Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton struggled Wednesday night to answer a question about why she took more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year.

“Well, I don’t know. That’s what they offered,” she said…

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In the olden days (2008), Harvard president Larry Summers made do with $135,000 for his speech in front of Goldman Sachs.

When questions were raised, during his subsequent government service, about some of his many hugely paid financial sector stand-ups, Summers donated a sliver of the money to charity.

Ravi Shankar, until recently a creative writing professor at Central Connecticut State University, writes about his favorite activity: driving at very high speed until he hits something and/or gets arrested.

I mean, the poem whose first line appears as this post’s title doesn’t really go on to describe

driving with a suspended license, and …evading responsibility for an accident that he fled from… two DUIs, operating with a suspended license, reckless driving over 85 mph…

(And that’s only his driving offenses! He’s also into shoplifting and credit card fraud and other stuff.)

No, no, the poem goes on, dutifully, pretentiously, emptily, to gush about a double rainbow. Shankar’s a bad poet (you can read some of his work here), which one would think would add up to two strikes against the guy in terms of being given permanent employment by a university: He writes bad poetry, and he’s always in courtrooms or jails. And he will always be in courtrooms and jails because there are quite a few cases pending against him. Plus I guess he’s still driving! Whatever.

Maybe he’s a helluva teacher! Hm, let’s see.

No midterm. Paper worth 50% at the end. I had him for a three hour class on Mondays and we always got out early. Did not give too much homework and we had to watch a movie one class. When it came time for the final I felt like I barely knew any of the material. However, if you want an easy 3 credits do good on the paper and go to class.

[He] missed 5 out of 15 classes (yet if you miss 3 you fail) & had us buy 100 dollars worth of books which were barely used (money down the drain). He liked my poems but was pretentious n rude to students whose work he didn’t like. If you go to him for help, he will ignore you.

Cut him some slack. Do you have any idea how many court appearances we’re talking about?

Great class, when he shows up. Had to meet online a few times, poetry is not the kind of class where online classes are really helpful.

Online, films, missed classes, routine early dismissal, no midterm – No wonder Bernie Sanders is calling for free public university education. This should definitely be free.

Maybe Bern can also look into professors assigning a hundred dollars worth of useless books.

And maybe Bern can figure out how this guy – who was promoted while in pre-trial confinement – got promoted.

UD dearly hopes someone recorded the discussion among his colleagues.

He’s a madman, a wildman, a Hunter S. Thompson right here in New Britain!

A lot of people would just say ‘career criminal’ and drop the guy, but what if they’d said that about Jean Genet?

Despite the university’s effort to keep him, the criminal renown of Shankar reached the stick-in-the-mud state legislature, which has today engineered his exit from the school.

… fraud.

So UD is sure he’ll make a compelling case against Cruz.

An October 2015 email to Turing Pharmaceuticals from a University of North Carolina professor.

Given your company’s recent move to raise the price of pyrimethamine over 5,000% to an incredible $750 a pill, I have decided not to meet with representatives from Turing. … I am also urging my colleagues here at UNC, as well as at Duke, ECU, Wake Forest and other clinical centers across our state to do likewise, until Turing announces a reasonable and ethical reduction in the price of this important medication — a drug we rely on most to treat toxoplasmosis.

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UD thanks dmf.

Long a magnet for rival biker gangs, Waco Texas could see a real uptick in biker-related business now that Denver, site of this year’s Motorcycle Expo, has wimped out after only one death.

In the wake of Saturday’s violence that left one man dead and seven hospitalized, the expo closed its doors on the 38th annual edition at the National Western Complex.

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One visitor to the Expo commented: “It is just wrong to bring guns to an event like this.”

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Gun-free biker event? Be like matzo-free Passover.

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Waco’s last biker get-together had nine dead and eighteen wounded and not in some closed off tickets-only expo space but sprawled out all over the street in front of a shopping mall (the shooting started in a restaurant) and just down the lane from one of America’s most Baptist campuses, Baylor University (see this post).

God Guns Grits and Gravy, to quote the title of Mike Huckabee’s memoir — Waco’s got it all. (Huckabee forgot Tits, which conveniently rhymes with Grits although it fucks up the alliteration. The breastaurant where the carnage took place has closed, but there’s a Waco Hooters.)

Waco’s shoot-out redoubled the state’s commitment to open carry. It didn’t have people talking horseshit about making biker gatherings gun-free.

Time for Waco to leverage its advantage and own the annual Motorcycle Expo.

Colorful writing from a University of Wisconsin sophomore.

Yeshiva University. Baylor University. Our nation’s flagship religious hypocrisy campuses.

Both Richie and Johnny were obvious wrecks during their college years, but at Incognito’s University of Nebraska and Manziel’s A&M, keeping them on the field was far more important than noticing that their mental health was shot. Not only was everything bad they did fine, just fine; John Sharp, one of many washed-out politicians who run universities in Texas and Oklahoma, babbled incessantly to the press about Manziel’s adorable perfectness. He was “innocent” of all the wrongdoing of which he was accused. “My mother wishes I was as nice a kid as Johnny when I was a sophomore in college,” Sharp told a newspaper.

Manziel’s the kind of alcoholic no one could miss, but Sharp missed it, or didn’t care.

Yet what’s most important in this is Sharp’s leadership skills. As head of the university, he established for the entire community the proper attitude, the proper emotion, the proper language, to bring to their quarterback. Sharp modeled a paternal gruff humor, an indulgent folksy tolerance that turned into outraged attacks on the press for reporting the things Manziel did.

So now Manziel has really imploded — not that this means he won’t be picked up by another football team, of course, but he has certainly imploded…

And after all much of the fun of watching NFL games is watching players get fucked up six ways to Sunday on and off the field: concussions, domestic violence, on-field fights, bar fights… Something in us loves fucked up athletes and loves to witness and contemplate the things they do that finally get them locked up. Right now there’s the insanely hyped OJ Simpson tv series.

It is a story that could tell us, on a smaller scale, why O.J. Simpson was the way he was, and what happens when a young man is venerated for his strength and power, and never has to learn how to do anything else.

It fails to tell us any of that.

But we can learn something by looking at the presidents and chancellors of our universities, people like Penn State’s Graham Spanier and Texas A&M’s John Sharp. They lead their university communities in venerating players – and of course sometimes coaches – whose darkness turns out to have been there for anyone to see.

… to jail.

Non-essential? Non-essential?? Them’s fightin’ words.

According to a Senate report released in December, Gilead knew pricing Sovaldi at $75,000 per patient for a 12-month course would restrict patient access by 24% of US payers, and yet it still ended up seeking $84,000 for it. The company priced Harvoni at an even higher $94,500, such that last year barely 2% of the eligible [hepatitis C virus] patients in the US were treated with the drugs.

Sure, that’s much more than one-tenth of one percent.

Nonetheless. Get the picture? Only a small number of rich people get to be cured.

Gilead is so depraved that the Massachusetts Attorney General is stepping in (though she probably can’t do much about it). Yet the story hasn’t even gotten much press, because as Americans we’re so used to homicidal greed.

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Sanders owns this reality. He’s running with it. He’s running on it.

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The letter from the AG went out to Gilead CEO John Martin, a man who has brought his depravity to the board of trustees at the University of Chicago.

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The lovely larger picture.

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Never before has Norman Mailer’s immortal statement felt so true: The shits are killing us.

[Tasmanian physician James Freeman said] “The price [for Gilead’s hepatitis medication] was set at the absolute maximum the market could bear, with absolutely no respect for the fact that it was going to bankrupt the Veterans’ administration or Medicaid – it is extraordinary pricing for a medication. It’s dreadfully sad that we have invented a cure for one of the five big infectious disease killers in the world and we’re not deploying it.”

Well, Gilead needs to make a profit, doesn’t it (Gilead’s 2014 gross profit margin: 85%)? What the HBeAg you gonna do about it?

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Actually, turns out that in response to the rancid greed of this company the whole world is producing Gilead antibodies. They’re attacking Gilead’s profits in any number of ways.

They’re setting up buyers’ clubs to get the drugs more cheaply from other countries. They’ve staged such loud street and social media protests that Gilead has now joined Goldman Sachs in the Most Popular American Corporations Club.

A writer in Seeking Alpha keens:

Alas, in the wake of [Gilead’s] giant financial success, patients, insurance companies and government officials are getting perturbed by the greed. The company has had a great couple of years. Massachusetts Attorney General Mara Healey was on CNBC today (01/28/16) attacking the ethics of Gilead Sciences’ pricing of its Hepatitis C drug treatments. State governments making moves on drug prices would be great for patients, but an absolute nightmare for shareholders.

It’s worse than that.

Gilead must contend not only with a shrinking number of patients, as more sufferers are cured, but also the prospect of implementing price cuts to stop health insurers switching patients to Merck’s drug.

Impending competition is bad enough; there’s also the fact that once you cure the fuckers you run out of desperate people to bankrupt.

Watch for Gilead to launch a massive new investment in dirty needles.

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The company does have something nice to look forward to. CEO John Martin’s retirement party will reportedly feature a chorus line of hepatitis-free, newly homeless people.

The Baylor University Song

Each time a recruit rings I still run
I don’t know how in the world
To stop thinking of them
‘Cause I still love them so

… of her “fringe and vociferous group,” Women of the Wall. Recall UD, featured here in the Forward (scroll down to her smiling and her holding her prayer shawl), at a rally outside the Israeli embassy on behalf of religious freedom in Israel.

And, well, WOW. We won.

(Your blogueuse.)

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Chelsea Clinton: J’ACCUSE!

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin sharply attacked the American Jewish Reform movement during Sunday’s government hearing on the compromise regarding a non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall, saying that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to her Jewish partner, officiated by a Reform rabbi and a priest, shows the extent of assimilation among Reform Jews in the United States.

“… [A] man who calls himself a reform rabbi is standing there with a priest and weds Hillary Clinton’s daughter, and no one condemns it, thereby legitimizing it.”  

This local editorial says all the right things about the budget-stressed state of Wyoming giving millions to university football and slashing millions from public education. (See this post for details.)

We don’t believe for one moment that this money is going to improve UW’s chances of having a winning football team – which really is the goal behind this. At best, it keeps pace with other schools in the Mountain West Conference. And it does nothing to ease the impacts of UW’s bigger problems: Quality athletes are not going to play in Laramie, at least not consistently, when they have options with better amenities and climates.

This is a myth, a dream, that UW’s athletics department and its supporters peddle. It is time to move on to a smaller conference and perhaps even a different division – at least in football.

True, there is some value in seeing athletics as the “front porch” of the university. But in times of fiscal crisis, it is unwise to toss millions at trivialities when cuts are being made that hurt the public schools, and UW’s academic programs, and the state’s poor.

The editorial board even tries to make the argument that sports are less serious than study.

Athletics are an extravagance; academics are not.

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Wyoming is just like Oklahoma, where the University of Oklahoma’s president is yet again explaining to stupid us (“the public misunderstands”) that we shouldn’t even ask the question posed in this Tulsa World headline:

HOW DO [OU’S FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL COACHES] MAKE $8 MILLION AT A SCHOOL FACING A $20 MILLION BUDGET CUT?

We shouldn’t even ask this, because the money’s not coming from the state and hell that’s how people spend their money in Oklahoma! They don’t give a shit about whatever else the university does. What else does UO do? Don’t ask! Don’t even ask!

Boren misunderstands that the real question isn’t about state or non-state funds. Oklahoma and Wyoming are two of our most happily and severely concussed states. They don’t cotton much, round them parts, to thinking.