Conn, who started his law practice in a trailer in 1993, had portrayed himself as “Mr. Social Security.” He fueled that persona with outlandish TV commercials and small-scale replicas of the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial at his office in eastern Kentucky.

Yes, his name’s even Conn.

If you can read this – real headline, Scenes from Postmodern America – without laughing, you have no soul.

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Professor Paul takes mid-semester sick leave.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) will teach a course [titled “Dystopian Visions”] at the George Washington University during the fall 2017 semester, offering students a rare opportunity to engage with a sitting U.S. senator.

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His scholarly credentials are impeccable!

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By the beginning of the 1300s, wealthy people in Southampton, England, were playing lawn games on the manicured expanse of Old Bowling Green — which coincidentally is the name of the Kentucky town where Sen. Paul was beaten beside his lawn mower 700 years later.

Read the whole thing.

Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:

Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …

JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.

Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.

Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?

JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.

I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.

… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?

JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?

Q. One more question about the FBI.

JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?

Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. You cannot answer it, fine.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?

JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.

Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…

JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?

Q. It’s been reported.

JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.

I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.

How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.

Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.

It was while reading his letter of termination, signed by the latest vague desperate interim nowhere man running the University of Louisville yet deeper into the ground. As she read the guy’s list of Rick’s evil evil deeds, which must be listed in this letter in order for the school to fire him with cause and get a forty-four million dollar discount on the transaction, the following exchange from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? began running through my head:

George: You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart … ALL NIGHT… and that’s perfectly all right … that’s OK…

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!

George: I CANNOT STAND IT!

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!

George: (Quietly.). That is a desperately sick lie.

Martha here is ol’ Rick, hotly sought after by UL and paid seven million dollars a year because no one cheats their way to a championship like Rick; because Rick’s a winner who sees what he wants in a restaurant and fucks it right there on the table; he’s a guy whose recruitment coaches run whorehouses in basketball dormitories, and whose program pays the biggest bribes to high school players, and… Louisville married him for it!. It wanted a world of gin-pissed vulgarians and pin-striped dress for success hypocrites to keep the ball rolling, and it correctly identified and highly rewarded Pitino as THE man to provide it.

But now! Now, just because of a teeny DOJ and FBI crackdown, it’s suddenly ooh what a nasty unethical person you are! We cannot stand you!

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I’m afraid Rick is well within his rights, just as Martha is, to point out that these qualities and behaviors are exactly why UL fell so expensively in love with him in the first place. UL loved him so much that they let him sweep up most of the money available at the University of Louisville. It is impossible to find words to describe how much UL loved Rick Pitino, but it is quite possible to look at the immense money, power, and adoration they gladly gave him all those years. Because he won championships, and that’s all UL cares about and ever will care about because it’s Kentucky and it’s UL and that’s that. The next strutting multimillionaire fuckhead they bring on board to win championships will do exactly the same things to win them. Rick knows this, and has a right to feel aggrieved.

[University of Louisville Athletic Director Tom] Jurich’s pay was essentially ill-gotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA Draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue. Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.

… All the sad sad pieces in the local rags ’bout how the University of Louisville was lookin’ so good and then hell all hell broke loose and now look at the mess we’re in… Boo hoo! Everybody’s cryin’ for UL, for Louisville, for the state of Kentucky… Everybody’s favorite current phrase: Fall from grace…

What state of grace? The school went from being a lowly commuter campus to a jockshop. All under the larcenous eye of the ex-president — a guy the school is likely to sue in order to see if it can recover some of the funds he, er, took.

No, UD doesn’t think valedictories are quite the right tone … For a university that… Well, let’s tell everyone what you did, UL.

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Short version: YOU WERE A VERY VERY BAD BOY AND THEN YOU GOT CAUGHT.

Longer version: You had a very long run as a bad boy and you made a lot of money. Your bad boy president and his cronies made a lot of money. Your bad boy basketball coach and his staff and some of his players made a lot of money. You won a lot of games by bribing the best high school players to commit to UL. You ran a house of prostitution inside one of your dorms and provided the prostitutes to sixteen year old recruits and their fathers. Bad, bad, bad. Naughty, naughty, naughty.

Still, for a long time you didn’t get caught, and your professors were silent and your trustees were silent and your students whooped at the games and your coach collected his annual seven million dollars and everything was great. And then you got caught.

That is, like bad boys everywhere, you gambled. You gambled that you wouldn’t get caught. You were Kentucky Gamblers, and this is the only valedictory you’re getting, courtesy of Merle:

… This Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick.

… But a gambler never seems to stop till he loses all he’s got
And with a money-hungry fever, I played on
I played till I’d lost all I’d won, I was right back where I’d started from…

[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

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So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

Okay, so it’s unnamed so far, so… uh… so… (thinking quick here!)… So here’s the description of U6:

University 6 is described as a public research university in Kentucky with an enrollment of 22,640. The University of Louisville is Kentucky’s only school that matches that description.

Here’s our play, guys. Listen up.

You’re getting hundreds of millions from Adidas in a sponsorship deal… In fact, you are

the highest-earning school in Adidas’ college portfolio.

Adidas sure don’t give a shit about that whole whormitory thing! Anyway.

Now, assuming the deal still goes through even though the FBI just arrested their head of global sports marketing, you take that money and with it you establish an entirely new public research university in Kentucky whose enrollment happens to be 22,640. This is an online university, of course… It’s all on paper… You recruit students (the names of students; no actual classes will ever be offered) the way many other online universities do… Hanging out at homeless shelters and offering bribes…

So anyway – this way you protect the U of L…

You can’t say the U of Smell, which provides its athletes with prostitutes in the comfort of their own dorm, stints when it comes to rewarding its currently-in-hiding president. Ex-president.

He and his cronies got their hands on the big-goody-levers at the university (no one to stop them – it’s Kentucky!) and they began to pull and pull and pull til they couldn’t pull no more! And then, in the immortal words of their great literary predecessor, they pulled themselves up to their magnificent height and announced:

And now I shall fuck off.

Goodbye, Monsieur Ubu! It was fun while it lasted! Enjoy your goodies!

The Ballad of James Ramsey is being written as we speak, and since the whole point of University Diaries is to pay attention to strange and unsettling things that happen in our country’s university system, we will follow his saga closely here.

A forensic audit demanded by [University of Louisville] donors recently confirmed that under Ramsey’s leadership, the foundation [which Ramsey, quite the monopolist, ran, along with running the university] authorized excessive spending, including on executive compensation, and realized unrecorded endowment losses to the tune of $120 million.

Yes, yes, Lawrence Summers, when Harvard prez, lost one billion from the endowment, so what’s a paltry $120 m? I mean, your university can lose twelve million in a matter of minutes if you have ninnies minding the till, so big deal. Money in, money out. At UL specifically, the job of donors is to give money; the job of trustees is to take it; the job of students is to shut the fuck up.

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Turns out, though, that even in America’s arguably most corrupt state, a few people find abundant high-level university theft annoying, and though Ramsey probably won’t live long enough to go to jail … wait lemme check his age… guy’s pushing seventy… that’s not that old these days!… he has, er, tons of money with which to countersue, to appeal, to fall mysteriously ill and delay his trial, to become a shimmy shimmy koko bop fundamentalist preacher and get too famous to finger blahblahblah… he might be able to swing it so he can spend the rest of his days weeping to reporters about how he’s being treated exactly the way they treated Jesus …

Poor (impoverished; pathetic) UL is right now floating on this very same stream of consciousness, asking themselves if they want to take a big financial and reputational hit (and when your most recent dorm renovation involved retrofitting the building so it’s no longer a whorehouse for your athletes, you got you some reputational issues) and go after Ramsey and his cronies… Already “donations to the university have been falling rapidly, down 25 percent from 2016–17,” and the question is whether allowing the Full-Ramsey shitstorm to hit the public in the interest of eventually clearing the air (‘cepn nobody who knows Kentucky thinks anything will ever clear its air) will appease donors or simply remind them what an icky place the school, grosso modo, is.

As the University of Louisville’s last marauder-president attracts more and more attention from the Kentucky attorney general, it’s just a matter of time before his story – and the story of his merry band of fellow marauders – hits the front page of the nation’s paper of record. Already James Ramsey and The Louisville Muggers have hunkered down in their multiple luxury homes hoping no one can find them in all the square footage… But the long arm of the law might just extend to that tenth bedroom at the back of the basement, and then all of the Ramsey regime’s efforts to erase its possibly criminal record will have been for nothing.

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Assuming things go as expected, here’s what we’ll soon see on Page One.

IN KENTUCKY, A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF GRAND THEFT

The accession of James Ramsey, a folksy local boy made good, to the presidency of the University of Louisville, was greeted with great enthusiasm…

Babadebah. You and I can write these things in our sleep. Utopia at last! And then – shocker – A Grand Reversal…

… Martha Mitchell.

And now….

She’s BAAAACK!

Time to wheel onstage at the University of Louisville John Dowland’s melancholy air.

Now that the school’s longtime chiseling president and his cronies (some of them? most of them?) have been, uh, made to absent themselves from felicity, the question is: Shall we sue to get back at least a little of the tens of millions they seem to have .. taken? Or shall we, as we desperately seek a new president, say fuck it – We’ll never find a non-larcenous president if we’re on the front page of every paper in the country – UNIVERSITY SUES PRESIDENT FOR MILLIONS IN STOLEN FUNDS — a national embarrassment, a school universally ridiculed as the U of Smell for years of financial and sexual scandals… Plus it’ll cost a fortune to sue these assholes…

ON THE OTHER HAND! It somewhat rankles that Ramsey took all our money and bought four houses and …

Auditors determined Ramsey was paid $12.4 million by the university and the [university’s fund-raising] foundation [which Ramsey also ran!!] from 2010 through 2016, including $7.2 million in deferred compensation. The report shows Ramsey and eight other employees collected $21.8 million in deferred compensation, apparently without foundation board approval.

Two days after his forced resignation last July, Ramsey and his wife paid $800,000 in cash for a 4,200-square-foot home in Miramar Beach, Florida. They also own two other Florida properties purchased for a combined $1.08 million, as well as a $470,000 home in Oldham County.

Yeah, don’t worry ’bout little Jim Ramsey!

“Don’t worry about me. Nobody is more blessed than Jim Ramsey of Fern Creek, Ky.”

Little Jimbo! Blessed, blessed, a thousand times blessed! Just a little ol’ fella from Fern Creek, Ky!

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All the rats are scrambling:

[E]x-foundation officer Kathleen Smith, who was fired in June, [has reportedly] recently moved about $800,000 worth of properties to limited liability corporations.

I mean, the endowment was just sitting there:

[T]he foundation’s officers and directors depleted the university’s endowment to fund excessive spending on compensation, football tickets and bad investments in real estate and start-up companies.

Hate to quote myself, but…

How did U of L get so bad? Just put it together. Just put it all together: The southland, good old boys, football, basketball, sex, and money. Add a hundred jiggers of Kentucky bourbon for a brilliant finish.

This here’s a BIG ol’ story, folks. Hold on to your hats.

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Words fail me.

When you don’t know which scandal has so disgusted people that they’ve stopped – en masse – donating to your university, you’re probably talking about the University of Louisville. Which scandal, which mix of scandals, accounts for gifts to the university tanking by over twenty percent?

Was it the dorm for the basketball players that turned out to be a whorehouse? Was it revelations about UL’s recently deposed, corrupt, leader – a man who took loud offense if you questioned his need to be both president of the university and head of the now-notorious U of L Foundation?

[A] forensic audit found that the foundation wasted money on virtually worthless real estate investments and startups as well as football tickets and bowl games.

It also says [President] Ramsey’s administration raided the university’s endowment – a pool of investments worth about $800 million – to fund at least $42 million in unbudgeted and “overbudgeted” expenses.

And it found that the bad investments and loans forced it to spend money from its endowment at a dangerous rate, despite warnings that such spending couldn’t be sustained.

An outside attorney for the university, Craig Dilger, has estimated losses at $60 million to $65 million.

If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know that along with these two scandals, there are many many others – all of which has earned for U of L the nickname U of Smell. If you’re not too averse to bad smells, you can read all about it here.

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How did U of L get so bad? Just put it together. Just put it all together: The southland, good old boys, football, basketball, sex, and money. Add a hundred jiggers of Kentucky bourbon for a brilliant finish.

… (see last three paragraphs), UD has followed the predictable – predicted – demise of Western Kentucky University as it embraces big-time football. As object-of-ridicule-and-contempt Professor Robert Dietel tried to tell the WKU idiots more than ten years ago, it’ll bring expensive slimy coaches and violent players to campus. It’ll drain the already paltry funds available for academics, and the steady march of player arrests will associate WKU’s name with criminality. The latest big roundup of players – for beating the shit out of a fraternity guy – on camera – is getting the national publicity it deserves.

I hope the WKU trustees who attacked Dietel are proud of themselves.