“Hm…. Yes? … No? … Hmmmmm…. I just don’t know!….”

And – hint! – you haven’t drawn upon your ever-reliable fraternity system in a long time. Make that your next move.

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And it looks as though USC’s long, happy relationship with the now-suspended Mark Ridley-Thomas will shine a bright light on the institution for some time to come.

No kidding.

[W]hy the push for a special [legislative] session now? Well, for one it makes for good politics. For most Wyoming lawmakers, there are few downsides to a public fight with the federal government, regardless of whether the fight is performative. But that performance isn’t free: Lawmakers will spend taxpayer money gathering in Cheyenne. And they’ll focus on bills that will likely have little impact, all the while avoiding the existing structural issues facing our state.

Because the special session won’t solve the problem of young people fleeing out state for more opportunities elsewhere. It won’t solve the problem of our overreliance on the energy industry to fund services like public schools and health care. It won’t solve the problem of shrinking small towns, an education system that’s not fiscally sustainable or our state’s persistently high suicide rate.

Can these claims be true? Longtime observers of SCSU know it’s a basket case; how could anyone have accomplished these remarkable … accomplishments there?

Hey, maybe the dude did… But if I were reviewing his self-presentation at West Liberty University, I’d vote against making him president…

But they did; they did make him president. And now they’re stuck with this disgraceful career plagiarist as the head of the school.

Absolutely best quote so far from the Dorian Abbott story. But I’ll bet someone will top it. Stay tuned.

In this 2010 photograph, entrepreneur Shawn Baldwin, 2015 recipient of the Boy Scouts of America Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award, stands next to Michael Milken. Milken was sentenced to ten years and fined 600 mill for violating securities laws, while Baldwin was just sentenced to seventeen years for doing a Bernie Madoff.

UD thinks it’s always nice to get a sense of the real people behind these posed, expensive suit, MBA-type photos…. I mean, who are these people, really? Once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me!

Sing a song of dead men,
Stomachs full of rye.
Four and twenty freshmen
Baked in a Phi.

When the Phi’s indicted
The killers start to sing:
College life would be so dull
Without some poisoning.

… “exonerated.”

How gracious and fine of the University of Michigan!

And now nothing remains but for Professor Sheng to leave UM, as rapidly as possible, for a legitimate school.

UD‘s walk today took her to the Monocacy Aqueduct, where she madly enjoyed the perfect cloudless afternoon along the C&O Canal.

The link up there shows you the aqueduct; her own image is a natural charcoal – a towpath shadow that looks like a butterfly chair seen from behind.

“Now whether he blinks or not, I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know whether Bannon is trying to martyr himself; I don’t know if Steve Bannon thinks that twelve months in the pokey is time to get in good shape and begin the next chapter of his career and write a book, like others have done in the fascist movement…”

Steve Schmidt, on The Beat with Ari Melber

Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asks whether the latest dead eighteen year old – this one at the University of Kentucky, a grody football school whose frat system is exactly as disgusting as you’d imagine – might finally shame the nation into shutting down its collegiate slaughterhouses.

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UD thanks Mondo for telling her about the latest.

I prefer not to, says the football coach at Washington State, and haggadah tell you (Passover pun), UD‘s always had a soft spot for silent machos who canter off and everyone watches them go and says What a man and No one will ever know why and Miss Ellie’s daddy he owns the biggest copper mine in the state and everybody knows she wanted to marry him but.

Nick Rolovich gave up fifteen million dollars and the wild adulation of the entire Evergreen State because he refused to get vaccinated because… because none of your goddamn business is because. Fine. Nuff said.

Behind this flat descriptive sentence lie the breathtaking, deathtaking statistics of America’s most murderous state, Louisiana, where shooting, especially among the very young, is happening pretty much all the time, pretty much everywhere. Two fatal shootings within a week on one American university campus – Grambling State, with today’s killing at a homecoming party – tells you how normalized it’s all become. Soon this stuff won’t make the news at all.

Grambling’s not far from Shreveport, if you want to get a quick sense of the world we’re talking about here. Shreveport’s already got among the highest gun violence rates in the nation; this year, they’ve gone UP eleven percent from the city’s rate last year.

Today’s Grambling killing happened at two AM…? The shooter wasn’t a student…? You might say there’s not much one can do about this – but there is, actually. Why in the world would you let your kid go to school at a place where they let campus parties go til two AM; and why, given the riot of gun violence in Louisiana, would the school not check i.d.s and weaponry at campus gatherings?

The school claims it had all sorts of security there. And that tells you that not only is it dumb enough to sponsor large late-night parties in a very dangerous neighborhood, but it’s also incompetent.

Don’t let your kid go to Grambling.

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Update: You see the … fatal disconnect in the president’s remarks: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” Man seems to think he’s in dear old Arcadia rather than dear old murder capital USA. With that degree of denial at the very top, we shouldn’t be surprised at these outcomes.

“As an alumnus, I’m embarrassed,” said Edmond Davis, who was visiting his alma mater with his wife. “Deeply embarrassed. It saddens me.”

Yes. Your school can’t hold a homecoming without a fatal shooting. You should take the school’s president by the shoulders – firmly – and say as directly as possible Grambling is unfortunately located in the heart of the heart of American homicide. If you want the school to survive, you are going to have to make it as much of an armed camp as possible. And by the way, doesn’t the school have trustees? Do they do anything?

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“We must … accept that the issues we face with gun violence are non-students who come to our great institution and cause harm to students and other non-students who are casually enjoying themselves,” [Grambling’s student government president] wrote. “We must realize that at some point we must stop allowing outside individuals to pass through checkpoints without university clearance.” 

Scandalous that this obvious necessity occurs to students but not university leadership.

Doesn’t Mount Holyoke think it’s time to take her faculty page down?

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Update: Done.