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.

Will free(r) trade survive?

Posted on July 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

This presidential election is putting globalization into the crosshairs again.

Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell offered a profound thought: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

As we ponder the appeal of Donald J. Trump, this insight is worth considering. While he stitches together various discontented groups in his bid to retake the White House, the former president seeks to turn the clock back even further on globalization, among other things. By imposing stiff new tariffs on imports, he maintains that this would restore jobs in hard-pressed Middle American communities.

But would it? Would restricting imports boost the numbers of factory jobs, especially in the states Trump hopes to win? And have similar efforts by President Biden – no friend of globalization himself — paid off for most Americans?

The Tax Foundation, a business-friendly but nonpartisan group in Washington, contends that such tariffs under both Trump and Biden have had a contrary effect – at least for Americans overall. Indeed, it’s not clear that they even helped voters in hollowed out manufacturing communities.

The foundation estimates that if imposed, Trump’s proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent. The group finds that the levies would slash employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs. And that’s all before counting the effects of retaliation in this potential escalation of an ongoing trade war.

As president, Trump imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, the group calculated. This amounted to one of the largest tax increases in decades.

And things actually worsened under Biden. That’s because the Biden administration kept most of the Trump administration tariffs in place, and in May 2024, announced tariff hikes on an additional $18 billion of Chinese goods. The cost amounted to an additional tax increase of $3.6 billion.

“We estimate the Trump-Biden tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.2 percent, the capital stock by 0.1 percent, and employment by 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” the foundation says.

But have the levies benefitted folks in protected industries? Have they kept open factories in the industrial Midwest that otherwise would shut down? Is the tradeoff worthwhile?

As WABC-TV broadcaster Warner Wolf used to say, let’s go to the videotape, (well to the stats, anyway):

The number of manufacturing jobs climbed during Trump’s tenure, rising from 12.383 million in January 2016 to a high of 12.828 million in January 2019, before slipping a bit (perhaps seasonally). This suggests that his policies (perhaps) helped add a relatively small 445,000 such jobs. Thanks largely to Covid, the tally dropped to 12.188 million by January 2021, the beginning of Biden’s term, but then climbed to a high of 12.966 million by this past January before slipping back to a preliminary estimate of 12.950 million by June.

The figures suggest that Biden’s policies (perhaps) helped restore more manufacturing jobs – as few as 122,000, if one counts from the Trump-term height, or as many as 760,000, if one counts from the Covid-dampened figure in 2021.

But do tariffs deserve the credit for gains in either administration? Not according to economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As The New York Times reported, a nonpartisan working paper by four such researchers examined monthly data on U.S. employment by industry. Their finding: tariffs that Trump placed on foreign metals, washing machines and an array of goods from China starting in 2018 neither raised nor lowered the overall number of jobs in the affected industries.

Worse, those additional costs did hit many Americans, who paid higher prices for such goods, fueling inflation. Moreover, they incited other countries to impose their own retaliatory tariffs on American products, making them more expensive to sell overseas, and the levies had a negative effect on American jobs, the paper finds. As the Times reported, that was particularly true in agriculture: Farmers who exported soybeans, cotton and sorghum to China were hit by Beijing’s decision to raise tariffs on those products to as much as 25 percent.

Trade wars of the sort that Trump launched, that Biden exacerbated, and that Trump promises to accelerate don’t appear to help even the people they are designed to help. And, overall, consumers and workers pay the freight for this, bearing the burden of higher prices for both imports and domestically produced competing products, the academic work suggests.

“Historical evidence and recent studies show that tariffs are taxes that raise prices and reduce available quantities of goods and services for U.S. businesses and consumers, which results in lower income, reduced employment, and lower economic output. For example, the effects of higher steel prices, largely a result of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, led to a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in the steel-consuming sector, a loss larger than the total employment in the steel-producing sector at the time,” the Tax Foundation contends.

So, what accounts for the recent rise in jobs in manufacturing? Well, part of that may be normal economic growth. The number of manufacturing jobs had been rising since at least 2014, predating both Trump and Biden. And, under Biden, assorted industrial policies may have helped boost the tallies, irrespective of tariffs.

Researchers at the Center for American Progress point to investment programs that Biden championed. Singling out three, the group, which styles itself as “progressive” but independent, lists the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The measures were aimed at undoing decades of disinvestment in American communities, the group says.

The efforts were designed to rebuild the nation’s physical, digital, and utility infrastructure; retake the global lead in advanced semiconductor manufacturing; speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and green energy; and create high-quality jobs, the center notes. These three policies combined direct public spending with grants, loans, tax incentives, and other financial assistance for private companies to promote key sectors, especially manufacturing, using public investment as a way to “crowd in” private investment.

To be sure, there can be little doubt that globalization in recent decades cost some people dearly, even as it benefitted most Americans. While low-cost imported goods helped most consumers, and access to the U.S. market lifted the economies of many other countries, this didn’t help some people – particularly those in industrial states that turned to Trump for relief.

Listen to the liberal Economic Policy Institute: “Globalization of our economy, driven by unfair trade, failed trade and investment deals, and, most importantly, currency manipulation and systematic overvaluation of the U.S. dollar over the past two decades has resulted in growing trade deficits—the U.S. importing more than we export—that have eliminated more than five million U.S. manufacturing jobs and nearly 70,000 factories.”

And consider the disproportionate effect this has had on working-class white voters in the most hard-pressed states – the sort of voters one sees packing into Trump rallies. As The New York Times reported, economic mobility for many of them declined in recent years, even as it improved for many Black Americans.

“Over the past few decades, globalization and changes in technology have caused many jobs to go from the United States to China, India and elsewhere,” the newspaper reported, drawing on a new Harvard study. “These shifts appear to have pushed white people out of the work force, while Black people found other jobs.”

The Times suggests several explanations for the racial disparity.

“White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their Black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility,” the newspaper suggests. “They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job — and might not settle for any other work.”

Moreover, the Harvard study found that the places where Black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And it noted that, compared with earlier generations, Black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. Certainly, this could only fuel the racist demagoguery so rampant nowadays.

As for globalization, even as it has brought big advantages to most Americans — and to many folks overseas — more open trade has been under assault worldwide for years. It was a tough slog for free-trade warrior Clayton Yeutter and President Ronald Reagan to open the way to freer trade back in the 1980s, and many have sought to retrench since. Indeed, the Republican party under the economic nationalist Trump has rejected the concept almost altogether, while Democrats have been only slightly less disapproving.

It’s not clear what a President Kamala Harris would do in this regard. The Tax Foundation, of course, has an idea for what she should do: “In the context of the ongoing trade war, the rise of digital services taxes, and the global minimum tax, U.S. policymakers should seek to build consensus through multilateral negotiations and the rules-based trade system rather than pursue harmful, tit-for-tat retaliation that threatens to compound the harms to U.S. businesses and consumers.”

For his part, Trump has been clear on his route, and it’s not what the foundation would prefer: As the foundation notes, he has proposed a new 10 percent universal tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China, as well as potentially higher tariffs on EVs from China or across the board.

As they battle for votes, particularly in key industrial states, Harris and Trump could easily race to the bottom in attacking world trade. The vote in states that they both need — Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, for instance — may turn on the issue. Unlike Trump, however, Harris has some training in economics — it was one of her majors at Howard University as an undergraduate — and her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. She should know better.

Will either candidate “disregard the first lesson of economics” and indulge in pandering on the point? Will Harris’s greater degree of economic sophistication keep that impulse in check? Their stances will bear watching.

The gloves are off

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

If Trump’s edge has been plain speaking, he’s about to meet his match

Some of my relatives in New Jersey have liked one thing above all about Donald J. Trump. As one put it, “he talks like us.” The meaning: unlike politicians whose insults are measured and almost diplomatic, whose criticisms on sensitive topics are muted, the blunt New Yorker “tells it like it is.”

Unburdened even by basic manners, the former president is given to fixing labels on opponents such as “lightweight,” “dumb” or “dummy,” “a dope” or “dopey,” “weak,” “a loser,” “boring” and so on. Like a grade school bully, he bandies about terms such as “Crooked Hillary,” “Crooked Joe,” “Pencil Neck,” “Birdbrain” and “Little Marco.”

Well, Trump may meet his match in Kamala Harris. Addressing her campaign staff, the vice president said that, as a longtime prosecutor, she dealt with perpetrators of all sorts: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Diplomatic? Hardly. Blunt to a fault or coarse? Well, no. Harris is too smart and too — well, adult — for that. On point, though? Unquestionably.

To be sure, Harris’s prosecutor-versus-predator theme isn’t exactly new. She indirectly called Trump a “predator” in the 2020 campaign in her comments in the virtual Democratic National Convention. But, with his 34 felony convictions since then, along with a fraud judgment of $454 million against him and the $88.3 million in a pair of judgments against him for his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, her barbs underscoring Trump’s venality hit home much harder now.

Harris won’t have to sink to Trump’s schoolyard level. Don’t look for her to call him “Dumb as a Rock,” as he, flailing for a label, said of her. Of course, she could do so, with ample evidence: a former prof of Trump’s at Wharton reportedly said of him: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!” and his former White House colleagues have called him an “idiot,” “dope” and “moron.”

But she won’t hold back, either. It’s clear that the gloves are off in this race and Harris and her compadres won’t be anywhere near as politic as former President Biden has been in dealing with Trump and his vice presidential hopeful, JD Vance. Already, potential Democratic vice presidential nominee Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has called Vance “a phony.”

And just how this all plays out will be fascinating to watch. Despite the relative genteelness of most recent presidential races, strong language has a long history in American political campaigns. A promoter of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, in 1800 referred to the nation’s second president, John Adams, as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And in 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson called John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, “a pimp,” accusing him of providing women to the Russian czar while serving as the U.S. minister to Russia. For their part, Adams’s supporters caricatured Jackson’s mother as a prostitute.

Nikki Haley, source; Getty Images via CNN

In today’s take-no-prisoners contest, the more Harris and her colleagues provoke Trump, the more he may be tempted to respond like the thin-skinned brute he is. As The New York Times has suggested, the attacks could provoke him to drop even lower, particularly because women, Blacks and other minorities seem to especially infuriate him. Recall that “Birdbrain” was his term for Nikki Haley, “Pocahontas” was his moniker for Elizabeth Warren, and “Crazy Nancy” was Nancy Pelosi. Trump used the less elegant “that bitch” for former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Certainly, obvious racism and sexism — if Trump and his backers descend into them — will play well with some of the former president’s supporters, perhaps even with many. Indeed, we already are hearing strains of both in comments such as that of Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who called Harris a “DEI vice president” and “a DEI hire,” invoking the common right-wing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities. Another Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, said the Democratic Party backed Harris only “because of her ethnic background,” while one right-wing commentator claimed she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were immigrants (she was born in Oakland, Calif.).

The theme of such critics will be that Harris got where she is as a kind of affirmative action baby. Never mind that Harris is the gifted daughter of an economics professor and a cancer researcher, and that she earned a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They will ignore the fact that she served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998, that she was elected in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco, that in 2010 she was elected as California’s attorney general and then, in 2016, was elected as a U.S. Senator from California. They will play down her work on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, on which she sat until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Even as he seems increasingly addled by age, Trump may be too clever – or too well-advised – to be flagrantly racist and sexist in his dealings with Harris. While others may be more cloddish, Trump knows just how to stop short of being fully outrageous, how to avoid being too explicit.

Charlottesville, 2017; source: AP, via NPR

Recall that Trump saw “some very fine people on both sides,” among the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. Remember that in 2020 he told a far-right extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” Recall that he urged on insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, telling them to “show strength” in the march on the Capitol, after telling them to “be there, will be wild!” And remember that Trump pressed Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” to try to overturn his loss in the state in 2020.

But, if Harris gets under his skin, Trump could well go too far. How will mainstream voters – particularly women – respond then? How will they react to dog whistles about race and gender? How will they react to more explicit assaults on those grounds by Trump devotees?

Harris is brilliantly positioned to take advantage of such attacks. And she is well-seated to launch far more precise – and well-founded – volleys at Trump. His flaws are legion and we can expect that she will expose, dissect and pound away at all of them.

Indeed, as my relatives may find, Harris will “talk like us” as she shines a bright, bold light on Trump’s foulness. But she may do so far more sharply — and effectively — than Trump ever could.

Now we may get a real fight

Posted on July 21, 2024 by Joe Weber

Kamala Harris helped take down Trump once. Will she again?

Three and a half years ago, Americans decided that a mixed-race Black and Indian woman was capable of serving as president of the United States. They chose Kamala Harris to serve the proverbial heartbeat away from The Resolute Desk, as Joe Biden’s partner. This was one chaotic presidential term after they had picked a Black man, Barack Obama, to serve two terms in the White House.

But how will they choose now? If the Democratic Party taps President Biden’s vice president as its nominee – the logical choice – will America rise to the occasion? After ousting him from office in 2020, will they turn aside Republican Donald J. Trump a second time? Have Americans matured enough racially and in gender terms to look beyond identity politics to Harris’s qualifications, especially since they overlooked the ample skills and experience of a white woman, Hillary Clinton, in 2016, in favor of a white man with no political background and a checkered, bankruptcy-marred business history? (The Clintons are backing Harris.)

The polls are notoriously unreliable. But, at the moment, as Newsweek reported, the most recent analysis by election website FiveThirtyEight, released on July 17, showed Harris had a net approval rating of -11.8, with just 38.6 percent of those surveyed approving of her performance and 50.4 percent disapproving.

Dismal as such numbers are, the latest polling about Trump puts him behind Harris. A July 21 FiveThirtyEight polling analysis gave Trump a net approval rating of -12, making him slightly more unpopular than Harris, with 41.7 percent viewing him favorably and 53.7 percent unfavorably.

The margins surely would be uncomfortably close, as they were in the last few presidential elections. In 2020, Biden-Harris turned Trump into a one-term president with just 51.3% of the popular vote and 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Trump garnered 46.9% of the popular vote, a figure that held up despite a national barrage of unsuccessful ballot challenges the former president launched.

Trump won office in 2016 with a similar share of the popular vote, just 46.1%, falling below Hillary Clinton’s 48.2%. Despite her success with voters overall, he bested her in the Electoral College, 304 to 227, by carrying the South and much of the Midwest and Northwest.

So, will Harris be the party’s choice, given her narrow lead on Trump at the moment? Can she boost her approval ratings enough to stay ahead of Trump’s beleaguered numbers? The Dems convene in Chicago on Aug. 19 and, in coming weeks there will be debate over whether she can win by carrying the party’s banner.

Despite Biden’s endorsement of Harris, there already has been talk of the party “leapfrogging” over her to tap a seemingly safer white male candidate. Names of governors such as Gavin Newsome of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and J.B. Pritzer of Illinois have been vaunted. So, too, has that of a white woman, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

And already, some observers argue that passing over her would cost the party big with Blacks, especially women – a constituency with which Biden was lagging. By this reasoning, she could bring out enough currently dissatisfied Black voters to carry the ticket over the top, even as she boasts of her mixed-race ancestry. She might bolster her chances with whites by tapping any of those governors as a running mate.

Whitmer, of course, could help deliver the key swing state of Michigan. Imagine, though, how a ticket with two women might send far-right voters around the bend. Consider what a stark difference that would represent from the elderly white male heading the GOP and his middle-aged white veep choice.

Of course, identity politics of this sort still matter — indeed they may be everything in this race.

But, looking just at her credentials, Harris couldn’t be better poised for it. Serving at Biden’s side since 2021, she has had an inside seat at the table in important policymaking choices, such as the infrastructure bill that is now pouring billions of dollars into the nation’s bridges and roads, the support of Ukraine, the strengthening of NATO, the difficult rebuilding of America’s stature around the world after Trump’s isolationist term. As Lesley Odom Jr. and Lin-Manuel Miranda might say, Harris has been in “The Room Where It Happens.”

Few vice presidents have been able to grab the limelight from their bosses, and it may be that Harris’s lackluster ratings simply reflect the public’s lack of knowledge of her. Only 15 vice presidents have gone on to serve as president and eight of them got the jobs because of their predecessor’s death. She will now have to show how she’s up to the post, first with the party and then the public — and all in a very short time.

Certainly, Harris brought an impressive resume to the White House. She earned her undergraduate degree in economics and politics at Howard University and her law degree from the University California, Berkeley, as the Arizona Republic reported in detailing her background. She served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998 in her birthplace of Oakland, California. She specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. In 2004, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco and served through 2010. She was an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, officiating the first same-sex wedding after California’s Proposition 8 was overturned, the paper reported.

Harris served as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017 after winning her first race in November 2010 by a slim margin over Republican Steve Cooley by 0.5% of a percentage point. On the consumer front, she won a $20 billion settlement for Californians whose homes had been foreclosed on and a $1.1 billion settlement for students and veterans who were taken advantage of by a for-profit education company, according to her White House biography.

Her law-enforcement background makes for a bright, bold comparison to the man who aspires to be the nation’s first felon-in-chief. Trump’s disrespect for the law is legend and his 34 felony convictions don’t sit well with many independent voters.

After her work in law, Harris was elected in 2016 to serve in the U.S. Senate. She served on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Shyamala Gopalan and Harris, Source: People

Harris also brings an interesting family story. She is the daughter of immigrants, with her father, Donald J. Harris, an economics professor at Stanford who hails from Jamaica, and her mother, the late Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India. The couple met at the University of California, Berkeley. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a former entertainment lawyer now serving as as distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A Jew and the nation’s first “second gentleman,” he grew up in Matawan and Old Bridge, N.J.

At 59, Harris is two decades younger than the GOP’s geriatric former president, Trump, now 78. Much as Biden’s age-related deterioration has been evident, so has Trump’s, as seen by his numerous gaffes – confusing Biden and Obama, calling Argentina a person and accusing Biden of conspiring to overthrow the United States (all those from just one weekend in March). His litany of falsehoods in his GOP nomination acceptance speech made for great grist for fact-checkers.

If Harris is tapped by the party, would Trump be willing to debate her? One suspects she would demolish him, performing far better than Biden did in his troubling time on stage. Would he shrink from such a head-on fight? Without evidence, Trump argues she would be easier for him to defeat – but that is a claim that, first, Democratic Party members must now assess.

How will they choose? How will America?

Flooding the zone

Posted on July 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

Maybe some presidential election rhetoric should not be turned down

A longstanding maxim in the news business says “information abhors a void.” When we don’t know things, or know things only partly, we rush to fill in the gaps. Often, we are wrong and, sadly, misinformation may carry enormous weight.

The latest example is the reaction to the shooting of Donald Trump. We still don’t know why a disturbed young man took up arms against the former president. But that hasn’t stopped people from blaming the fiery rhetoric of one side or the other – pleas for putting oil on the waters, notwithstanding. Indeed, the absence of information has driven those who see opportunity here into overdrive (and it’s been rich grist for the inevitable conspiracists).

Before the shooting, would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks googled the phrase “major depressive disorder” and searched for information about Trump, Joe Biden, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as we heard from The Washington Post and The New York Times. We also saw in The Times that he looked up events where Trump and Biden were speaking.

Does that mean he would have attacked whichever man was nearby? That it was just convenient that Trump was appearing not far from his home? That his motivation was less political (or partisan) and more psychological, i.e., a lost post-adolescent looking for a grandiose way to commit what is often called “suicide by police?”

We’ve seen several reports that Crooks had shown little interest in politics, though he was a registered Republican with one parent a Democrat and one a Libertarian. Those reports, and the absence of political matters on his phone or other communications, suggest that his motivation was something other than wanting to do away with a candidate who may or may not have infuriated him.

Still, the black hole that Crooks has created is being filled by Republicans, such as J.D. Vance, who eagerly blame Democrats and the media for demonizing Trump – an odd flip, since Democrats and the media are routinely demonized by such Republicans. It’s also being filled, to a degree, by Democrats, such as President Biden, who blame the hot rhetoric of the campaign for a toxic atmosphere, implying that such language drove Crooks to his mad actions.

One of the more seemingly sophisticated commentaries was offered by author Gerald Posner, who rushed into print in The Wall Street Journal just two days after the July 13 shooting to blame “incendiary political language.” From whom? Well, liberals and the media, of course. “The assassination attempt against Mr. Trump follows years of relentless attacks from left-wing media and many in the Democratic Party, who likened the former president to Hitler and claimed his re-election would end democracy,” Posner argued.

Posner, a lawyer and an investigative journalist who wrote well-regarded books about the assassinations of JFK and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., compares the “volatile atmosphere” in Dallas in 1963 and in Memphis in 1968 with today’s environment, warning that “reckless speech” can inspire an assassin. He makes the link, even as he undercuts his argument by acknowledging that we may never know the motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, as we may never know what drove Crooks.

This is a classic case of correlation versus causation: I got up and the sun came up this morning, so therefore I must have caused the sun to rise. Similarly, people said nasty things about Kennedy and King, therefore those comments must have caused their killings. Today, people are saying nasty things about Trump, so it follows that someone would try to kill him. A lawyer such as Posner, frankly, should know better.

The questions his reasoning begs are legion. Here are a few: did critical things that people said about Trump drive Crooks? Or might it have been Trump’s own many vile comments, some of which incited the riot in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Or might both those things have been irrelevant to a troubled loner who perhaps was looking for a way to write himself into history and do away with himself at the same time? Might it have been that Trump was just the famous politician on hand?

We may learn more as the FBI continues its investigation into Crooks. Perhaps his parents, acquaintances and workmates will shed more light as time goes on.

But we also may never know, as Posner sensibly admits. And, given that void, should the opportunists rule the day? Should Democrats and Republicans stop criticizing one another?

Certainly, Republicans are not holding back. “America cannot afford four more years of a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, referring to the ‘80s comedy in which two salesmen accidentally kill their boss and then pretend he is still alive. “Let’s be honest here. Biden is just a figurehead.”

And some argue that Democrats should not fall into a trap by backing off on warning Americans about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

“Donald Trump really does present a threat to the norms of liberal democracy and the welfare of millions of US residents,” Vox commentator Eric Levitz writes. “Joe Biden truly supports the legality of medical procedures that some Christian conservatives believe to be murder. Rhetoric that describes in good faith our polity’s disputes will imply that our elections have life-or-death stakes — because they do.

“That Trump poses a threat to democracy should go without saying,” Levitz adds. “As president, he attempted to block the peaceful transfer of power by manipulating vote counts and instigating a riot on Capitol Hill. He has also outlined plans for undermining the independence of federal law enforcement while vowing to enact ‘retribution’ on his movement’s enemies.”

Those unaware of the profound effect a Trump presidency could have can turn to plenty of places for info. As The New York Times reported, and I’ve previously recounted, he would step up the trade war that already is riling global relations, imposing stiff tariffs that will drive up prices on broad ranges of goods for Americans. He would set up WWII-style detention camps to hold rounded-up migrants for mass deportations, try to end birthright citizenship, use the Justice Department to persecute his enemies, strip employment protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, purge intelligence agencies and other bodies of people whose work he dislikes, and he would cut taxes for wealthy friends, driving up the national debt anew.

Even more discomfiting things might come if Trump associates at The Heritage Foundation have their way. Their Project 2025 would reduce the size of federal agencies, ban abortion drugs, and overhaul popular programs like the Affordable Care Act, as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer reported. He argued that it could cause immense harm to “women of childbearing age, undocumented immigrants, public education, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, unions, and the LGBTQ community.” Critics say Trump would enjoy “unprecedented and potentially dangerous powers unlike any occupant of the White House in American history.”

Certainly, there’s no dearth of information about what a Trump presidency would bring. The problem is that his supporters either back his agenda or don’t bother to inform themselves about it, as they remain under his demagogic sway.

Sadly, no amount of information may swing enough devotees away from Trump’s magnetic lure. And it remains to be seen whether Biden could be persuaded to yield the ground to a younger Democrat who could better go toe-to-toe with the former president.

Still, filling voids with misinformation seems to help only Trump. And, in this regard, jailed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once offered some perverse wisdom: “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told writer Michael Lewis in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The GOP and folks such as Posner are doing that to a fare-thee-well.

Who’s to Blame?

Posted on July 15, 2024 by Joe Weber

That depends on who is pointing the finger about the attempted assassination of Trump

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has proved to be something of a Rorschach test. The way some people view it — and how they affix the blame for it — seems to turn on how they view our problematic November election.

Oddly, none of the quick analyses seem to be looking at the obvious question — and, perhaps, plain meaning — here: just what was going on in the unhinged mind of a 20-year-old who found it far too easy to get an AR-15-style weapon and the ammo for it? Indeed, we don’t know what motivated the late Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, and we may never know what drove him. Unlike others who have taken up guns in such efforts, he left no manifesto and few signs.

But that hasn’t stopped some folks, particularly opportunistic Republicans, from weighing in.

Potential vice president J.D. Vance, for instance, quickly said the shooting is the fault of Democrats. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance posted on X about two hours after the shooting. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

As reported by Slate, Donald Trump Jr. quickly echoed the theme, tweeting, “Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap. Calling my dad a ‘dictator’ and a ‘threat to Democracy’ wasn’t some one off comment. It has been the *MAIN MESSAGE* of the Biden-Kamala campaign and Democrats across the country!!!”

The two were among many Republicans in what seems to be a GOP echo chamber making that sort of argument. Others included Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called Dems “flat out evil” and accused the Democratic Party of trying “to murder President Trump.”

For their part, many Democrats, by contrast, tried to take a higher road, avoiding blaming the usually overheated Trumpian rhetoric common since 2016. Instead, they just condemned the assault and bemoaned our tainted political environment that, perhaps, gave rise to it.

“Look, there’s no place for this kind of violence in America. It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons we have to unite this country,” President Joe Biden said Saturday, as The Washington Post reported. “We cannot be like this.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi waxed personal in her condemnation, touching on the 2022 assault on her husband – a hammer attack that Trump mocked. “As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society,” the former House speaker said. “I thank God that former President Trump is safe.”

It was only by implication that Biden criticized Trump’s hot rhetoric – language such as Trump’s oft-repeated lies about the 2020 election being fraudulent or his inflammatory words egging on rioters in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Without criticizing Trump for fostering the current environment, Biden said Americans now need to “lower the temperature,” adding that “it’s time to cool it down.” Of course, one need not wonder who has turned up the heat for years.

And is lowering the temperature possible? Even as Trump reportedly planned to hit a unity theme in his address to the GOP Convention, can this zebra change his stripes? Given his tirades about the poor shape America allegedly is in, and his plans for overhauling much of Washington, is a cooler atmosphere possible?

That hardly seems likely when Trump, with blood staining his face moments after being grazed by the bullet, pumped his fist at the crowd and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” That bit of spontaneous stagecraft fit in with the former president’s long history of using hot words and making threats against his enemies and critics. Plainly, anger is a big part of who Trump is and why his supporters back him.

Then there’s the odd reaction of the religious right and Trump himself. In the accounting of some megachurch pastors, Trump’s slight turn away from likely death was evidence of Divine Providence, of G-d’s protecting his chosen one. Trump, for his part, echoed this, writing in a Truth Social post: “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”

In all this, though, some of the richest post-shooting commentary has been castigation of that ever-handy villain, the media.

“Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, another Trump ally, wrote on social media, as reported by The Washington Post.

Commentator Erick Erickson criticized MSNBC for characterizing Trump as a “would-be dictator,” asking, “What did they think would happen?”, as CJR reported. And Texas Rep. Chip Roy tweeted a “New Republic” cover depicting Trump as Hitler, adding, “You bastards.” Moreover, in a series of tweets, Georgia Rep. Greene called the media “corrupt,” accused them of inciting violence, and said it was time to clean them up.

Lauren Boebert and friends, source: Colorado Times Recorder

Perhaps even more rich than all that was the reaction by Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert, an incendiary figure who once called a Muslim fellow member of Congress, Somali refugee Ilhan Omar, a member of the “Jihad Squad.” As reported by Business Insider, Boebert used to own a gun-themed restaurant called “Shooters Grill” in Rifle, Colorado. There, waitresses carried guns as part of their uniform, and customers could order dishes like the “M16 burrito” and a “bump stock corned beef hash.”

But Boebert, like other Republicans, was vexed by a cliche Biden reportedly used in a call with donors. Waxing metaphorical, he said: “we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

As recounted by Colorado Public Radio, the often gun-toting Boebert lambasted the president for the phrase. “This should not be rhetoric a president should be using,” she said on 9News. “And here we are. Now president Trump was literally put in a bullseye, after the president of the United States, the sitting president of the United States, called for him to be put in a bullseye. I believe that the rhetoric needs to end. I hope and pray that it ends.”

Don’t we all?

And, while we’re at it, perhaps we can put in a contrary word about how maybe, just maybe, overly easy access to guns by disturbed post-adolescents could be really a key issue here. Yes, the political atmosphere is foul — and, yes, an honest look at the record shows that Trump is a major reason for that — but perhaps there are simpler explanations. The opportunists don’t want to wait, but we’ll have to see what the FBI turns up on the point.

Can dawn break again?

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Joe Weber

This July Fourth will likely be a bleak one

As July 4 approaches, I feel myself in mourning. I grieve for my country and worry for the nation that my children and grandchildren are inheriting.

Unless something dramatic intervenes, we face a difficult choice in the fall presidential election. We elect a man who is decent, moral and right on his policies, but whose diminished capabilities will only decline further. Or we pick a man who has said he’d be a dictator (perhaps for more than just a day), whose personal morality is that of “an alley cat” (as his opponent memorably said), and who promises to sow chaos in government, domestic civil society and foreign affairs.

This is a Hobson’s choice, of course. The second route surely leads to disaster. But the first, the road we should take, spawns uncertainty, fear and doubt. Could we count on President Biden’s aides, colleagues and advisers to make sure he manages the reins of power well? Certainly, we could expect the seemingly more vigorous Trump to clutch and pull at such reins to monstrous effect, doing even more damage than such moves as packing the Supreme Court and lower courts has already done.

Yes, Biden’s deterioration is on full display these days. Without a teleprompter, he is at sea, a worrisome thing in a man who will need to deal with grave threats from abroad and mystifying polarization at home. It’s no wonder he’s lost the support even of longtime friends and loyalists.

Source: Getty Images, via New York Magazine

But Trump needs no electronic aids to showcase his bigotry, divisiveness, self-interest and ignorance. He need only to deliver his erratic and rambling speeches, ones in which he claims that “Catholics are being persecuted,” that people will be arrested if they say they “answer to God in heaven,” that terrorists “in record numbers” are coming over our borders, that Social Security and Medicare are “being destroyed,” that his conviction by a jury on 34 felony counts was a politically motivated “show trial,” that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

Trump’s claptrap, dishonesty and demagoguery are extraordinary. Out of sheer opportunism, this longtime huckster paints a dystopian picture that seems to sell. Never mind that unemployment continues to be at record lows, that government spending has led to improved roads, bridge and transportation systems around the country, that inflation is subsiding. Never mind that the reason the border continues to be a problem is that Trump, desperate for an issue to run on, deep-sixed a plan backed by conservative legislators that would have fixed it.

And what would the man do if he ousts Biden? As The New York Times reported, he would step up the trade war that already is riling global relations, imposing stiff tariffs that will drive up prices on broad ranges of goods for Americans. He would set up WWII-style detention camps to hold rounded-up migrants for mass deportations, try to end birthright citizenship, use the Justice Department to persecute his enemies, strip employment protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, purge intelligence agencies and other bodies of people whose work he dislikes, and he would cut taxes for wealthy friends, driving up the national debt anew.

And all that is just for starters. Trump would also further pack the Supreme Court and the judiciary with untalented ideologues who could wreak damage that no successor could undo. In foreign policy, he would greenlight Vladimir Putin’s expansive ambitions and embrace and embolden dictators in other places, such as Hungary and, perhaps, North Korea. He also might try to overturn a constitutional amendment so he could seek a third term to impose even more chaos.

I mourn the passing of the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, men with whom one might disagree but who were patriots committed to doing right by the country, not desperately seeking to salve damaged egos and shield themselves from prosecutions. I miss such aides as trade advocate Clayton K. Yeutter, whose actions enriched both the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. In his place, we have convicts such as Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro and Roger Stone, as well as extremists such as Stephen Miller.

We, of course, also have a long list of former Trump lieutenants who now disavow the man, including his own former vice president, who has declined to endorse him. Trump’s ex-chief of staff, former Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, said his ex-boss is “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators” and “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” Think Jan. 6, if you doubt the last point.

Indeed, Trump is a man who memorably mocked former POW and GOP presidential contender John McCain, saying “I like people who weren’t captured.” He ducked military service by faking a bone spur and more recently called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” as noted by Kelly.

As the nation’s first felon-in-chief, Trump would surround himself with toadies determined to march in lockstep with him, no matter the legal impropriety. They include potential vice presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who once called Trump a “con artist” but who now endorses him, and Sen. Ted Cruz, who once labeled Trump “utterly amoral” but now backs him.

And while Biden’s acuity is likely to decrease, Trump’s mental challenges have long been on sorry display and appear to have worsened. As his rambles have suggested, he seems deeply unwell. A Biden operating on fewer cylinders surely would be less of a danger than a rampaging Trump.

So, I grieve for my country. The only thing that gives me heart is that it’s possible American voters will make the right choice. Indeed, perhaps Biden will make it easier by stepping aside, clearing the way for a more vigorous person with similar sensibilities and sanity (though all indications so far are to the contrary). It’s possible that my fellow citizens will repudiate the corrupt and ideologically blind GOP of the Boeberts and Greenes. It’s possible that they will see through the party’s leading conman’s games.

But it’s hard at this point to be optimistic. Will the disaffected, gullible and ill-informed among our voters have their day? Will those rule who are taken in by slick TV-friendly imagery, who don’t school themselves beyond that? Will a minority of the nation again choose a would-be-tyrant thanks to a flawed Electoral College system? Recall that Trump won with just 46% of the vote in 2016.

If one can invoke Revolutionary War history, there were times when the cause seemed lost back then. Generals stumbled, turncoats betrayed their leaders, soldiers deserted. Yet, somehow the patriots prevailed. Can that happen again? Can dawn break after this darkening stretch? For now, it seems a long way off.

Time’s a wastin’

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Joe Weber

Can a successor to Joe Biden emerge in time, if at all?

In February 1968, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite editorialized on the air against the Vietnam war. After watching the broadcast, President Lyndon B. Johnson supposedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” And then, a month later, LBJ announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection.

Well, it seems LBJ did not in fact utter those words – which have been repeated in various forms over the years – and he never even saw that Cronkite program. Or so a revisit to the myth by journalism academic W. Joseph Campbell found. Johnson at the time was in Austin, Texas, celebrating the birthday of his longtime friend, Gov. John Connally, Campbell recounted.

“The Cronkite program was neither decisive nor pivotal to his thinking on Vietnam,” Campbell maintained. He suggested that the media exaggerated their role in affecting a president’s thinking.

I’m reminded of this now, after many journalism outlets and pundits have called on President Joe Biden to throw in the towel on the election after his disappointing debate performance. They want him to yield the Democratic nomination to someone – anyone – who could put on a better show.

The key question: will the media angst make a difference to the president?

“The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant,” The New York Times editorialized. “He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.”

Thomas Friedman, source: The Jerusalem Post

Echoing that, Times columnist and reported Biden-whisperer Thomas Friedman called on those closest to the president to persuade him to quit the race. “The Biden family and political team must gather quickly and have the hardest of conversations with the president, a conversation of love and clarity and resolve,” Friedman wrote. “To give America the greatest shot possible of deterring the Trump threat in November, the president has to come forward and declare that he will not be running for re-election and is releasing all of his delegates for the Democratic National Convention.”

More predictably – and nastily – The Wall Street Journal said the president looked like “a feeble man” with no business running. “Mr. Biden lost the debate in the first 10 minutes as he failed to speak clearly, did so in a weak voice, and sometimes couldn’t complete a coherent sentence,” the paper said. “His blank stare when Donald Trump was speaking suggested a man who is struggling to recall what he has been prepped for weeks to say, but who no longer has the memory to do it.”

Chiding those who encouraged or tolerated the president’s choice to run again, the WSJ accused such supporters of failing to heed warning signs of the president’s deterioration. “It was clearly a selfish act for him to seek a second term,” the editorial said. “But did they really think they could hide his decline from the public for an entire election campaign?”

Labeling Biden’s debate performance an “unmitigated disaster,” WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan argued that Democrats must “admit what the rest of the country can see and has long seen, that Mr. Biden can’t do the job. They have to stop being the victim of his vanity and poor judgment, and of his family’s need, and get themselves a new nominee.”

For my part, I give the president high marks on substance – indeed, despite his shortcomings, his mastery of many of the details he recounted was impressive. Regrettably, however, he seemed at times like a man desperate to recall and regurgitate those details — like someone grasping for lost memories. Certainly, he lost on style, with too many slips and too much confusion. And, as we learned way back in the Kennedy-Nixon debates, style and appearance make all the difference.

But can a man who fought so hard and long to attain the prize Biden did now give it up? Does Biden have enough self-awareness to pack it in?

It’s possible that some of the media outpouring will unsettle Biden enough to help him do so, but we are in uncharted territory here. History offers little guidance.

Despite the Cronkite myth, the media’s desertion of LBJ, it seems now, had little influence on his prosecution of the Vietnam war; it dragged on through President Nixon’s term years later. Moreover, it’s likely that LBJ’s decision to quit the election race was less influenced by the media than by impressive threats from challengers Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

For his part, Biden in the spring had a sole credible challenger. But that man, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, racked up pallid results that persuaded him to drop out and endorse the president in early March. Before getting into the race, Phillips had called for a “moderate governor” to challenge Biden, who he said could not defeat Trump.

Now, if the media and pundits are correct, Democrats may have to scramble to a) persuade Biden to quit and b) find a credible challenger to Trump. Both seem like herculean tasks, complicated by the short time frame left.

It’s not that there would be a shortage of pretenders. Indeed, it seems likely that a free-for-all would precede the party’s convention, slated for Aug. 19-22 in Chicago. The names being vaunted include Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. Other potential candidates include Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, and Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Gretchen Whitmer, source: National Review

“If Democrats can somehow work through all of this, someone like Gretchen Whitmer would be a much tougher opponent for Trump on paper,” National Review editor Rich Lowry argued. “She’s a young, relatively popular governor in the key swing state of Michigan. She wouldn’t have to answer directly for any of Biden’s failures and has a history of presenting herself in campaigns as a non-ideological Democrat. ‘Fix the damn roads’ was her slogan when she first ran for governor.”

Would there be enough time for Whitmer or any of the others to mount a successful effort to knock Trump aside? Would they fracture the party in a desperate battle royal, carving one another up while Trump bides his time, taking potshots at whoever seems the most likely to emerge?

If Biden can be persuaded to step aside, it’s possible that the ambitious folks who could succeed him would do one healthy thing: they would deprive Trump of the media oxygen he so desperately depends on. Their fight, should it materialize, would dominate the headlines, superseding such things as his veep choice.

But the Dems would need to choose wisely. Not only would they need a person of substance, but that person must be able to skewer Trump while avoiding descending to his level. As many observers – even those at the Wall Street Journal – reported, Trump’s debate performance was filled with misstatements that he routinely echoes on the campaign trail. Highlighting them would just be the beginning for a credible Trump challenger (while Trumpists may not care about facts, reasonable voters might).

Making the case for taking Biden’s mantle would require passion, thought and vitality. It’s not impossible for those potential candidates to bring such qualities to bear, but it’s a tall order and time’s a wastin.’ At the moment, that job seems like a far easier task, though, than would be needed for Biden to recover from his debate disaster. Going forward, every appearance now by the diminished president would likely just deepen the hole he’s in.

Higher Ed aims lower these days

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Joe Weber

Have the pols lost sight of the value of education in Nebraska?

Back in 2009, when I joined the journalism faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, all arrows were pointing upward for the university. Enrollments were growing, buildings were rising, and graduates were going on to healthy careers in newswriting and other things. The state legislature and good citizens of the state realized that education was important, and they funded it, accordingly.

Even the Huskers won far more than they lost. The state’s football team racked up a 10-4 season that year, leading the Big 12 Northern Division and ranking 14^th best in the national AP poll.

My, how things have changed.

Overall enrollment at the flagship Lincoln campus has slipped from 24,100 back then to 23,600 now. Journalism is on the run, with graduates finding fewer opportunities in newspapers and other news operations. And the legislature and governor, engaged in ideological warfare with educators, seem to have forgotten that education both matters and costs.

As for the Huskers, the team seems emblematic of the university’s decline. After several pricey coach and athletic director departures, Big Red eked out a 5-7 season last year, a middling result in the Big 10 West (albeit better than the 4-8 record of the prior year). The university appears to be scrambling to avoid being kicked out of the Big 10, a lingering fear because UNL is the only conference member that doesn’t belong to the 71-member Assoc. of American Universities (the university was tossed by the AAU in 2011 over research funding issues and is trying to rejoin it).

Ameer Abdullah rushes in 2012; Source: Aaron Babcock

But now the ideologues who’ve seized most of the levers of power in the state are busy chipping away at the university’s hopes and ambitions. As a former student of mine, Zach Wendling, reported for the Nebraska Examiner, the regents just approved a $1.1 billion state-aided budget for fiscal year 2025 that will require campus leaders to scrape away another $11.8 million from their budgets in the next year, after they cut about $30 million in the past two fiscal years

While that one-year 1% cut seems like a pittance, it will bite. The earlier cuts did so, with some of the most visible trims being reduced library hours and fewer graduate teaching assistants and student workers. Plans were made last fall for deep cuts in the diversity, equity and inclusion office, undergrad ed and student success programming and non-specific operational efficiency improvements.

I’m reminded of a dark joke an economist colleague at BusinessWeek once told me. “If you cut the feed of a fine thoroughbred racehorse just a little bit each month or so to save money, what do you wind up with?” The answer: “a dead horse.”

In the case of UNL, it more likely will be a hobbled one, but one that limps along, nonetheless. The new round of cuts will involve an elaborate consultation approach with faculty and administrators, so it’s not clear now where they will come from. “As we begin this work, we will utilize shared governance processes to move forward in an engaged and thoughtful way,” Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett said in a message from his office.

But cutting majors and departments with little enrollment has been vaunted as one possible approach, along with eliminating staff jobs. That has been a popular tack at several schools, including the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The University of New Hampshire, as it trims 75 staff jobs, is shutting it art museum. And closer to home, at the University of Nebraska’s Kearney campus, bachelor’s degrees in areas such as geography, recreation management and theater are slated for elimination.

At UNL, just how much university-wide consultation versus administrative fiat will be involved will be difficult to say. When the chancellor last fall proposed a 46% cut from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Office of Academic Success and Intercultural Services – some $800,000 – he triggered passionate objections from a good number of faculty and others. But he was pleasing the regents who had hired him last year.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The university’s DEI efforts – like similar programs around the country – have been hot-button matters for many on the right. Indeed, the chair of the regents opposed the budget in the June 20 5-2 vote, arguing that no diversity, equity or inclusion initiatives or programs should be funded.

“We need to recruit and have folks — diversity — here, but we shouldn’t be using tax dollars to fund and promote certain races or genders above others,” said regent chair Rob Schafer. “It ought to be a fair and level and equal playing field for all.”

Asked whether he’s seen the promotion of one race or gender at NU campuses – i.e., evidence of a problem — Schafer offered a, well, incomprehensible reply. “Just the fact that we have funding and we’re promoting different things, I think there’s some things that we could just do better,” journalist Wendling reported.

While enrollments continue to be under pressure, in part because the numbers of teens in the state have been stuck at between 129,000 and 142,000 for the last dozen years, the regents seem to be operating at cross-purposes by making the school more costly. They voted to hike tuition between 3.2% and 3.4% across the system’s several campuses, on top of a 3.5% across-the-board hike they okayed last year.

Despite that, Chancellor Bennett pointed to enrollment growth this past spring. Going forward, though, it’s not clear how making something more costly will draw more customers. Perhaps the regents and administrators haven’t consulted the folks in the economics department.

The tuition hikes drew the other no vote on the budget from Kathy Wilmot, who won her elected post as regent in 2022 in part by attacking “liberal leaning” courses at the university and venting about “indoctrination” at UNL. Now, as she bemoans the planned tuition hikes, she doesn’t seem to be urging more funding from the legislature to make those hikes unnecessary.

“To me, the families have already chipped in because they’re paying the taxes and things that we turn to the Legislature and everybody for,” Wilmot said, according to Wendling. “Then, when we ask those students from those families to chip in again, I feel that’s somewhat of a double hit.”

Back in the late 1960s, when the university was forming its four-campus system and the legislature generously funded the effort, a rising Republican star with a lot of influence in the state named Clayton Yeutter argued passionately for education. The schooling he got at Nebraska – including an undergrad degree, a Ph.D and a law school degree – led him from a small family farm to high levels in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including serving as Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Trade Representative and head of the Republican National Committee. Trained in economics, the late Yeutter understood that quality costs.

Somehow, in these polarized times, the overwhelmingly Republican leaders in Nebraska have lost sight of that. Yeutter, whose statue graces the campus, would likely be disgusted by their approaches now.

Livin’ the Disney Dream

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

A cruise offers a few lessons

Some 52 years ago, I made a silly mistake. Seeing myself as very much a counterculture creature at that time, I looked on high school proms as just so unhip. The formal clothes, corsages, etc., were just not my jam, as we might say now. They seemed so, well, Establishment and the cool kids were anything but that. So, I skipped my prom.

Now, I have a different view. Such anti-Establishment notions, it seems to me today, were essentially snobbish, ways of looking down one’s nose at others who were just not “aware” enough (today we might say “woke”). I didn’t disdain friends who rushed off to rent formal clothes, and get dates, photographs and limos arranged, but I thought the scene just wasn’t for me. Somehow, I was above or at least apart from all that.

Of course, I would have liked the motel rooms that groups of the guys booked at the Jersey Shore for them and their well-coiffed newly adult (i.e., about 18 years old) girlfriends. But that would have been for other reasons.

I’m put in mind of all this because I just got back from what surely has to be one of the most Establishment things one can do — a cruise on the Disney Dream. For a week, my wife and I, our son and daughter-in-law and three grandkids steamed about the Mediterranean. We stopped off at a few Greek islands and we spent a good bit of time on board a very large ship, one that holds 4,000 souls and a host of cartoon characters.

This was, in some ways, very prom-like. Girls and women on such trips dress up as princesses, men and boys as pirates or princes – and those are not just the employees, but the cruisers. Meanwhile, Disney employees parade about, decked out as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and a host of others in the Mouse House universe, strutting and posing for photos to the delight of kids and their parents, alike.

All the while, music from uplifting Disney movies plays in the background on nearly all 13 decks on that ship. Some tunes are reprised during evening shows when cast members in Broadway-style productions caper about on a stage suited to any New York legitimate theater. Think “Beauty and the Beast” in a venue that rocks and sways slightly. The production values are impressive.

One of several elegant family dining spots

And then there’s the food. It’s unlimited at breakfast and lunch and is exceptionally varied. In the evenings, dinner rotates among several lavishly appointed restaurants. We skipped the adults only restaurants, though they were there for those wanting to get away from the kids for a while. For such times — or anytime — there were, nursery and kid’s club programs (that kids, like the 3-year-old with us, really, really want to go to).

A couple wading pools and an adults only pool (complete with wade-up bar) round out the offerings. And above it all, folks can fly through a tube on fast-rushing water, the AquaDuck water coaster. Remarkable fun. There’s also a track for burning off the many calories one consumes, along with a workout room and spa.

I’m no Disney cultist of the sort found at times in the parks and on the ships – people who count their visits on many more than two Mickey hands. But our weeklong adventure, to and from a port near Rome with stops in Naples/Pompeii, Mykonos, Santorini, and Chania on Crete, was extraordinary. Yes, it was the ultimate conventional tourist thing to do, but it was wonderful.

Reality, of course, is all too ugly at times in ways that make Cruella De Vil and evil stepmothers seem far too tame. But with Disney one can be immersed in a fantasy world that can be surprisingly engaging when seen through the eyes of the 6-and-under set, like our grandkids. Piracy in the real world is monstrous, but on the boat it’s all makeup and “aarghing.”

Moreover, the real-life elements that make Disney ride high among entertainment and hospitality companies are exceptional. From a business point of view, the company knows its markets, knows what its public wants, and it serves that up to a fare-thee-well.

On board the Disney Dream, the details knock your socks off (or those yellow Mickey shoes, perhaps). Portraits of characters around the ship move and talk when one stands before them. Waiters know what the kids eat each night. The level of cleanliness in the halls and staterooms (post-cleaning) is the definition of shipshape.

And the staff — the “cast members” — bring their A-game each day. From stateroom “hosts” who make the beds to ship mechanics, people greet guests warmly on sight. Each night, the ship’s officer group –- clad in Navy-like dress whites – gather for events to chat amiably with guests.

As I dealt with the multilingual and ethnically varied crew and staff, as well as with fellow guests, I was reminded of a bright, bold contrast, one involving the blinkered view of the world that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis brought to his silly fight with Disney. Recall that DeSantis in 2022 signed the Parental Rights in Education Act. As NPR reported, the “Don’t Say Gay” law restricts how sexual orientation and gender identity are discussed in the schools. Disney’s former CEO Bob Chapek spoke out against the law and said he’d work to overturn it. “That angered DeSantis, who then worked with Republican lawmakers to pass a measure revoking Disney’s self-governing status,” NPR said.

DeSantis, of course, also derided the “wokeism” that he argued plagued Disney. The company famously reaches out to customers and staff of varied backgrounds and orientations, and the governor lambasted that approach as he tried to appeal to a very different constituency – the straight, white anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant crew that dominates the MAGA GOP.

On the ship, the variety of people that Disney serves and employs is apparent. The cruises draw passengers of all sorts, including straight white folks. Its crew includes people from all across the world, some of whom (such as our dinner servers) are supporting families back in India and elsewhere with their earnings from several-month stints on board ship.

Disney both employs and serves the broadest of markets. Its “wokeism” and its aggressive embrace of diversity may have offended DeSantis (or perhaps he was just being opportunistic about that). But the company’s decisions to appeal to a rainbow-like array of constituencies in films, music and other vehicles (including ships) are simply smart business moves. Disney CEO Bob Iger, who succeeded Chapek, may or may not share a welcoming ideology, but he knows what his customers and staffers want. He knows those whom he serves.

DeSantis’s political moves, by contrast, seemed aimed at a very narrow slice of the electorate, one that surely will diminish in time. MAGA bigotry and narrow-mindedness won’t disappear, of course, but demographics suggest it will appeal to fewer and fewer Americans over time.

So Disney is remarkably conservative – consider those carefully coiffed princesses and happy tales of good prevailing over evil – but also progressive. It is prom-like but with a modern spin, perhaps something akin to the group dates that many high schoolers now indulge in, rather than conventional couples nights out.

Curiously, today’s wokeism is really just an updated version of the counterculturalism of my high school years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In that sense, a Disney cruise or visits to the parks can be pretty hip things to do.

I later regretted missing my prom, but I’ve made up for it with visits to Disney parks in Florida and outside Paris with grandkids, along with that cruise. Smitten with the Dream, my wife and I are making arrangements for another such big boat ride next year, this one with more grandkids.

I still can’t quite bring myself to wear those Disney ears, as some adults on the cruise did. But, if one of the grandkids insists, I won’t fight too hard.

The sins of the son

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Joe Weber

The multiple tragedies of the family Biden

One of the first rules of questionable PR is to change the subject when your client is feeling heat. Get people talking about something – anything – other than, say, his conviction as a felon. Put something or someone else under the Klieg lights.

Defenders of Donald J. Trump, the convict, are doing this to a fare-thee-well with the plight of President Biden’s son, Hunter. Hunter’s trial on three felony gun charges, all based on his lying on an application for a gun license in 2018 and on his drug addiction, began today with jury selection. The court action is expected to last two to three weeks.

Trump’s trial took five weeks. It led, of course, to guilty findings on 34 counts related to false bookkeeping for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star in 2016. It was about burying troubling information during an election.

So, now, the media – particularly right-wing media – are having a field day with Hunter. They are busily making comparisons between Trump’s sordid disgrace and the young Biden’s drug-addled misbehavior.

Fox News analyst Jonathan Turley, for instance, noted that the jury pool in Wilmington, Del., the Biden family’s home turf, is likely to be friendlier than the Manhattan jurors were to Trump. “This is the hometown of the Bidens, and they may be hoping for a type of jury nullification,” Turley opined. “This is the opposite of Manhattan. This is a great jury pool for the defendant.”

Never mind that the pool included a former Delaware police officer who said he believed that the FBI prosecutes over politics and who mentioned the Steele Dossier (a much-attacked report in the Trump-Russia probe) and the trial against former President Donald Trump in New York, as Fox reported. The potential juror – who would seem likely to be tossed — said he once supported a candidate who challenged Beau Biden, Hunter’s deceased brother, in the race for attorney general.

Once the jury pool was winnowed down and the dozen members were selected, Fox also reported that the panel includes three black women and three white women, four black men and two white men. Just why their race and gender were relevant was not clear — but, hey, you gotta report something, right?

Calling the federal litigation an “historic trial,” Fox also referred to defendant Biden, 54, as “the first son,” a derivation of first lady. In three simple words, the phrase does two things that a spinmeister might like: it ties Biden to his presidential dad even as it misleads, since Hunter’s brother, Beau, was older and died in 2015.

The late Beau Biden and wife, Hallie, right

Not to be outdone, the New York Sun suggested that President Biden’s visit to his daughter-in-law Hallie’s home eight days before his son’s trial began “could raise the possibility of accusations of witness tampering.” One might note the exceptional array of fudge words there: “could,” “possibility” and “accusations,” all of which raise the question of whether such speculation is good journalism.

For its part, the more fair-minded Newsweek took note of a comment by a White House spokesman that Biden’s visit to Hallie was about the then-impending ninth anniversary of Beau Biden’s death; the president wasn’t there to talk about the trial, the spokesman said. The piece also helpfully recounted a laundry list of rightist fulminations on X, including this over-the-top one by former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass: “Biden crime family boss uses presidential muscle to pressure witness: Joe Biden visits Hallie Biden days before she testifies in Hunter’s gun trial,” Kass wrote on X.

Hallie had been Beau’s wife, but she took up with the then-divorced Hunter years after Beau’s death. As recounted by The Washington Post, Hallie found the gun that Hunter improperly bought in her home after he had spent the night. She bagged it and tossed it in the trash some miles away. After the two split, Hunter married anew in 2019. The New York Post’s Page Six site helpfully reported that Hallie was wedding anew, too.

The Sun also gushed about how this is “the first trial in American history in which the child of a sitting president has been prosecuted.” It further tied the younger Biden to his dad – and mom – with the headline “First Lady Makes Surprise Appearance” at the trial’s opening. We seem to be in for breathless gavel-to-gavel coverage in some venues at least, troublingly like the sort given to a much-sullied former president.

Of course, some of this is legitimately newsworthy, though it’s not clear why the support of a mother for her son is surprising. There also seemed to be little in the conservative-media coverage about Hunter’s graduation from Georgetown University and the Yale Law School and his work in business, law and government. It will be up to his lawyers to sketch out Biden’s not-inconsequential resume for the jury.

For his part, President Biden issued a statement saying he has “boundless love” for his son, “confidence in him and respect for his strength.” He added: “I am the President, but I am also a Dad … Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today.” He said he would have no further comment on the case.

The mainstream media gave the younger Biden’s missteps a great deal of attention, too. As it did with Trump’s trial, the New York Times offered a stream of updates on the case, including one taking note that First Lady Jill Biden was “wearing a purple blazer and scribbling on a white legal” in the courtroom. The Washington Post similarly offered such updates but, so far at least, attire has not been part of its coverage. One wonders if such fashion details may yet come, as hard-pressed reporters cast about for information to share.

This live-update process mirrored the approach journalists took to the Trump trial. If it continues, that process itself amplifies the false equivalence that Trump enthusiasts are making between the two bits of litigation.

Personally, I was touched by this false equivalence in a family feed. When I posted a link to my Substack piece about Trump’s conviction that asked “Is decency returning to our politics?,” that sister responded: “I guess we’ll find out next week after Hunter Biden’s case.”

Of course, Hunter is not a candidate for president or a former president. Moreover, Hunter’s issues have nothing to do with the election, other than that they are arising as his father is running again. Trump’s, of course, had a great deal to do with his last election and his early days as president. Indeed, it’s notable how Biden has not tried to pull strings in the case (something Trump, no doubt, would do for Ivanka, if needed). But such subtleties apparently elude Trump enthusiasts.

One has to wonder, moreover, whether this case would have even gone this far if it didn’t involve a president’s son. “Hunter Biden has argued that he was only charged because of his last name,” legal podcaster and Justice Department veteran Sarah Isgur noted in a guest essay in The New York Times. “And he has a point — there are far more gun crimes committed than can be handled by federal prosecutors.”

Colt Cobra .38, the type of weapon Biden bought, source: AthlonOutdoors

Rather than shining a reflected light on President Biden, perhaps this case should raise questions about why it’s so easy for a drug addict to obtain a gun. If we had tighter gun laws, perhaps, none of this would have occurred. Pols, are you listening?

Isgur argued that Biden should seek a plea deal, even though it might be tougher than one he almost had last summer. She noted that the DOJ rarely loses its cases, so jury nullification may be what Biden hopes for. To that end, one might expect that sorrowful events in his life – dating back to the 1972 car accident that killed his mother and sister and left him, at 3, with a fractured skull, as well as his descent into addiction that saw him booted from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 2014 – will be shared with the jury.

For a full account of Hunter Biden’s woes, The Washington Post did a creditable job. One piece, “For Hunter Biden, a dramatic day with his brother’s widow led to charges,” offered a tick-tock on how the cocaine-addicted and grieving Biden fell into a series of mistakes that led to the litigation. Another, by fact-checker Glenn Kessler, ably sketched out the man’s descents and dealings.

Together, those pieces – as well as others in respectable places — should disabuse conspiracy-theorizing Trumpists of some of their more bizarre claims about Biden le père, and Biden le fils. Will they, though?

As the trial proceeds, one can expect the false equivalences to continue, apparently in hopes that Americans will look on all politics as corrupt and be inured to that. The GOP and Trumpists will sling as much mud as possible on the president, hoping it will take eyes off Trump’s thick coating of slime. The question for the thinking American public is: should the sins of the son be visited upon the father?

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber