​Fifty-five years ago, June 6, 1969, Specialist Fourth Class Joseph Valesko, Jr. was leading his U.S. Army 25th Infantry Division squad on a reconnaissance mission in Vietnam when it came under intense enemy fire. After repositioning his men, Valesko charged an enemy machine gun nest. He was shot in the abdomen and killed instantly. He was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Joe was 24 years old.
 
In 1980, the baseball field where Joe and I played our summer league games was re-dedicated “Joseph Valesko, Jr. Park.” Every time I drive by the field, I get a lump in my throat as I remember my baseball teammate and friend. It does not do him justice to simply say he was a great guy. He was decent, invariably of good humor, honest to a fault, and a patriot who felt that he owed it to his country to volunteer for military service.
 
Donald Trump, who possesses none of these qualities, calls Joey and the more than 1 million U.S. military members who have died over the last two-and-a-half centuries defending our land “suckers and losers.” His long history of disrespecting their sacrifice and disparaging the military and veterans is well-documented. From his insulting the late John McCain during his first presidential run to lamenting that “my generals” were not as loyal as Adolf Hitler’s and much more, including equating his negotiating the STD risks he encountered during the 1980s with Vietnam service. Trump’s belittling of those of us who served and the ultimate sacrifice of those who died for their country renders him more than merely unfit to be the commander-in-chief. It makes it simultaneously a national travesty, a deep and unforgiveable insult, and a sick joke.
 
Trump’s Memorial Day message was on a par with his customary holiday greetings: “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country,….” Once again, he ignored the heroes who gave their lives for their country and for whom Memorial Day exists. Once again, he projects on others what he himself represents.
 
Apparently, Trump’s disparagement of military service is an attitude shared by his family, as evidenced by the next generation’s biggest threat to the image of hapless Fredo of Godfather fame: Eric Trump. Going his father’s unhinged Memorial Day tirade one better, Eric posted a family photo on X with the caption: “The family that gave up everything to save America.”
 
Pause, while I attempt to refrain from losing my lunch.
 
The utter shamelessness of Trump and his despicable spawn is beyond staggering and beneath contempt. This family of criminal vipers has infected America with their bad behavior for far too long. The time is long past when this entire brood of cruel malefactors should have been consigned to the backwaters of history’s rubbish heap. The damage they have done—and are poised to do again—is unacceptable and must be contained. Removing them from the public sphere is the responsibility of the voters.
 
Dick Hermann
May 30, 2024

​When he was running for President in 2020, Joe Biden severely criticized the $300 billion in tariffs Donald Trump imposed on Chinese products. He correctly noted that this amounted to a major tax increase on ordinary Americans. Add to that the tens of billions Trump sent to rural America to ease the plight of farmers affected by China’s retaliatory tariffs and you get an added burden on U.S. taxpayers.
 
Once in office, Biden reversed course and retained the Trump tariffs. Bad enough. But now, Biden is compounding his protectionist policies by imposing additional tariffs on Chinese goods.
 
A trade war with China is not going to end well for the U.S. Not only because trade wars never end well, but also because of the squeeze that higher prices for heretofore cheap Chinese goods will put on American consumers.
 
While some of the Biden tariffs may be justified on national security grounds, others are just plain foolish. Before Biden’s recent announcement of new tariffs, Chinese automakers paid a 25 percent tariff on cars exported to the U.S. Now that tariff will skyrocket to more than 100 percent. You won’t see many Chinese cars on our highways henceforth. The argument the administration and Detroit make is that Chinese car manufacturing is heavily subsidized by the Chinese government and that this unfair trade practice discriminates against U.S. automakers. Conveniently absent from this claim is that the U.S. government also subsidizes American car manufacturers. It was not so long ago, in fact, that Washington poured billions of taxpayer dollars into Detroit coffers to “save” the American auto industry.” In addition, large tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles are also a government subsidy.
 
A better policy would be to cap the number of Chinese electric vehicles allowed into the U.S. market, with the cap rising every year. This would serve to incentivize U.S. automakers to accelerate their efforts to become more efficient and be able to charge less for their EV models and thus compete with Chinese vehicles. It would also prompt Chinese EV manufacturers to follow the example of Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Subaru, Hyundai and other foreign automakers that built manufacturing plants in the U.S. This has been a job-creation bonanza for American workers as well as the U.S. economy.
 
The history of American tariffs is uneven. When the first several Congresses piecemeal adopted Alexander Hamilton’s proposed tariffs, they served to protect fledgling American industries when they needed it most. Jump ahead 140 years to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930. They made imported goods unaffordable for all but the wealthy, dramatically decreased U.S. exports and contributed significantly to the advent of the Great Depression.
 
Trump, whose ignorance about tariffs (and everything else) is colossal, says that if he returns to the White House, he intends to impose a 10-percent across-the-board tariff on all foreign imports and a 60-percent tariff on all Chinese goods. Add this to the endless list of reasons this man should never be president again.
 
Tariffs are usually a bad idea anytime. In a time of rising prices for basic goods, they make even less sense.
 
Dick Hermann
May 27, 2024

President Biden’s re-election campaign needs to come up to speed fast if the incumbent President is to retain his office. I have to pinch myself when I say something like this because it is inconceivable to me that he trails a criminal, low-life con artist with zero redeeming qualities in the polls.
 
Nevertheless, since voters apparently have short-term memory problems so severe that they have forgotten what an unmitigated disaster Trump’s time in office was, we must proceed to critique Biden’s thus far tractionless campaign and make some suggestions for righting this leaky vessel at risk of sinking fast.
 
A very wise and perceptive friend of mine has the following suggestion for Joe Biden: Devise a series of TV and social media ads featuring people who were stiffed, abused or otherwise grievously wronged by Donald Trump. The opportunities are limitless:

• Several years ago, I was at a breakfast where I sat next to a gentleman whose company had sold products to Trump’s casinos and was not paid for them. He sued the Trump Organization, was countersued for a staggering amount of money, and ultimately ran out of money to pay his attorneys. Judging by the vast literature canon describing similar episodes, there are a great many such Trump victims out there who could be enlisted to recite their tales of getting stiffed by Trump.

• Six thousand people turned over thousands of their hard-earned dollars to Trump University, the fraudulent scam that cost many victims their life savings. The $25 million court settlement paid these poor dupes mere cents on the dollar.

• Hundreds of thousands of Americans died of Covid-19 who would have survived if a minimally competent President had been managing the government’s pandemic response. Their surviving family members have compelling stories to tell voters about their tragic losses due to Trump’s pathetic ineptitude.

• Similarly, it would be thought-provoking to hear from folks who ingested bleach at the urging of the supremely ignorant President, or took one of the other useless and dangerous medications he recklessly recommended to combat Covid.

• And then there are the two dozen-plus women who have come forward with their disturbing accounts of being sexually assaulted by the individual Stormy Daniels labels “the Orange Turd.” Voters deserve to hear from them, too.

• The list goes on…and on.

 
The American public deserves to hear from Trump’s legion of victims who have been preyed upon by Trump over his many decades of conning the public. In addition, add to the list former Trump insiders who have escaped the gutter and now see the light.
 
Political ads featuring Trump’s inexhaustible inventory of victims should be supplemented by video footage of the equally infinite instances of Trump’s cerebral collapses, such as his inability to remember Jimmy Carter’s last name (he kept repeating “Jimmy Connors”) at his recent New Jersey rally.
 
These are not the only campaign strategies the Biden campaign should employ. I have suggested other tactics in prior Rants, including liberal use of surrogates such as the many highly capable Democratic cabinet members, governors and mayors; doing something about our porous borders via executive order; stopping the pandering to the so-called Progressives and focusing more on the centrist swing voters who are likely to determine the election outcome; and acknowledging  that high food and gas prices are hurting families and emphasizing what the President is doing about them.
 
Biden’s efforts to tout how his legislative accomplishments have produced the best economy in the world don’t resonate with voters because they are just not feeling it and believe that it shows that Biden is out of touch with what folks who fill up their cars and grocery carts every week experience. Its fine to talk about how the Chips, Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts will improve lives over the long haul, but getting that message across requires constant drum-beating, not one-offs. He must also specify what he is doing and will continue to do to make daily life affordable.
 
In addition, campaigns usually are referenda on incumbents. Biden must transform his campaign into a comparison and contrast with his opponent. Given Trump’s lies, behavior, criminality, corruption, cognitive decline and innumerable other defects, that should be a piece of cake.
 
Dick Hermann
May 18, 2024

The recent protests that have shaken college campuses are an indicator that there is much that is troubling about higher education today:

• Anti-Semitism is widespread on campuses across the country (per 63 percent of students).
• The mass movement away from standardized testing with respect to college admissions, which made it close to impossible to judge applicants by comparing their high school grades. After all, there is zero equivalency between an A grade from the Bronx High School of Science and a similar grade earned at many other schools. Fortunately here, a number of schools have revived the SAT and/or ACT as core components of their admissions process.
• Scandalous amounts of money spent on college administrators. Example: Cornell and Vanderbilt have 1 administrator for every 2 students. This, of course, contributes to runaway tuition increases (3 times the inflation rate for the past 35 years).
• Grade inflation—the subject of the rest of this Rant.

 
My senior year (way back when), Margaret Mead, the world’s most famous anthropologist, was a guest lecturer at my university. At the end of the semester, she announced that everyone could grade themselves. It was no surprise that virtually every one of us awarded ourselves an A grade. That might have been a signal of what was to come.
 
You might want to sit down before you consider the following data:
 
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the median GPA for college students is 3.28. That’s a B+. The Best Colleges website says that the average GPA ten years ago was 2.9.
 
Independent researcher Stuart Rojstaczer studies grade inflation from news, campus publications and internal university documents. He finds that grade inflation has been a nearly universal trend across institutions. However, it is more extreme in private colleges than in public institutions. And its most egregious manifestation occurs at the elite level—the Ivy League universities. Nearly 80 percent of the grades awarded by Yale professors during the last academic year were A’s or A minuses (New York Times). The mean GPA was 3.7 out of 4.0. The other seven Ivy League schools were just as dishonest. A large number of students who received B grades complained to their professors.
 
Doling out A grades for just showing up or having a pulse cheapens degrees for the thousands of alumni who preceded the current generation of students. Fifty years ago, around 8 percent of Yale students graduated with honors. Today that figure approaches 80 percent. This is ridiculous.
 
Grade inflation is hardly exclusive to the Ivies.
 
Can it be that today’s students are that much smarter than their predecessors? I don’t think so.
 
The problem with grade inflation is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the escalation without doing considerable harm to those students who then must operate under an honest grading system. They will be at a disadvantage in pursuing graduate and professional school admissions and for jobs when competing against students (and alumni) from schools where grade inflation continues. It also demeans and disrespects the degrees of graduates who attended these schools when grades were awarded on merit.
 
Grade inflation is higher education’s equivalent of participation trophies demanded by soccer moms and dads so that, unlike real life, every kid must feel s/he is a winner.
 
I don’t know if employers understand what has happened as a result of grade inflation. If they do, I hope they discount the weight they might otherwise accord a candidate’s grades.
 
All in all, grade inflation has opened a Pandora’s Box that will be difficult to close and seal.
 
Dick Hermann
May 13, 2024

​My law professors told us to forget about ever pursuing a defamation lawsuit because proving libel was an impossibly high bar. U.S. law deemed truth to be an absolute defense. Moreover, the 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan mandated that plaintiffs had to prove that the libeler either knew that the information it published was wholly or patently false, or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Subsequent Supreme Court cases forbade libel claims for statements that are so ridiculous as to be obviously facetious. The courts have also held that a prospective plaintiff must give the alleged defamer an opportunity to retract its libelous assertions. Consequently, the defamation cause of action largely lay dormant in the U.S. court system.
 
Then, as the century turned, along came the Republican Party’s far-right propaganda machine in the form of sleazy outlets and platforms such as Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, Alex Jones’s InfoWars et al., with their unceasing salvos of exaggerations and outright lies. Suddenly, winnable defamation actions surged.
 
In one of the largest defamation awards in U.S. history, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay approximately $1 billion in actual damages to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting after claiming incessantly on his InfoWars broadcasts that the massacre was a hoax. This case was followed by Dominion Voting Systems’ suit against Fox News for the barrage of lies Fox spewed about the company and its products after the 2020 election. Fox is on the hook to Dominion for $787 million. Another voting machine company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox for $2.7 billion for similar lies the “fair and balanced” network vomited out to its viewers. Disgraced and soon-to-be-disbarred Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, lost a defamation suit to two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of cheating. To the extent he is able to pay the massive damages awarded by the court, he may soon be sleeping on a heating grate in the city he once ran like a medieval fiefdom. Hopefully, the Georgia plaintiffs are standing in line waiting to sue Donald Trump for similar libelous attacks on them. Trump has already been found liable for defaming E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted in a department store dressing room, to the tune of $83 million. And, Fox News was just recently alerted that Hunter Biden is poised to sue it for defamation.
 
The revival of defamation as a viable cause of action has been a bonanza for lawyers. However, it has not been a fun time for right-wing media and its discredited heroes. Notwithstanding, don’t expect these creatures to change their stripes and give up lying. Not gonna happen.
 
Dick Hermann
May 6, 2024