… not to have said that, Part 2.

(Part 1.)

If you kick him off the team altogether, you gum up the works of the amazing publicity machine that is Baylor University athletics.

… wouldn’t you be for anyone he was against?

[I]n 2014, [Washington State University] predicted athletics would be back in the black by 2017.

That isn’t going to happen. But listen folks!

If all goes according to plan, athletics will post a $1.2 million surplus in 2021.

So relax and pay your outrageous student athletic fees!

Donald Trump … has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.

In an essay on King Lear, the philosopher Stanley Cavell describes Lear’s daughter Regan, who orders the eyes of her father’s loyal friend Gloucester gouged out, thusly: “She has no ideas of her own; her special vileness is always to increase the measure of pain others are prepared to inflict; her mind is itself a lynch mob.” A year and a half into Trump’s incitement of a campaign, this seems the most concise formulation of his character: He has no ideas of his own; his special vileness is always to increase the measure of rhetorical violence others are prepared to inflict; his mind is itself a political mob.

… not to have said that.

Either Lino Graglia is trying to obscure his identity for the purposes of inclusion on this list, or Scholars and Writers for America should hire a copy editor.

*********************

Another name on the list stirred something in ol’ UD, and then she remembered:

… Peter Ferrara, of the Institute for Policy Innovation, acknowledged in …BusinessWeek Online … that he had … taken money from [Jack] Abramoff in exchange for writing certain opinion articles. But Mr. Ferrara did not apologize for doing so. “I do that all the time,” Mr. Ferrara was quoted as saying.

*********************

Pointy-headed intellectual calls the Scholars and Writers for America list “fairly pathetic.”

But UD, with Ferrara and several others on the list in mind, would say that these people, like their leader, are “enterprising.”

Early morning smoke curling off
of one of UD‘s fence posts.

Autumn’s finally coming.

… Strega Nona territory.

Much too much pasta.

Despite his history of conflict with her, Michael Chertoff, “the lead Republican lawyer on the Senate committee investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater scandal,” endorses Hillary Clinton:

[Trump’s] decision to spend last week attacking former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a woman Trump once called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” proved to the former homeland security secretary that the Manhattan billionaire is too impulsive to be president.

“This issue came up at the debate about Miss Universe,” he said. “Not only did he seem at the debate to lose his temper, but to get up at 3:30 a.m. and reach for your smartphone is to me a hysterical reaction. If you’re president, the button you reach for is not the Twitter button; it’s the nuclear button.”

A situation where [Harvard’s] in-house investment managers are getting paid 50 times more than university professors, while delivering lackluster returns, is “politically not feasible,” [one expert] says.

Indeed, the news about Harvard’s endowment [the school just lost two billion dollars] led many to question the university’s approach and its costs. Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan at Flint and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that Harvard spends at least $70 million on its endowment-management office. That’s almost enough to cover Harvard’s $45,000 tuition for its 1,600 freshmen.

… [I]f Harvard had passively invested in a standard mix of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds, it would have gotten a higher rate of return — 8.9 percent over the past five years, versus 5.9 percent with its active in-house management …

E.J. Dionne.