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.

Cleansing the past

Posted on September 11, 2025 by Joe Weber

Will Charlie Kirk’s death — and life — be remembered in full?

Young, good-looking and charismatic enough to impress his party’s elders while rallying lots of other young people to their cause, this passionate true believer was gunned down by people he had long attacked as enemies. As he lay dying, a backer released a statement saying he had been assaulted by “degenerate communist subhumans.”

In death, however, the assassinated man – the son of a Christian minister and a woman whose family included ministers — proved especially useful to his party. His funeral was filmed and turned into a major propaganda event as he was declared a martyr. The party’s top leader called his sacrifice to the “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.”

The man was Horst Wessel, a Nazi party enthusiast who was killed in Berlin in 1930, as his party was beginning its ascent into infamy. Are we now seeing what happened to Wessel take place with a modern right-wing firebrand, Charlie Kirk?

Wessel was embraced by Nazi propagandist leader Joseph Goebbels and party organs. A wartime article in the Nazi-owned Völkischer Beobachter newspaper called Wessel “the hero of the Brown Revolution” and referred to his “sacrificial death” as one that “passionately inflamed millions who followed.”

Today, in Kirk’s honor, flags are being lowered to half-staff around the country by order of President Trump. That’s a distinction usually reserved for deceased presidents and other leaders. Also, the president, without evidence of what drove Kirk’s assassin, was quick to decry the “radical left” for his killing.

So, are we seeing political martyrdom opportunistically bestowed on this polarizing young figure? Are we seeing a nobility bestowed on him in death that many say wasn’t deserved in his life?

Social media, cable TV and other outlets lately have been filled with praise for Kirk, leader of the campus-focused Turning Point USA organization. Vice president JD Vance called him “a true friend. The kind of guy you could say something to and know it would always stay with him.” A tearful CNN commentator, Scott Jennings, called him “one of the most unique and special people in the conservative movement today. What he was able to build, the people he was able to organize, was just so large and powerful.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan called Kirk “a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives” adding that “he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts.” Over at The Washington Post, George Will compared Kirk with William F. Buckley, that eloquent lion of the right, saying: “Kirk was killed at the beginning of what was to have been a Buckley-like tour of political evangelism among the unconverted: college students. He also was probably killed because, unlike Buckley when he was 31 in 1956, Kirk was advocating a powerful and ascendant politics.”

Even at The New York Times, Ezra Klein celebrated Kirk. “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein held. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

When any young person – and Kirk, the father of a 1-year-old son and a 3-year-old girl, was just 31 – is killed, it is monstrous. And when the murdered person is an influential political figure, it is even worse. Such assassinations must be decried anywhere and at any time by everyone on any end of the political spectrum. Such a killing is anathema to the free discourse that is a pillar of American culture or should be.

“There is no place in our country for this kind of violence,” former President Joe Biden said. “It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.” And his predecessor, Barack Obama, similarly said: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”

Also, I concede that it seems churlish to speak ill of the dead person, especially so soon after his passing.

But I also fear that in the lionizing of Kirk, we are seeing a far-too-convenient beatification of sorts that serves Trump and Trumpism too well. Will Kirk’s death be used to further justify outrages that go even beyond anti-immigrant roundups, the placement of troops in cities? Will we now see further rollbacks of reproductive rights and the freedom to marry a person of one’s choosing?

Erin Reed, source: Sociologists 4 Trans Justice

We do ill to ourselves as a society to forget or downplay many of the things that Kirk stood for and built his organization around. As journalist and blogger Erin Reed has written, Kirk in 2023 called transgender people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God.” Do such sentiments reflect a compassionate and goodhearted man?

In one interview, Reed wrote, he said the first thing he thinks when he sees a Black pilot is, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.” In another, Kirk called for the man who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be bailed out of jail. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964— and infamously said a few gun deaths were worth his Second Amendment rights in the aftermath of a school shooting. He even derided empathy itself as worthless, a sentiment that Reed wrote has since metastasized into a broader far-right project to strip empathy education from schools.

In another interview, Reed noted, Kirk mocked fellow Christians who followed scripture about loving their neighbor. He scoffed that God also “calls for the stoning of gay people,” which he described as “God’s perfect law.”

As the Anti-Defamation League has written, Kirk promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud and Covid-19. He was an enthusiastic backer of Christian nationalism, “the idea that Christians should dominate government and other areas of life in America,” the ADL reported. His TPUSA organization, the league said, has been a magnet for racists and white supremacists.

“Kirk has created a vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists, who speak and attend his annual AmericaFest and other events sponsored by TPUSA,” the ADL reported. “AmericaFest has showcased extreme rhetoric from speakers and attendees and has attracted white supremacists.”

Will his death legitimize even the worst of his views? And was this really the sort of person young Americans should admire and emulate?

Certainly, Trump thinks so: he plans to bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously on him. “Charlie was a giant of his generation, a champion of liberty and an inspiration to millions and millions of people,” the president said. “The date of the ceremony will be announced,” he said, adding, “and I can only guarantee you one thing, that we will have a very big crowd.”

Crowds, of course, are important to Trump. And with Kirk’s death offering him a golden chance to draw an audience, this is an opportunity the president will not pass up. We don’t know how and when he’ll commemorate Kirk, but he’s almost certain to make a big show of it.

Recall that Trump has said little about other killings of Democratic leaders. In a Sept. 10 video, USA Today noted, the president did not mention the June shooting of Minnesota House of Representatives speaker emerita Melissa Hortman, though he alluded to his own survived assassination attempts and the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana in 2017. He offered no presidential medal or flag lowering for Hortman.

The president also did not mention other attacks on Democrats, including an arson attack at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house, a kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or an assault on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their home.

Those events apparently don’t serve Trump’s agenda as well as Kirk’s death does.

As former President Obama said, we don’t know what motivated Kirk’s assassin, and it’s possible we never will learn that. Will it prove to be a “leftist” assault, as Trump suggested? In two attempts on Trump’s life, the would-be killers – Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh — seemed to have been driven more by mental illness, anti-government beliefs or antisemitism.

Back in pre-Nazi Germany, Wessel was killed by Communist assassins. His death helped galvanize and further drive the Nazi movement. Kirk’s life certainly helped do the same for Trumpism. Will his death now do even more to advance that cause? And will his life be remembered in its fullest and most honest way, or as something to be sanitized, a martyrdom Trump can market?

The last bulwark

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

Some courts stand tall against Trump’s depredations

Judge Allison D. Burroughs, source: The Boston Globe

Judge Allison D. Burroughs was unequivocal.

Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to combat it, she wrote in her 84-page decision in the university suit against the Trump Administration. “Defendants and the President are right to combat antisemitism and to use all lawful means to do so,” she wrote. “Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

But antisemitism on the campus – which she suggested the university has gone far to defeat since the upheavals of 2023-24 — was not what is really driving Donald J. Trump and his administration in their campaign against the university. It was not the reason for the government to cancel billions in research grants to the university last spring, a full year after pro-Palestinian actions at the school had all but faded away.

“… [T]here is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism,” the judge said. “In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA [the federal Administrative Procedure Act], the First Amendment and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act].”

Judge Burroughs’s blunt ruling came amid a flurry of other recent court setbacks for Trump. A federal appeals court shot down many of his tariffs, another court ruled his use of troops in Los Angeles was illegal, and still another harshly ruled that Trump had no standing to sue federal judges in Maryland over immigration rulings they made.

“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” Judge Thomas Cullen, a Trump appointee, wrote in the Maryland case.

Such losses by Trump suggest that even as his overreaches grow, critics and clear-thinking judges are not sitting still for them. The court actions offer hope amid a seemingly nonstop parade of outrages.

Let’s consider Burroughs’s order closely. Along with being notable for even stronger language than Cullen’s, the clarity and airtight logic of her ruling is exceptional. It is an outstanding example of how the courts remain our last bastion of resistance to a would-be tyrant’s vindictive assaults.

To many critics, it has long been obvious that Trump has used antisemitism as a club with which to batter Harvard and other schools. But the judge’s decision ripped any shred of a veneer off that claim.

“There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism,” wrote Burroughs, an Obama appointee. “By way of example (although by no means an exhaustive list), Defendants have ordered immunologists overseeing a multi-school tuberculosis consortium to immediately stop research, … a researcher at the Wyss Institute to halt his development of an advanced chip designed to measure NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure during the upcoming Artemis II mission to the moon … and another Wyss Institute scientist, a recipient of the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, to cease his research into Lou Gehrig’s disease ….”

She continued: “Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have begun the process of cutting funding for research into, among other life-saving measures, ‘a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized.’” Yet another project involved a defense program aimed “at increasing awareness of emerging biological threats.”

Going beyond the irrelevance of the defunded research to the antisemitism claim, the judge also laid bare Trump’s true motivations. Using his own language on social media, she left no question that the assault on Harvard was driven by his longstanding and broad attack on “wokeism.”

Among Trump’s posts: “[p]erhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Then there was his slam at Harvard for “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots,” followed by his denunciation of the university as “a Liberal mess.”

Her order also shone a light on Trump’s vindictiveness, his rage at the university for having the temerity to oppose him, unlike schools such as Columbia and Brown, which rolled over under his attacks. To placate Trump Columbia agreed to pay $221 million, while Brown agreed to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. Trump has sought $500 million from Harvard.

At one point, Trump said he was considering taking away $3 billion from “a very antisemitic Harvard,” which he would then give to “TRADE SCHOOLS,” the judge noted. Then, during an interview in the Oval Office, Trump said that Harvard is “hurting [itself]” by “fighting,” adding that “Columbia has been, really, and they were very, very bad . . . . But they’re working with us on finding a solution.” He further stated that Harvard “wants to fight. They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked”; “every time [Harvard] fight[s], they lose another $250 million”; and “[a]ll they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

Recall that Trump, far from “smart,” was a middling transfer student at Penn’s Wharton School, where one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Perhaps he still suffers still from an insecure man’s resentment at all those folks who were far brighter than he?

Certainly, there’s little doubt that these were the infuriated reactions of a martinet offended at a school that refused to genuflect to him, as so many other institutions have. Sadly, yet another university president — Northwestern’s Michael Schill — just quit, a few months after Trump’s minions froze $790 million in funding for the school — providing another scalp among many that Trumpists have claimed in recent years.

As for Harvard, Burroughs invalidated the administration’s freeze on billions of dollars in federal research funding for a broad array of projects. But it’s not clear when or whether the school will get any of the money back.

The administration will drag out the matter with appeals as a White House spokeswoman argued that the university “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, by using agencies across the federal government, Trump has threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, tried to block its ability to enroll international students and probed money it receives from foreign sources. Harvard will also owe higher taxes on its $53 billion endowment under the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Source: Supreme Court Historical Society

Trump’s assault on academia continues, of course. And, in the end, many of his attacks will be adjudicated in the Supreme Court. Good outcomes are far from a sure thing there, given the deference the body has shown to Trump.

But, at least in some quarters, smart people such as Burroughs are seeing the assault for the petty and destructive effort it is. The fight is far from over, but this round has gone to the better side.

Can “going high” work again?

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Joe Weber

Gutter level politics has a long history, but we seem to hit new lows daily

For much of early American history, politics at the highest levels was a bloodsport.

Just consider how our founding fathers spoke of one another. To John Adams, Alexander Hamilton was “a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” and Thomas Jefferson had “a mind, soured… and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” For his part, Jefferson saw 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, as all fans of the musical know, Hamiton died after Aaron Burr shot him in a duel.

So, is it inconsistent for Gavin Newsom to troll Donald J. Trump by mimicking his tweeting style?

“DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER ‘HOT,’” the California governor’s press office tweeted. “FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS ‘STEP.’ MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE ‘BIG STAIRS’ ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW.”

The governor, a likely 2028 presidential contender, is even hawking merchandise à la Trump. His red caps proclaim “NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” And he mocks Trump’s bombastic self-promotion in an X post that says “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THIS IS THE GREATEST MERCHANDISE EVER MADE.”

And is it in keeping for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, another possible presidential candidate, to refer on X to Trump as “President Bone Spurs” who “will do anything to get out of walking” and to offer him a golf cart? As The Wall Street Journal reported, Trump had criticized Moore over “out of control, crime ridden, Baltimore” on Truth Social after Moore had invited the president to walk the streets. “I would much prefer that he clean up this Crime disaster before I go there,” Trump said, and floated the idea of sending the National Guard to the streets of Baltimore, as he has in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, source: Johns Hopkins Magazine

The bone spurs reference, of course, was to Trump dodging the draft during the Vietnam War by getting a doctor’s note about foot problems. For his part, Moore served as a captain in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Afghanistan, belatedly getting a Bronze Star.

And then there’s Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s jibe at the Democratic National Convention last year.

“Donald Trump thinks we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich,” said Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune. “Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.” More recently, in response to Trump floating the idea of sending troops to Chicago, the governor said: “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families.”

Of course, with his combative and bullying style, Trump years ago triggered the insultathon that American politics has become. Slinging the mud, however inartfully, works for him among his underschooled supporters, who often say he “tells it like it is,” unlike the polished politicians of most of the last decades.

It’s not clear when vulgarity and coarseness became synonymous with seeming truthfulness, but neither truth nor simple good manners are things Trump is well-acquainted with, of course. Some of his more juvenile nicknames for people who offend him include Allison Cooper (Anderson Cooper), Maggot Hagerman (Maggie Haberman), Tampon Tim (Tim Walz), Little Marco (Marco Rubio, his own Secretary of State) and, of course, Governor Newscum.

But does it need to be this way? Aside from winning splashy headlines, does it really help a potential president to imitate Trump’s buffoonery? Or would grace and class sell better to those in the electorate who find the schoolyard taunts and WWE-style crudeness tiresome and unworthy of anyone in – or prospectively in – the White House?

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, source: Politico

Consider Andy Beshear, another potential White House occupant. After spring storms clobbered much of Kentucky, Trump belatedly approved emergency aid for the state. Beshear, the state’s popular Democratic governor, was gracious about the president. When asked about a call he got from Trump, Beshear said he and Trump had “good, positive conversation that was only about emergency assistance,” adding that “he was nothing but polite, and positive, and I was nothing but polite and positive.”

Beshear, the son of a former Kentucky governor, was elected to the state’s highest office in 2019 and reelected in 2023. A former attorney general in the state, he is also a deacon in his Christian church, as is his wife. Beshear claims to strive “each day to live out the values of faith and public service,” though right-wing religious figures have attacked what one called Beshear’s “radically progressive political ideology,” mainly blasting the governor’s defense of LGBTQ rights. Beshear riled them with an executive order banning “conversion therapy” on minors.

Beshear in many respects is reminiscent of Bill Clinton, albeit with far better morals. Clinton governed a red state, Arkansas, espoused moderate positions that many in our center-right country could tolerate. Clinton also for the most part avoided gutter-level insults, preferring a gentle jab to a schoolyard slur. Clinton last year poked fun at Trump’s penchant for talking mostly about himself. “So the next time you hear him, don’t count the lies, count the I’s,” he said.

Compared to the way Trump and some Democratic presidential aspirants are talking, that’s mild stuff, little more than blunt observation of the facts. It’s akin to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another possible presidential contender, calling Trump a “pathological liar” after a debate with President Biden that was, in fact, marked by falsehoods from Trump. Similarly, it was fair game for Shapiro to say that Trump was “obsessed with continuing to spew hate and division in our politics” after Trump called him “the highly overrated Jewish Governor,” a phrase calculated to whip up Trump’s antisemitic followers.

Of course, Trump’s baiting approach drives responses that, even when they are factually on target, seem like descents to his level.

As for Clinton’s stab at Trump’s egocentricity, the president has done little in office but prove how self-aggrandizing he is. A huge image of him now draping the Labor Department not only reflects his megalomania, but evokes the propagandistic self-adulation of the world’s worst despots, men who ruled countries such as North Korean, Romania, Iraq and, of course, Germany.

Self-adulation at the Labor Dept., source: Meidastouch Network

Can someone such as Beshear bring the Democratic Party and the nation back to some sense of civility? Some sense of personal modesty and integrity? Has that boat sailed forever, throwing us back to the days when national leaders vied for who could be more vicious?

“When they go low, we go high,” is how Michelle Obama put it in an address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Sadly, she took a sharper tack at last year’s convention, accusing Trump of “going small.” The former first lady said: “Going small is petty, it’s unhealthy, and, quite frankly, it’s unpresidential… It’s his same old con: doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

Still, it’s entirely proper to attack misogyny, racism and con artistry, along with the savagery Trump and his minions have brought to bear against immigrants. His conduct and that of his Justice Department and ICE against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, for instance, is despicable. So, too, must we condemn his dictatorial aspirations, as shown by his troop deployments in American cities, along with the sheer vindictiveness of his actions against critics. Consider the FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, a former Trump ally who has his old boss’s number all too well and often lays that out in TV appearances, infuriating the president.

“The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas,” the often Trump-friendly editorialists at The Wall Street Journal said. “We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”

Lambasting loathsome policies in virile and sharp terms is different from calling someone “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” Or, as Trump labeled Bolton, calling someone “a lowlife” and a “sleazebag” — terms he applied to the Yale lawyer who served under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush before becoming a once-trusted adviser in the first Trump White House. We need bold and sharp criticisms of what Trump does, as well as smart insights into his character or lack of it.

But how much longer will all this ugliness last? Will it end in 2029? Or has Trump so polluted the atmosphere that it will take a generation to clear the foul air? Can a Beshear or someone like him win against Trumpist toadies such as JD Vance by going high? In time, we’ll find out.

Entering the reality-distortion zone

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s truth-scrapping efforts reach deep

Big Brother, source: Michael Radford’s film,’1984;’ source: El País

George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984” had a peculiar mission. Its job was not to spread truth at all, but rather to insure that history and current information aligned with the views and goals of the infallible Big Brother and his ruling party. When reality differed, the descriptions and accounts had to be bent accordingly.

Echoes of that approach abound today, it seems.

Take, for instance, what Washington, D.C. looks like. The district that Donald J. Trump sees is a dystopian spectacle of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” The capital, he tells us, has been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” along with “drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

Presumably, the president is not referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob he incited at the Capitol or to the current mostly supine GOP members of Congress and the Senate. Certainly, he’s not referring to the district crime rates as reported by its police.

If one looks at the D.C. police reports, violent crime in the capital is dropping. Homicides fell 32 percent in the district between 2023 and 2024, to 187 last year, the lowest tally since 2019. And the murder rate is down again about 11 percent this year, with 100 recorded so far. Indeed, per capita, D.C. doesn’t even crack the list of the 30 most dangerous cities in the U.S.

To Trump, as with Big Brother and other would-be tyrants, however, reality is not what data tells us. It is, instead, what Trump conjures up in his own mind. Indeed, independently developed data is, to him, an inconvenience that should be suppressed. And incendiary language must reflect the reality of his fevered imagination.

Independent information gets in the way of Trump’s efforts to dispatch federal troops to whatever scene he deems appropriate, for instance. Thus, immigration is an “invasion” a term that justifies the development of detention camps and roundups on the streets by masked authorities. Thus, military forces can be stationed on Los Angeles streets to suppress a “rebellion,” even if a major general involved doesn’t seem to see that.

And independently generated data gets in the way of Trump’s vision of an economy now on the way to a “golden age.” When a Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggested that hiring slowed in July and was weaker than expected in the prior two months, Trump took umbrage at the figures and so fired the bureau director. He moved to install a Heritage Foundation lackey who has suggested deep-sixing monthly jobs reports and presumably will generate shinier numbers.

When people outside of government, moreover, don’t sing his tune, Trump argues for finding new crooners. Thus, he now is pressuring Goldman Sachs to can Jan Hatzius, the firm’s longtime chief economist whose views on the economy-draining effects of tariffs mirror those of many other economists. Trump took to Truth Social to say that firm chief executive David Solomon should “go out and get himself a new Economist.”

Reality bending by Trump and his minions entered a new realm with the president’s deployment of 800 National Guards in D.C. and his seizure of the police department there, as well as his attack on the nation’s preeminent Wall Street firm. These big stretches by Trump could amount in the end to little more than headline-grabbing stunts designed to distract us from the ways his staffers are burying Epstein scandal information.

But Trump’s deflection and misinformation efforts aren’t all that new. Consider the administration’s moves to rewrite American history in national parks and historic sites with a March executive order mandating that such sites not “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” but instead emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”

No matter whether it’s true or not, unflattering information is not welcome in the America Trump is making great again.

And this reality-twisting, whether economic or cultural, seems likely only to deepen. The White House now plans to review exhibits by the Smithsonian Institution to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” as one lickspittle wrote. The effort will “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”

Propaganda, in other words.

National Museum of African American History; source: Washington, D.C.

One can only wonder how this will play out in a couple Smithsonian facilities that have been more thorough in efforts to fully describe our history, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian. Administrators may be hard-pressed to find a lot uplifting about the nation’s earliest years regarding Blacks and Native Americans, though they will surely be pushed to do so.

Of course, reality distortion is a familiar tack for many Trump toadies. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claims that Trump’s White House is the “most transparent in history.” So why, one wonders, is that White House removing transcripts of Trump’s comments from an official database – which would allow historians and others to easily check his tortured words against reality — and instead is posting limited numbers of videos?

Writing as Orwell, BBC producer Eric Arthur Blair published “1984” in 1949. Blair was appalled by the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But his fictional “Oceania,” the superstate that was home of the Ministry of Truth, included the Americas and the British isles.

Some 76 years on, at least one political leader seems to be doing his best to make Orwell’s vision a reality — of sorts.

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Joe Weber

But Malcolm Forbes’s famous admonition holds no brief in Trumpworld

J.B. Milliken, source: University of California

Talk about a baptism by fire. Only a week into his job as president of the sprawling University of California system, James (J.B.) Milliken, has been plunged into a risky battle with Donald J. Trump. Milliken has had to be unequivocal about a $1 billion extortion demand Trump’s minions are trying to impose on UCLA, one of the pillars of the 10-campus system.

“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” said Milliken, a son and grandson of small-town Nebraska bankers. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

Ostensibly, the federal demand is being made to settle claims that university officials tolerated antisemitism in demonstrations against the Gaza War in the 2023-24 academic year and that its diversity polices breached anti-discrimination laws. The demand is being accompanied by requirements for policy changes dealing with admissions and gender identity in sports and housing, as well as the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups.

In fact, however, the diktat is the biggest yet in a campaign inspired by authors of a Project 2025 effort, Project Esther, which nominally targets antisemitism on campuses, but more broadly assaults “wokeism” in the academic world. The project was developed largely by Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump and vice president at The Heritage Foundation. Coates, a self-described committed Christian, holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on an academic career until she grew alienated by what she called a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times.

Columbia University, source: the university

The $1 billion demand ratchets up the stakes in the longstanding Trumpist and Heritage Foundation assault on major universities. The administration forced Columbia University into a $200 million deal and Brown University into a $50 million settlement. Negotiations are under way for a resolution with Harvard, with a $500 million figure being bandied about. Still more extortions could well be on the way from other schools under the gun by Trump.

But these deals beg several enormous questions. How will extracting the hefty sums of cash advance education at these schools, for instance? Sure, policy changes that could include cuts in pro-Palestinian academic departments could help foster a balance in curricular offerings, but does cutting diversity efforts have anything but a negative impact? If the administration truly aimed to improve higher education, wouldn’t it be making more money available, perhaps supporting educational efforts more sympathetic to Israel, not imposing brutal penalties?

Already, the University of California has overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring, as the Los Angeles Times reported. So, why does Trump want to humble the system financially? What really underlays his animus toward these schools?

Certainly, part of this must be longstanding Republican animosity to California and perhaps to the likelihood that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election. The $1 billion proposal came just a day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to President Trump, as the other schools have.

“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that,” Newsom said. “Period. Full stop. I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Even more personally, however, one must wonder at the motivations of a disgruntled former academic such as Coates, or of the middling transfer student into Penn’s Wharton School, Trump. Are they driven by grudges, by a need to punish those by whom they feel wronged or who shunned them? Recall that one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Certainly, the rarely articulate Trump’s feelings about schooling are clear from his plans to eliminate the Department of Education.

Explorations of Trump’s motivations are legion. Perhaps one of the best, however, is a new offering by The New Yorker’s David Remnick. As a child, Remnick writes, “Little Donny” was “a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York.” There, “Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him.”

Remnick tells us that Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”

There’s no doubt that Trump exults in having powerful people and institutions quake at his feet. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’ ” he bragged, after certain law firms started making their pitiful arrangements with the White House. “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’”

But, even beyond Trump’s need to force schools to quiver before him, other worrisome trends may cloud our national future long after the would-be tyrant is gone. Where we were once a country that built great universities — private and public — because we realized they were essential to national growth, much popular sentiment is against expansion — at least as reflected by rightist politicians. Hostility to higher education is widespread.

California may be case story No. 1. Growth was long the mainstay of the system, which now serves more than 295,000 students. Before he landed in the cauldron he’s now in, Milliken ran other university systems, getting an early start as president of the University of Nebraska, from which he had graduated in 1979. When he led the NU system, from 2004 to 2014, the university was punching far above its weight, so much so that its flagship campus in Lincoln joined the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in 2011.

Milliken, a lawyer, got his post at Nebraska in part because he had worked as the legislative assistant to an influential Republican congresswoman from the state, Virginia D. Smith, the only woman to serve in the House from the state. Republicans such as Smith had long championed higher education and she served on the House Education Committee.

Enthusiastic backing for higher education among Nebraska Republicans for decades allowed officials to build a university where nearly 50,000 students now attend, most hailing from a statewide population barely topping 2 million. Without such crucial support, the school’s flagship campus in Lincoln could never be good enough to rub shoulders with the likes of the University of Michigan, Northwestern, the University of Southern California and Rutgers in the Big Ten.

And yet, some MAGA-inspired state leaders today are now pulling in their horns in ways that threaten the university’s health and prospects. At the flagship campus alone, legislative trims are forcing the chancellor to direct officials to come up with $27.5 million in cuts to a $1.67 billion budget for the coming year, atop several years of smaller budget trims. Thus, the campus and the university overall are offering deals for veteran tenured faculty to quit early, a move that will reduce the school’s vitality, and officials may shrink or consolidate departments that took decades to build.

“I suspect there will be programs, majors, units, departments, all of those things will change,” said journalism professor and faculty senate president John Shrader, a former colleague of mine in UNL’s journalism school. He said the faculty expected some cuts, but the sheer scale—$27.5 million compared to last year’s $5 million—is staggering. “Not one part of this campus will be unaffected.”

Oh, how times have changed. Some time ago, I was privileged to write a biography of an influential Republican leader, Clayton Yeutter, a Nebraska-born statesman who headed the Republican National Committee along with taking on many other crucial government roles. When Yeutter testified at his confirmation hearing to become the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1989, he spoke passionately about the importance of education.

“We should not aspire to competing with the rest of the world on wage rates, in agriculture or anywhere else,” Yeutter argued. “We must compete on the basis of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, institutional flexibility and personal and institutional freedoms. All those are built on education!”

Certainly, Yeutter knew first-hand about the power of schooling. His training at the University of Nebraska, from his undergraduate years through a law degree and doctorate in agricultural economics, lifted him from the life as the son of a small-town immigrant farmer into some of the nation’s most important jobs. Along with Ag Secretary and RNC head, he served as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative, where he opened the U.S. and the world to freer global trade.

Long before his Washington achievements, however, as a governor’s top aide he had championed funding for the University of Nebraska. His efforts laid the groundwork for the school to expand into its current four-campus system, which now includes membership in the Big Ten for its flagship campus.

The growth in the NU system has been breathtaking. The system’s nearly 50,000 students, spread across Lincoln and campuses in Kearney and Omaha, are a far cry from the fewer than 7,000 when Yeutter graduated in 1952. The university’s growth far outstrips gains in the state’s population, which was below 1.37 million in Yeutter’s time and still barely tops 2 million.

No doubt that story has been echoed all around the country, at least in states where education has been a priority. At least for now, however, the era of growth has been brought to a grinding halt by today’s Republicans. Will they or their successors someday look back on this time with shame, seeing it as a period when they shortchanged the nation?

One can only hope that Milliken and his like can prevail or, at least, show up the Trumpist forces for the damage they are causing and its effect on our young. As a Nebraskan might say, the seed corn must be kept healthy. Today, it’s at great risk.

“The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”

Posted on July 9, 2025 by Joe Weber

So says Hamlet. And the bellowing in Trump’s Washington is loud.

In 1938, Joseph Stalin ordered the executions of scores of Russian officials as he consolidated his grip on power. Figures as important as Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik theoretician and former chairman of the Communist International, and former premier Alexei Rykov were killed side by side. Scores of others were murdered or exiled in Stalin’s Great Purge, as the vindictive and paranoid leader sought to vanquish anyone he felt deserved punishment or seemed threatening.

Is history repeating itself, albeit in a bloodless way, in the United States? Is another power-obsessed leader hellbent on punishing anyone who has slighted him? Is this modern headman flouting traditions of political civility in a quest to quash any opposition and assert his authority?

Consider the actions of Donald J. Trump and his minions against such figures as former FBI director James B. Comey and former CIA director John O. Brennan. Both are being put under the gun, metaphorically, for their roles in the 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.

As The New York Times reported, CIA director John Ratcliffe has made a criminal referral of Brennan to the FBI, accusing Brennan of lying to Congress. And law enforcement officials hounded Comey and his wife, following them in unmarked cars in May, as his cellphone was tracked after he posted a photo on social media of seashells he said he had found while walking on a beach during a vacation.

The shells were arranged in the formation “86 47.” That, of course, is common shorthand for dismissing or removing Trump, the 47^th president; it’s a slang reference that can be found on T shirts. (“86 46” was used in the same way for former President Biden). When Comey’s Instagram post triggered a furor in Trumpist circles, the former FBI chief deleted it. But Trump put the Secret Service up to “interviewing” Comey about what the easily slighted president claimed was an exhortation to assassination.

And then there’s the pursuit of Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who was hauled up before the House Oversight Committee in its investigation of the former president’s mental acuity. O’Connor cited doctor-patient privilege and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to testify. As Politico reported, the doctor’s lawyers pointed to a Justice Department investigation into the same subject, saying it raised the risk of potential incrimination, even though they insisted his claim of the right did not imply that O’Connor had broken the law.

So great is the fear of persecution in Trump’s Washington that a physician can’t open up about a matter that should be more one of historical rather than partisan interest. Remember that little more than Trump’s viciousness against his predecessor is driving the congressional probe.

Recall, too, that Trump’s Justice Department has sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland, including the chief judge, over an order that blocked the immediate removal of immigrants. While the only thing at risk for the judges is reputational, the extraordinary move undercuts the authority of such courts, especially since the suit will be heard by a Trump-appointed judge in the western part of Virginia.

As The New York Times reported, Georgetown University Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck said the suit was in keeping with the Trump administration’s efforts to delegitimize the federal bench. “I think we are seeing an unprecedented attempt by the federal government to portray district judges not as a coordinate branch of government,” he said, “but as nothing more than political opposition.”

Trump’s toadies have similarly targeted scores of others who offended their dear leader or had the temerity to object to administration policies. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, recently put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent,” arguing that the agency no longer is living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment, as reported by the Associated Press. The agency, in a statement, said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting” the Trump administration’s agenda.

Earlier, Trump revoked the security clearances of prominent Democrats. Among them: Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Hillary Clinton and former diplomat Norman Eisen. He even denied security protection to former officials in his first term, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, putting them physically at risk and in need of hiring their own bodyguards.

Trump also fired FBI officials and senior Justice Department career lawyers, especially those who worked with former special counsel Jack Smith on a pair of criminal investigations into Trump. He revoked the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter suggesting that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could have been Russian disinformation. And he revoked the clearances of top lawyers at major law firms he felt had worked against him, denying them the ability to work.

No one should be surprised by the often-vindictive Trump’s actions, even if they fall well beyond the pale of normal presidencies. While addressing a crowd in 2023 at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Of course, especially after he was convicted of 34 felonies, Trump feels deeply wronged. And grace against opponents has never been a calling card for the former New York developer who is still punishing Columbia University for refusing years ago to buy a parcel of overpriced land from him. When he was interviewed by TV psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw in 2024, he said: “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that… And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.”

Stalin’s purges were far more deadly than Trump’s, of course. The Russian seized power in a bloody revolution, after all, not an election. And yet, much as Stalin was able to muster the power of the state – legions of servile bureaucrats — against his enemies, so is Trump able through his lackeys to exercise his vengeful will against anyone who has triggered his pique.

Are we dealing here in a difference in degree, but not in kind? It took years for Stalin to build the power he exercised. At 79, Trump almost certainly won’t have as much time, though his lapdog followers will. We have yet to see just how far his and their virulence will go.

A tale of two Dons

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump appears to have exceptional role models

Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, source: Screen Rant

Ya gotta hand it to Donald J. Trump. His immorality and dishonesty rival only his self-dealing and self-delusion. But he works the system like nobody else, except maybe another Don, the fictional mob boss Don Corleone, who bestows deadly punishment if crossed.

Consider Washington Don’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Of course, it passed, even as several Republican legislators decried it either for boosting the national debt by between $3 trillion and $4 trillion over a decade or for slashing Medicaid by $1 trillion, along with imposing cuts in food aid to the poor. The bill squeaked by the Senate in a 51-50 vote, with the tie broken by Vice President JD Vance. It slipped by in the House 218-214.

In the Senate, just three Republicans showed some cojones. Kentucky’s Rand Paul and the already-endangered Maine Sen. Susan Collins voted no. They joined North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who announced he would retire before casting a vote that would otherwise have led to a Trump-backed primary challenger in 2026. “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!” Trump said on his Truth Social. “He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”

In the House, the only Republicans to stand tall were Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. And Massie has felt Trump’s wrath for a while now. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump posted last week.

Truth isn’t a high priority for Trump and his minions. But some of these opponents spoke uncomfortable truths about a bill that will reward high-end earners with a continuation of 2017 tax cuts, which were otherwise slated to expire, at the expense of lower-income Americans, particularly in healthcare.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, source: Newsweek

“The Medicaid program has been an important health care safety net for nearly 60 years that has helped people in difficult financial circumstances, including people with disabilities, children, seniors, and low-income families,” Collins said. “Approximately 400,000 Mainers – nearly a third of the state’s population – depend on this program…. A dramatic reduction in future Medicaid funding, an estimated $5.9 billion in Maine over the next 10 years, could threaten not only Mainers’ access to health care, but also the very existence of several of our state’s rural hospitals.”

Collins took a principled stand even though recent polls suggest she would face an uphill fight if she seeks a sixth term next year. As Newsweek reported, a University of New Hampshire poll found that only 14 percent of Mainers have a favorable opinion of Collins, compared to 57 percent who see her unfavorably. Another 26 percent are neutral, the poll found, while 2 percent say they don’t know enough about her to say. That gives her a net favorability rating of –42, which is virtually unchanged from June 2022, when her rating stood at –40.

Similarly, Tillis warned that his party was making a mistake “and betraying a promise” in imposing the healthcare cuts.

But just as the Godfather’s Don seemed shrewd in his criminal operations, so do Washington Don and his allies seem in their politically foul ones — or at least they are trying to. “At the core of Republicans’ newly finalized domestic policy package is an important political calculation. It provides its most generous tax breaks early on and reserves some of its most painful benefit cuts until after the 2026 midterm elections,” The New York Times reported.

But will that bit of wool-pulling work?

Perhaps Washington Don and Co. expect so many folks to enjoy such 2025 tax benefits as a higher standard deduction and the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime that they won’t bridle at the pain borne by less well-off folks through cuts in health insurance and Medicaid. Maybe the Republicans are betting that this lag will shield some of their Congress members from furious constituents.

Is the electorate that dumb, though? It’s true that nearly a majority did vote for Trump last November, so perhaps he and vulnerable Congress members can count on such folks again. Still, when onerous work requirements and trims in Medicaid benefits begin to hit, perhaps some Trump supporters will realize what they voted for.

Nonetheless, the Don’s ability to work the system is extraordinary. In other ways, too, he has shown his brilliance at manipulation, particularly when it involves fellow billionaires.

He played Shari Redstone at Paramount like a fiddle, extorting a $16 million settlement for an offense by CBS’s “60 Minutes” that amounted to nothing more than common television editing. Earlier, he fleeced Disney’s ABC for the same amount because an anchor called him a rapist when the technical term was sexual abuser. And he cowed Jeff Bezos into changing the editorial policy at The Washington Post to abandon election endorsements and end its practice of running a broad array of opinion.

All the outfits had reasons for genuflecting to Trump. Redstone wants to sell Paramount to Skydance in an $8.4 billion deal that Trump’s Federal Communications Commission must rule on, and on which it’s been dragging its feet. For its part, Disney fretted that it might have lost a lawsuit brought by Trump in red Florida and worried that such a fight could hurt its brand, its “family-friendly movies, television shows and theme park rides that appeal to people of all political persuasions,” as The New York Times noted. And Bezos is beholden to Trump for business units far more important to him than the Post, notably a rocket company and Amazon.

Like a mob boss, Trump knows where the pain points are.

But, despite these high-profile scalps in his record of press intimidation, Trump hasn’t yet reached the level of an autocrat he admires, Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Recall that Trump said of Orbán: “He’s a very great leader, very strong man. Some people don’t like him ’cause he’s too strong.” Striking a different tone, the Associated Press, has explained how the Hungarian rules through “a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.”

For now, the U.S. still remains blessed with some courageous media outfits that haven’t been cowed. For those in the electorate who pay attention, they offer a beacon illuminating the ways of Trump and his GOP.

Consider the exceptional piece The New York Times recently ran that explained how Trump’s business empire was teetering last year, making it financially necessary for him to run for reelection to the White House. “His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf courses regularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up,” the paper reported. “And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.”

But now that he’s the leader of the free world, Trump’s businesses appear to be thriving. Many consider this self-dealing beneath a U.S. President, but Trump is as shameless as a Third World tinpot dictator.

“The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant,” the Times reported. “The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.”

Similarly, The Atlantic shines bright lights on Trump’s misuse of his elected position:

“He’s accepted a $400 million plane as a gift from a Middle East autocracy that hosts both Hamas and the Taliban, and also may be the home of a new Trump hotel,” Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg said on PBS’s “Washington Week with The Atlantic. “He’s dined with top investors in one of his cryptocurrency projects and reportedly promised to promote the crypto industry from the White House. He’s pardoned prominent Republicans and reality T.V. stars, including a man convicted of securities fraud, who, with his wife, donated $1.8 million to Trump’s reelection campaign, for good measure.”

Goldberg added that Trump’s family is charging half a million dollars to join a private club in Washington, D.C. He’s building a golf resort in Vietnam, a country that sought and got tariff relief, and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City. “The Trump organization is planning to build a Trump Tower in Riyadh, for good measure,” Goldberg noted. “After a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, the most expensive licensing fee ever paid for a documentary.”

So, not all media voices have been silenced or humbled. As a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team called the Paramount capitulation “another win for the American people” and said that Trump was holding “the fake news media accountable,” many others have noted the sword the president’s wields through the FCC.

Trump’s efforts might even constitute bribery, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has suggested.

“With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Warren said in a statement. “Paramount has refused to provide answers to a congressional inquiry, so I’m calling for a full investigation into whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.”

Some independent media, too, have suggested that such potent language is well-suited to Trump and his cronies. Mother Jones headlined a piece about the Paramount dealings “Trump’s Mob-like Shakedown: A Scandal Starring ‘60 Minutes,’ Paramount, and the FCC”

“This is an Olympic conflict of interest,” the outlet’s Washington bureau chief, David Corn, wrote. “Trump, via [FCC Chairman Brendan] Carr, can squeeze Paramount and Redstone and force a settlement of his lawsuit, which could result in Paramount paying millions to him. It’s a mob-like shakedown: Hey Paramount, you want your billions? Reach a deal with Trump. And Carr is his Luca Brasi—the enforcer who applies the pressure to serve the criminal kingpin.”

Of course, bribery – or rather the despotic misuse of government power by a sitting president – would not be inconsistent for a man convicted of 34 felonies, as well as someone on the hook for $90 million plus because of his sexual abuse. And it would not be inconsistent for someone who keeps an iron grip on his party through means any real Godfather would envy.

In about a year and a half, with Congressional elections, voters will get the chance to either show their admiration for the Don’s handiwork, celebrating it in the perverse way some fans of novelist Mario Puzo exalted mob chiefs, or to make a different call. Just 29 percent of voters support Trump’s bill, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, as reported by The New York Times. And roughly half of voters — including 20 percent of Republicans — say they expect the bill to hurt them and their families, according to a Fox News poll.

Trump, who is also a skilled huckster, will now set out to persuade the skeptics — and those done dirty by his bill — that what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own wallets isn’t really there. Will Americans fall for his claims, as they did last November? As they still say on CBS and ABC, stay tuned.

The sins of the past

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s assault on higher education threatens to repeat them — or worse

Jefferson looks over his university; source: PresidentsUSA.net

Founded by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in a state where 20 percent of the population is now Black, the University of Virginia might reasonably be a place that owes the state’s minority population something. And yet, only a fraction of the undergraduate UVA student body is Black (variously reported as 6.2 percent or 8 percent). And, after other minorities are counted, nearly 57 percent of undergrads are white, College Factual reports.

Diversity has been even more of a nonstarter among the faculty at Mr. Jefferson’s university. More than 82 percent of the faculty are white, according to College Factual, with the share of Black faculty variously reported as 5 percent or 9.8 percent.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that James E. Ryan, a UVA Law graduate, saw a need to boost diversity, equity and inclusion efforts when he took over as the school’s president in 2018. In his inauguration speech, Ryan committed to redressing UVA’s longstanding racial imbalances.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, he said the campus community should “acknowledge the sins of our past,” including slavery, eugenics, and the exclusion of Blacks and women well into the 20th century. The university needed to recognize both Jefferson’s “brilliance and his brutality,” he argued.

Ryan also praised that fact that most UVA students at the time were women (a demographic reality at many campuses) and spoke highly about hundreds being among the first in their families to attend college. He warmed to the idea that the freshman class then was the most diverse in the university’s history.

As might be expected, this all didn’t sit well with some alums. A couple of the good ol’ boys in 2020 co-founded the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group that the Chronicle described as “committed to reducing the influence of progressive students, faculty, and staff, and restoring a more traditional UVa.”

The alums involved saw the university’s investment in DEI as wasteful, the news outlet reported, and they argued that it forced leftist dogma down the throats of Wahoos, as UVA students are known. They lambasted efforts to rename buildings, diversify admissions, and spend millions on DEI-focused administrators. Through blogs and social-media posts, they documented what they saw as the university’s mistaken priorities, and they put New Jersey-born Ryan into their gunsights.

With Donald J. Trump leaning on the school, the good ol’ boys have now won. Ryan quit after Trump’s Justice Department bridled at his refusal to dismantle the DEI programs and demanded his scalp, according to The New York Times. He stepped down rather than having the school risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, as other universities have.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in an email to the school community, The Wall Street Journal reported. “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Of course, this is just the latest university administrator’s head Trump or his supporters can claim. Their trophies now include Katrina Armstrong, driven out at Columbia in March after Minouche Shafik was forced out last August; and M. Elizabeth Magill, ousted at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, just a short time before Claudine Gay was driven out at Harvard. A fifth university chief, Martha E. Pollack surprised the Cornell University community in May by stepping down amid a threatened $1 billion in funding cuts.

Trump has put some $9 billion at risk at Harvard, with another $3 billion or so at risk at those above and other prominent schools. Those under the gun also include Princeton, Brown and Northwestern, as well as Johns Hopkins, a research gem where $800 million in cuts have led to hefty layoffs and where up to $4.2 billion in federal support is in danger.

The attacks are personal to a degree – Trump has a particular animus to Columbia, which once refused a $400 million land purchase he tried to foist on it (it’s not accidental that he cut $400 million from the university, or that the money hasn’t been restored even as Columbia largely capitulated to his demands). Also, recall that Trump himself was a middling transfer student into the University of Pennsylvania, where a professor of his said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’”

But the assaults also reflect the longstanding hostility rightists have had against the academic world, dating back at least to the days of Richard Nixon. Recall that Nixon famously said, “the professors are the enemy,” a phrase JD Vance reprised in late 2020 at a National Conservatism Conference.

Recall racist Gov. George Wallace’s assault on “pointy headed intellectuals,” which was mirrored decades later by Trump’s attack on “those stupid people they call themselves the elite.” The attack played well with Wallace’s undereducated followers back then and still resounds with Trump’s underschooled loyalists now.

It’s all something of a replay, though those earlier assaults had none of the teeth Trump’s latest ones have. The broad-gauge attack the president and his acolytes have mounted has been enormously costly. Consider what The Atlantic reported at the end of March:

“But college life as we know it may soon come to an end,” the magazine reported. “Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

“Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to ‘the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.’ In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies ‘an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.’”

The administration’s twin rallying cries are fighting anti-Semitism and killing DEI. The former, of course, is just a fig leaf, a handy excuse for bludgeoning administrators because some students angry about the Gaza War misbehaved in the school year before last. Those protests were usually handled, if not always well, and mostly didn’t recur in the year just ended. Still, they are bogeymen the rightists can invoke as example of dissent they just can’t tolerate.

The DEI assault is more substantial. White Trumpians angry about minorities becoming more prominent feel disadvantaged, as they have ever since affirmative action began in 1965. Back then, President Johnson issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equality of employment opportunity without regard to race, religion and national origin. Ever since then, any steps to give disadvantaged groups a leg up – and to adapt to our increasing national diversity – have been castigated by angry whites as unfair.

So, it’s no surprise that at UVA some white alums have resented the modest advances Blacks and other minorities have made and DEI efforts to help them. To them, 57 percent is apparently not a high enough share of whites among students; nor is 82 percent of faculty.

A third rallying cry among the Trumpians is intellectual diversity in the college communities. What that means is that professors are just too damn liberal — another longstanding canard — and they should be driven out in favor of rightists. That is taking root in some places. Just look at what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done with the New College of Florida in Sarasota, where ideologues have marched in, particularly as scholars in residence. The right sees this is as a model for remaking universities nationwide.

Judging from my days as a student and more recently as a professor, there are indeed plenty of liberals on faculties. That’s likely because liberals generally tend to be more adaptive to social change than conservatives, almost by definition, and being attuned to such change is natural in the academy. Still, there also are plenty of conservatives, and not only in economics departments and business schools. And is the liberal-conservative split even an issue in the sciences, tech and ag areas, for instance?

There are lots of scary elements about the changes Trump and his minions are enacting. One is a very conservative idea — that the drive amounts to social engineering by an elite in Washington — a Trumpian elite — not change coming from the grassroots. It is one thing if spontaneous change is demanded by the public around the country, in various states where legislatures fund education; another if it is directed by federal authorities.

Another troublesome factor is that many of the changes now being forced on private institutions are moving into the public ones. UVA is an example, but not the only one. We’ll likely see more such state universities in the dock going forward. More university presidents are likely to be driven out or quit under the pressure.

And where will this all leave students? Well, federal funding cuts will leave them with fewer intellectual opportunities as programs disappear. What’s more, in some states dominated by Trumpian rightists such cuts are being amplified by stinginess in state funding. As a result, many students are paying more for less.

In Nebraska, where I taught for 14 years, the state government’s contribution to the university system will rise roughly 0.6 percent in the coming year, far below the 3.5 percent increase that the Board of Regents had sought to account for inflation. The Trumpian Gov. Jim Pillen, who wanted the state to have “the courage to say no, and to focus on needs, not wants,” had originally pushed for a 2 percent cut, The New York Times reported.

“We will need to continue to reduce spending and make increasingly difficult choices to ensure fiscal discipline,” Jeffrey P. Gold, the University of Nebraska’s president, said before the regents voted to impose cuts and increase tuition. Students at the flagship campus in Lincoln will pay about 5 percent more.

It took many decades for higher education at both private schools and top-tier public ones, such as UVA, to develop into an international bragging point for the United States, a magnet for the world. That system, moreover, has long been the engine of American economic growth. Tragically, all that is under siege and it’s not clear how or when the damage we’ll see in the coming three and a half years can be undone.

The “end of the beginning?”

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s attack leaves us with uncertainties aplenty

Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 developed what came to be known as the Pauli exclusion principle. It holds that identical particles cannot occupy the same quantum state at the same time. Non-scientists have since broadened the idea to say that no two objects can fill the same spot at the same time.

But what of ideas? And what of competing and equally bad realities? Can two disparate and conflicting things coexist, especially when matters of politics, war and religion are involved?

Tragically, perhaps, we have an example now with Donald J. Trump’s attack on Iran. On the one hand, the world is surely safer if that country can’t now develop a nuclear bomb.

Certainly, Israel is more secure without that. And so are any of the many other enemies of the ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, the “cleric” whose bloodthirstiness belies any claim to holiness. We can include on his enemies list most of the western world, along with neighbors such as Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, as well as Jews everywhere.

U.S. and Qatari troops and staff await U.S. President Donald Trump at the Al-Udeid Air Base southwest of Doha on May 15, 2025. Source: CNBC

On the other hand, all those enemies are now just as surely more at risk of lesser attacks. Terrorist assaults, missiles — perhaps even dirty bombs that could spread radioactive material over large areas — are all at the Shi’ite ayatollah’s disposal. Indeed, he already has sent missiles into Qatar in a failed retaliation at the U.S. military location, Al Udeid Air Base. What more awaits his enemies in coming weeks, months, even years?

In other words, the Trump attack is difficult to assess because this unquestionable act of war could bring safety to many for a long time, even as it poses great dangers to many, perhaps for a longer time.

So, was it a good move or not? Will history look back on Trump’s swaggering Marshal Dillon move as the bold and visionary effort of a courageous leader, a Churchill in a world of Chamberlains, as one right-wing rabbi suggested? Or was this a short-sighted, impulsive and power-mad bit of machismo that ultimately will deepen the U.S.’s plunge into an unresolvable Middle Eastern quagmire, possibly this generation’s Vietnam or Afghanistan?

Of course, with the ruins at the Isfahan, Natanz and Fordo nuclear-development sites still smoldering, a huge amount remains unknown. Vice-President JD Vance hinted that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium remains intact, for instance, saying “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”

That appears to contradict his boss’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program was “totally destroyed” or “obliterated.” Trump’s claim was undercut, too, by the leaders of the U.S. military, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine saying that an assessment of damage to Iran’s nuclear sites was “still pending,” and Caine hedging that it was “way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”

Similarly, the judgments of a couple independent experts fly in the face of Trump’s bravado. Consider the remarks of Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks Iran’s nuclear program.

“At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven’t been hit,” Lewis told NPR. “If this ends here, it’s a really incomplete strike.” And Albright said: “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”

Put another way, we either are now just entering the cliched but on-target “fog of war” or we are seeing the beginning of the removal of an horrific threat to Israel and the West. Judgments by very smart observers are conflicting:

“Those who claimed that Trump would flinch and back down at the last moment, that he is always afraid to take the next decisive step, were proven wrong,” the hawkish Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal wrote on YNet. “The Chinese watched and saw a great power willing to defend its interests and its allies in the region. The Russians saw Iran’s capabilities—some equipped with Russian weapons systems—easily crushed by the Israeli Air Force. By deciding to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump has begun to rebuild the image of a superpower that stands by its principles and is ready to deter its rivals. This is not only important for Israelis, but for the entire world. This is not the end, but it is certainly the end of the beginning.”

And then there is the opposite view of Zev Shalev, an Israeli-South African television producer and author of the “Narativ” Substack.

“Pentagon planners aren’t talking about surgical strikes,” Shalev argued. “They’re discussing deployments, supply lines, and regional bases. They know what civilian leaders refuse to admit: there’s no such thing as a quick war with Iran. Once American forces engage, we’re committed to decades of conflict in the world’s most volatile region. Iran has prepared for this moment since 1979. They’ve built a war machine specifically designed to survive initial strikes and then bleed America through sustained asymmetric warfare. They’ve studied our weaknesses, positioned their assets, and created the perfect strategic nightmare for American forces. Russia and China are waiting. They’ve engineered the ultimate trap for American power: a war we can’t win, can’t afford, and can’t escape. And they’ve found the perfect mark to spring it—a cognitively compromised president who mistakes manipulation for respect.”

Can both views be true at the same time?

Certainly, one hopes that Pentagon planners have contingency plans for all eventualities, though Shalev doesn’t cite any sources for reporting what such planners are up to or know. Nonetheless, even if his comments are just conjecture, they are not unreasonable.

For sure, what is unreasonable is Trump seeming to think – or at least suggest – that his effort was a one and done, something that would force the Iranians to the bargaining table to sue for peace. “We did not assault anyone, and we will never accept being assaulted by anyone,” Khamenei said, as reported by Reuters. “We will not submit to anyone’s aggression – this is the logic of the Iranian nation.”

And just before the explosions in Qatar, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X: “We neither initiated the war nor seeking it. But we will not leave invasion to the great Iran without answer.” The missiles Iran sent into Qatar killed no one – probably because Iran back-channeled a warning about its plans in advance – but they underscored Iran’s intent to respond.

What is also unreasonable is Trump ignoring the views of his own intelligence agencies by arguing that Iran was on the brink of getting a bomb. His own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in March testified on Capitol Hill that the U.S. “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Only later did she backtrack, as Vance more recently claimed that “a lot has changed” since Gabbard’s March testimony.

Is this all shades of the fictional weapons of mass destruction that were invoked to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq? Given Iran’s very real nuclear-development effort, the argument for decisive military action – the Trump bombing – seems far more reasonable than the Iraqi action was. Almost certainly, the Iranians would love to have a nuclear bomb — sooner or later.

However, what happens now is problematic. As even critics of prior efforts at diplomacy with Iran admit, the country plays the long game (see Stanford’s Josef Joffe). Will it now bide its time, making small gestures as it tries to regroup after the blows to its military leadership and ordinance? Or might it escalate to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, restricting the world’s oil supplies? Then again, will it lay low but hit again when it judges the time right, in a year or two or three?

And will Trump soon be forced to realize this isn’t a reality-TV show where the plot unfolds in days and he comes out on top in the end? Will he be forced to kill the Iranian leader, as he threatened to do? Will he be forced to push for regime change, the mantra of other failed U.S. military efforts?

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump cartoonishly posted on Truth Social.

And where would that put us but even deeper into the mud, as happened in so many wars before?

Questions abound. But, eventually, we’ll find out whether Trump’s cowboy actions — all done without the legally required assent of Congress — will amount to the end of the beginning, maybe a prelude to far worse. If physics offers any guidance, two opposing ideas can’t really be right at the same time.

The Big Picture

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