The football coach makes millions and keeps getting raises. Everyone else gets cut after cut. Eventually the school will be little more than its football team.

… you get a lot of milling.

About half of Republicans favor higher taxes on the rich…

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Many pithy sentences, such as this one:

Running for office as an exercise in ego gratification may not be as good a thing as running as a serious candidate with good ideas, but it’s much better than running as a serious candidate with bad ideas.

And plenty of low-key humor (read the whole thing). Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves writing like this.

At Baylor University, things have certainly reached a pretty pass.

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They’ve fallen down on the rape front at Rutgers athletics, but in every other way they’re maintaining the school’s distinction.

Since 2009, questionable behavior or oversight has prompted the resignations or firings of two men’s basketball coaches, a football coach and two athletic directors.

Last fall, several current and former football players were arrested and charged with armed robbery and other crimes.

… In 2013-14, the athletic department had a $36 million deficit that had to be subsidized by university discretionary funds and student fees. That was the highest subsidy among 230 schools surveyed by USA Today.

Hubba hubba!

These speeches, I bet, are largely just a string of anecdotes by Clinton.

Figure around fifteen minutes at the beginning for greetings, jokes, thank yous. That leaves forty-five minutes worth of speech. Which (if my math is correct, which it never is) means Hillary Clinton told four to five anecdotes at roughly $55,000 apiece.

Hillary: A Story of Wall Street

Will you share the transcripts of the speeches you gave to Goldman Sachs?

I would prefer not to.

Rick Pitino’s raise this year will be in the millions.

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And turning your athletics dormitories into whorehouses for recruits, players, and the fathers of players, will, uh, continue to be viable:

If missing the tournament this year is the only penalty, more schools will take the chance.

What point does this Washington Post writer think he’s making when – in the voice of Hillary Clinton saying what she should have said about the now-notorious Goldman Sachs speeches – he has her say this?

And the money? Yeah, it’s hard to turn down that kind of money [$675,000 for three speeches]. So I go, I talk for an hour about the complex challenges America faces in an ever-changing world, blah blah blah, do the grip-and-grin and get a six-figure check. You would too, if you could.

I know it’s an article of faith on Wall Street that everyone is gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy. Another word for people who are gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy is psychopaths, and indeed large numbers of Wall Street people are psychopaths or almost-psychopaths. “[Goldman Sachs wants to hire] people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

If a deeply disreputable bank offered to fly you first class to some location where you were wined and dined and then asked to mouth cynical bullshit about a country whose problems are actually worth taking seriously… And then if that bank pressed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into your hands for doing that, for mouthing that bullshit … And then if the bank flew you back first class to the destination of your choice… Would you do it?

Franchement, you couldn’t pay me to swim with vampire squids. Their destructive greed and arrogance disgusts me (and inspires Andy Borowitz), and, as the current presidential campaign suggests, I’m not alone.

You will never catch Bernie Sanders standing in a room as a paid guest of a bank under investigation for ripping billions off pensioners and investors, addressing the audience in the first-person plural.

When mainstream political pundits, like this Washington Post guy, assume we’re all as psychopathically greedy as – well, as he is… And as this observer is… When he makes the same claim that all apologists for America’s culture of wealth inequality make (The rest of us have no considered moral position on this behavior and in fact are simply jealous; every one of us would behave the way psychopathically greedy people behave if we had the opportunity.), he might as well be giving money to the Sanders campaign. Because all he does is make decent Americans angrier.

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There is something disgusting about the spectacle of someone who was already wealthy far beyond the imagining of ordinary Americans continuing to accept what she claims were unsuccessful attempts to bribe her, even as she was on the eve of launching a presidential campaign supposedly dedicated to protecting the interests of those ordinary Americans against the depredations of the very masters of the universe funneling millions of dollars into her personal bank account.

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Notes on greed.

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A bargain at twice the price!

Clinton actually undercharged Goldman Sachs, since she was paid $9,000 less than her average fee.

Friends & Family rate.

… unless it’s inside a university-issued football helmet!

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UD‘s loving the CTE headlines leading up to the Super Bowl. Her favorite so far:

[Ken] Stabler’s Brain Damage Intrudes on Super Bowl Fun

In the same, er, vein:

Ken Stabler’s CTE Diagnosis Put[s] Damper on Super Bowl Glitz

There’s also:

NFL’s New CTE-Tainted Reality

This tainting glitz-dampening fun-intrusion risks making this year’s Super Bowl a kind of Masque of the Red Death, the field crashed by a guy in a red suit and a facemask.

Updated version of the party crashing.

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Despite His Own Concussions, [Merril] Hoge Thinks Football Critics Go Too Far

Kind of a black knight thing going on there.

The notorious John Thrasher, head of one of America’s most corrupt universities, has endorsed him.

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.