey in that delightful bit of Anglophilic fluff that aired on our local movie screen.

What a glorious escape it was for a couple hours.

Oh, to live in a world of glittering silver place settings, gracious conversation with men in tuxes and women with gloved hands in stunning open-backed gowns, all in a stone behemoth of a home that one’s family has owned for centuries. Oh, to sport top hats and cravats at Ascot, where one could chat amiably – if deferentially – with royalty, with whom one might be related in some distant way. Oh, to be tended by manservants and ladies’ maids with meals served on strenuously polished platters in wondrous halls bedecked with old family portraits and marvelous tapestries.

Of course, it was only a privileged few – relatively speaking – who enjoyed such delights in real life. Their servants lived in far less cozy quarters and, simply by accidents of birth, were fated to call their “betters” m’lady or m’lord. And the vast majority of their countrymen lived in various states of unpleasantness or worse— sometimes grinding poverty—while they organized their oh-so-tiring visits to the great and glorious homes of London for the whirl of the social season.

To enjoy “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” and the earlier installments, one just has to put reality on a shelf. One must imagine that he or she was part of that upper crust, not the downstairs folks. Not that their lives in the fictional kitchens and stables were all that bad. The lord and lady, naturally, were kindly sorts who had at heart the best interests of all in the county, the domain they were born to oversee.

Downton, of course, is a lovely bit of cotton candy. It paints an England that is fading, being dragged into the middle of a 20^th century that is a far less pleasant place. “They say America is the future and England is the past,” the Levinson character says. “Sometimes it’s more comfortable in the past.”

Judging by the ample amount of gray hair in our surprisingly crowded theater at our afternoon matinee, many of the movie’s fans might second that thought. “Downton” offers a cozy world beloved by those of a certain demographic, a group of which many of us, reluctantly perhaps, are part. The series aired for six seasons on TV in the U.S., beginning in early 2011, a time before the Trump era, a time when for many of us the past was indeed far more comfortable than the present. There were also movies in 2019 and 2022 that could remind us of the halcyon days before 2016.

As it happens, this installment of the Crawley family saga is set in 1930. The Depression hasn’t done its nastiest work yet (though the family’s American branch did lose a bundle to a con man after the crash) and the stunning Lady Mary (heartthrob Michelle Dockery) and her father, Lord Grantham, are a bit stressed at how to keep the estate together without selling off too much. And, of course, the next world war is a long way off. Still, change is afoot for the royals and that does give the Crawleys a lot of worry.

As The New York Times put it: “.., the movie delivers exactly what ‘Downton’ fans want: yummy photography … stunning set pieces and Lady Mary trying on as many fabulous frocks as possible. It will be another 15 years before the rise of socialism pierces the aspic of aristocracy; for now, the worst that can happen to the Crawleys is being ousted from a ball.”

Highclere Castle, setting for Downton Abbey, source: Golden Tours Travel Blog

For longtime fans, it’s a delight to immerse oneself in this world, a place facing plenty of threats but still a realm of comfort and warmth where social roles are rigid but, in this imagined reality at least, are not all that constricting. The upstairs and downstairs folks look after one another in a mutual way. And there’s much reassuring about that old stone pile of a family manse, which had stood through centuries of turmoil. Yes, divorce among the upper classes is intolerably scandalous, but even that proves surmountable for our redoubtable Lady Mary.

“With its mix of old characters and new, worldly upheaval and small-town drama, [writer Julian] Fellowes illustrates what ‘Downton’ has always done best, which is a social examination of how much things have changed and how they haven’t changed at all,” the Los Angeles Times says.

Fluffy, unrealistic and comically so, yes. But what a delightful ride it is, what a sweet fantasy.

“It’s no surprise that ‘The Grand Finale’ is thoroughly fun, stunning to look at … and aptly emotional as the iconic brand’s swan song,” Variety’s reviewer wrote. “There are expected doses of fan service throughout (including a playful wink to one of Dame Smith’s most unforgettable lines, ‘What’s a weekend?’) and a neatly achieved final sequence that says a lovely and memorable farewell to all those for whom the show has meant so much. But what lingers most after ‘The Grand Finale’ is its handle on the end of an era, which inherently comprehends that big ideas matter more than massive estates.”

Those big ideas, of course, touch on matters of equality, democracy, feminism, gay rights, the end of hereditary privilege. These things, in real life, are far more important than a wistful look at aristocracy. And, tragically, in our time these things are under merciless assault.

Today, we Yanks contend with leaders who appear to live in a world in which such modern values must be stamped out. Indeed, our president and his colleagues are determined to stamp out our history, to recast it in terms almost as glossy as those in Downton Abbey. Signs and exhibits related to slavery, for instance, are being pulled from our national parks, as The Washington Post reported.

The Smithsonian is under pressure to remove all unflattering elements, evoking only a gauzy celebratory past. Of course, that institution and so many others should be recording and educating about reality as it was, not as some corrupt political regime thinks it should be.

It’s fine, of course, to go to movies that paint happier pictures — so long as one knows they are false. What lingers most about the gently challenged world of Downton for me is that it’s so much warmer and more pleasant than the too-often ugly and unhappy world we now inhabit.

In Downton’s universe, no one is being assassinated by disturbed Internet- and video-game-obsessed young men. No one is fielding military forces in our cities or hauling people off to detention camps for deportation to frightening Third World countries. No one is courting the rebirth of polio and other dread diseases with a disdain for the science that all but eliminated those things years after the fictional Crawleys lived. And no one is erasing the past, even as they mourn its passing.

The more class-conscious (and, perhaps, more reality-focused) British paper, The Guardian, perhaps not surprisingly mostly mocked the new movie, though it couldn’t pan it altogether. Its reviewer referred to the film’s “gibbering, wittering, blithering and surreally enjoyable nonsense,” saying it was “very silly and always watchable in its weird way.” But he hoped the latest was not in fact the finale for the abbey.

Yes, the past can be far nicer than many parts of the present, at least in the confines of a theater. Our very real danger today is that we will forgo the real past for some self-deluding demagogue’s version. That would be an all-too-real tragedy.

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber

About Joe Weber

Ah, the webs they weave

Networks of opportunists betray the meaning of friendship

Who is the real swine?

Trump’s misogyny may — at last — be catching up with him

Is “intellectual diversity” really diverse?

An Indiana case tests what intellectual exchange means in the Trump era

The poor shall always be with us

But, in time and with the right change, they could fare better

Unfit to serve

Donald J. Trump tarnishes Veterans Day

A harvest of worry

Israel’s intractable conflict hits home with a daughter’s visit there

The Big Loser

As Dems sweep the election, a red-faced president proves indecorous

An era passes

The death of a brilliant colleague highlights our losses in media

In my little town?

Yes, ICE seems to be everywhere nowadays, including in small Colorado towns

“The past always looks better than it was.”

Downton Abbey lets us escape for a while, but real history won’t.