​Today’s Republican attack on education is nothing new. It dates back to the late 1940s when conservative gadfly, William F. Buckley, began his assault on higher education that eventuated a few years later in his book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” The book rocked academia and catapulted Buckley into becoming the principal voice for the rightward shift of the Republican Party. His National Review soon became the newspaper of record of American conservatism. Since Buckley’s era, there has also always been something of a theological bent to Republican skepticism about education.
 
An irony of Buckley’s prominent position as town crier for the hard right is that he was a highly educated paragon of the Eastern establishment elite and the very definition of an intellectual. Despite that, his adherents adopted anti-intellectualism and skepticism of knowledge in general and science in particular. These characteristics resonate even more strongly among today’s Republicans.
 
What Bill Buckley launched was reinforced over the years by a series of Republican luminaries such as Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, most powerfully by Donald Trump, and currently by the House Republican Freedom Caucus and Florida Governor (and Yale and Harvard educated) Ron DeSantis.
 
The disastrous Kansas experiment of the early 2000s should give these folks pause if they truly care about their own children’s education. When religious conservatives took control of the Kansas State Board of Education in 2005, they directed that creationism (Intelligent Design) be taught in the state’s public schools as a science. While not completely eliminating evolution from the curriculum, the Board directed that it be presented it as a greatly challenged and disputed theory. One consequence was that Kansas high school students experienced great difficulty getting accepted into many colleges and universities across the country, including Kansas. Some who were admitted found themselves taking required remedial courses in biology, chemistry, or physics. This, plus a tsunami of criticism from both parents, students and state and national scientific and other organizations, prompted the Board to withdraw its edict several years later.
 
Governor DeSantis’s continuing offensive against the teaching of anything the hard right finds disagreeable or uncomfortable is not only adversely affecting both K-12 and college education in Florida, but is also prompting students and their parents to reconsider where they want to live and attend school. New College of Florida students last week held an alternative graduation ceremony in protest against the official ceremony and its keynoter, a DeSantis flunky. The University of Florida is viewed by an increasing number of Floridians and other Americans as the University of Floriduh.
 
Other red state governors and legislatures are taking a page from DeSantis’s “Book of No” and adopting his anti-education stance for their bailiwicks. Like DeSantis, they are also promoting the banning of books that conservative extremists find offensive because they talk about topics such as race, gender, LGBTQ matters, and even the Holocaust. Because these issues make them uncomfortable, they want to prohibit everyone reading them.
 
DeSantis’s enabling of parents objecting to certain books has found its reductio ad absurdum in in a Miami-Dade County school library restricting access to Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb, because one parent objected to it.  She alleged it contains “indirect hate messages.” This particular mother (a) admits that she has not read the poem in its entirety, (b) wrongly identified Oprah Winfrey as the “author/publisher,” and (c) posted an image of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus 19th century screed dripping with fanatical anti-Semitism, on Facebook.
 
Political control through nefarious schemes such as voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are apparently not enough. Now Republicans also want to exert mind control. This is unfondly reminiscent of the tactics employed by the German Nazis and Soviet Communists in the last century. They started with history and the social sciences, then moved on to the sciences. The Nazis even banned the teaching of quantum physics as “Jewish physics” which, along with terminating Jewish physicists (30 percent of the German physics community) from their jobs, plunged Hitler’s atomic bomb development program into the toilet. The USSR banned Mendelian genetics in favor of the perverted “science” of Stalin's favorite, Trofim Lysenko, whose nutty ideas were applied to Soviet agriculture with disastrous consequences.
 
Promoting ignorance is a major goal of the current Republican Party. Their political success depends on it. Dumbing down the population is now a conscious Republican electoral strategy. Keep the people uneducated so that they will vote Republican against their own self-interest.
 
Set aside Republican accusations that Democrats are advocates of the “nanny state.” What red state leaders are doing is instituting the nanny state writ large.
 
If you want your kids to be educated, keep them away from red states.
 
P.S. There is, however, one exception to my diatribe against book banning: consider boycotting James Comey’s new mystery, “Central Park West.” The man who did more than any other American to afflict the world with Donald Trump should not be rewarded for his arrogance and perfidy.
 
Dick Hermann
May 26, 2023

​The barrage of criticism raining down on CNN for hosting a Donald Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire is well-deserved, but only to a point. The notion that it gave the petulant child of 30,000+ lies a national forum is not the issue. The twice-impeached insurrectionist president is, after all, the current runaway leader for the 2024 Republican nomination. Even without letting him rant, rave and rage before a TV audience of 3 million, he sucks up all the media oxygen anyway and on a daily basis. So planting his portly physique on live TV is no big deal.
 
We cannot fault CNN interrogator Kaitlin Collins. She did a credible job, exhausting herself calling out every one of Trump’s 70-minute torrent of lies. CNN might even have done us a mitzvah (Yiddish for good deed) by showing Trump in all his inglorious bastardy. His delusions, ignorance and mindless stupidity was on display for all to see and process. Collins actually did us a service by not only allowing us to foresee the increased chaos Trump would bring with him to a second term, but shrewdly honing in on the cruelty of his policy proposals: he is all for defaulting on our debts; he wants to reprise separating migrant families; he would abandon Ukraine to his pal, Putin; he would pardon the January 6 traitors; and much more from this would-be autocrat’s chamber of horrors. The nation got to see exactly what it would get in the disastrous event Trump returned to the Oval Office.
 
Chris Licht, CNN’s new head honcho, deserves full-throated criticism, however, in having invited only Republicans, including strong representation from New Hampshire’s MAGAverse, to comprise most of the studio audience. Even there, CNN might have done the electorate a favor: seeing and hearing the huzzahs, applause and raucous laughter that accompanied Trump’s lies and doubling down on his extreme misogyny. This might prompt every lucid voter to distance him or herself from these delusional fanatics and their hero. Nevertheless, future forums might want to seat a more balanced studio audience.
 
Moreover, upcoming Trump town halls—and debate stages—should have readily available audio and video clips that refute Trump’s lies. When, for example, he claimed “I never asked for anything” during his infamous phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State, CNN should have run the tape where he asked Brad Raffensberger to “find 11,780 votes….” Instant, irrefutable fact-checking in the form of the Trump’s own words would be devastating.
 
The mainstream media must not allow itself to be exploited and run roughshod over by an anti-democratic villain who labels the Fourth Estate “the enemy of the people.” It has to learn to fight back against this existential threat while sticking within the parameters of responsible journalism.
 
Dick Hermann
May 19, 2023

​The mainstream media, rightly focusing on the cesspool of corruption infecting our Supreme Court, has, perhaps through ignorance of just how legal headhunting works, let the saga of Jane Roberts drift away. They have dismissed Jane’s story as a nothingburger in contrast to the grift mill in which Justices Thomas and, to a lesser extent some of his colleagues, ply their judicial wares.
 
Jane’s work, though, may not necessarily be as pure as the disinterested media believes.
 
Thanks to wife Jane, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts does not have to rely solely on his piddling $298,500 salary. Jane, a legal headhunter (recruiter) hauled in more than $10 million in eight years matching attorneys with law firms. Nice work if you can get it. Few can.
 
The legal headhunting business is one of the most unforgiving occupations going. It is brutally competitive. Losers outnumber winners by several orders of magnitude. The annual headhunter turnover rate is way more than 100 percent. Very few succeed. Among them, their average annual compensation is $109,000, less than one-tenth what Jane Roberts makes. The likelihood of success in the headhunting business is infinitesimal. Here’s why:
 
The vast majority of headhunter legal searches are “contingent,” meaning that whichever headhunter presents a successful candidate to the firm first earns the fee. In many instances, a multitude of headhunters present the same candidate. The first past the post wins. All the others lose, their hard work identifying, vetting and presenting the candidate going for naught.
 
A much smaller number of searches are either “exclusive” or “retained.” An exclusive search is one where the firm engages only one headhunter. A retained search is one where the firm pays only one headhunter a fee (usually up-front) to find it a suitable employee.
 
Given her million-dollar-plus annual compensation, I suspect that most of Jane Roberts’ job orders are either exclusive or retained. That’s pretty rarified air in which to practice headhunting.
 
Do you think Jane’s success is solely because of her extraordinary headhunting competence? Maybe, but it is more likely due to the singular advantage she has over the competition: her husband.
 
All other things being equal, law firms that work with headhunters would be insane not to favor the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States. You never know when you might represent a client in a case before the Supreme Court. Or when your firm might be asked to submit an amicus brief in such a case. Whether any of this would actually influence the Chief’s vote, it is the appearance of a possible ethical compromise that is at play. Julius Caesar, speaking of himself in the third person (as was his inclination), pronounced that his wife (at the time), Pompeia, “must be above suspicion.” Apparently, what was true 2,000 years ago might no longer be.
 
Parlaying one’s family member’s exalted position or name for financial gain is as old as pre-recorded history. Hunter Biden is a classic example. Jane Roberts’ relationship may open doors that are closed tight to the rest of the headhunting world.
 
It may pass the smell test, but perhaps not the sniff test.
 
Dick Hermann
May 13, 2023

House Republicans are once more holding the United States and global economy hostage, willing to burn the entire edifice down if their draconian spending cut demands are not met. No matter that during the Trump administration, debt ceiling increases passed Congress three times without a peep from Republican members about spending cuts.
 
The party for whom lying has become a core principal has done it once again. This time the topic is what is actually in the toxic bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives in late April that links support for a debt ceiling increase to draconian spending cuts. The Sunday talk shows are overflowing with Republican House members spouting blatant untruths about the bill they are advancing in an attempt to undermine the U.S. and global economies and destroy millions of lives.
 
Failing to raise the debt ceiling means that the U.S. will default on its obligations to pay for goods and services it has already received. The Full Faith and Credit of the U.S., the linchpin of the global economy for more than a century, will go down the toilet. The practical effects of this titanic Republican recklessness will be:

• The government will not have the money to meet its financial obligations.
• The government won’t be able to borrow in order to pay for entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as all domestic discretionary spending programs, including those that fund veterans programs, law enforcement and border security, all of which Republicans claim they strongly support.
• The bill rescinds nearly $71 billion that Congress is providing the IRS to upgrade its technology and boost hiring in order to increase tax revenues (and thus decrease the deficit). The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says such a rescission would actually increase deficits by $120 billion.
• It repeals clean energy tax breaks while leaving those directed at fossil fuels in place.
• Interest rates will rise, adding to inflation and accelerating the slowdown currently affecting the economy. Mortgage rates and borrowing costs for government, businesses and individuals will go up.
• It expands work requirements for federal cash and food assistance recipients, which would result in several million families in need being thrown off Medicaid and food stamps.
• The stock market will likely plummet, wiping out millions of retirement accounts and savings.
• As bond values decline, more banks will be in trouble, further exacerbating market panics and volatility.
• The possibility of recession will become a reality.
• Millions of Americans will lose their jobs.

 
This is not a complete litany of the disasters to come if the debt ceiling is not raised.
 
Hypocritically, the bill exempts defense spending from any cuts despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next ten biggest defense spending countries combined. We spend more than four times what our major adversary no. 1, China, spends for defense, and more than 20 times what our major adversary no. 2, Russia, spends. Leaving defense spending out of the mix demonstrates the unseriousness of the Republican approach. It is nothing more than yet another bit of performance art brought to you by the extremist right wingnuts who have taken over the party.
 
The Republicans would suspend the debt limit only through March 31, 2024 or by $1.5 trillion, whichever comes first, at which time we will be right back where this insanity all began. Another debt ceiling fight is guaranteed.
 
The U.S. and Denmark are the only countries in the world that have a debt ceiling. Given the lunacy that has consumed the Republican Party, the best medicine would be for Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling altogether. Of course, this would require that the 2024 elections punish Republicans for their rash behavior so that the only sane party left can get something like this passed.
 
The reality is that there is no guarantee that the public will blame Republicans for an economic collapse. The GOP calculus is that they won’t because recessions are invariably viewed as the fault of the sitting president. They will say that they passed a debt ceiling bill that Democrats refused to consider. What is actually in that bill will likely not be processed by most voters. In other words, Republicans are perfectly willing to countenance economic disaster in return for an election triumph.
 
Thus far, Biden appears unwilling to invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, …shall not be questioned.” While the language seems to support forging ahead and continuing to pay our debts despite any debt ceiling, Section 4 has never been tested in the courts. This would certainly go to the Supreme Court. Best case: the Court would declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional in contravention of Section 4. Worst case: the Court would uphold the debt ceiling despite Section 4. In the meantime, the U.S. would have avoided an imminent default and resulting economic chaos. The administration has nothing to lose in either case.
 
Dick Hermann
May 5, 2023