Transmillennial

"Mr. President, we may have a problem..."

Mostly because out-of-state school choice hucksters had pissed me off, I testified last week on LB1202, Lou-Ann Linehan's School Choice Scholarship bill. This is what I said. My name is Gerard Harbison, and I teach at the government university about eight blocks north of here (laughs) but I'm speaking only for myself. I haven't been flown here by a lobbying group. I haven't served as a political appointee of the Trump administration, like some of our previous speakers. But I did put three children through Lincoln Public Schools, and I have a grandson in public school in Omaha. I want to talk about one thing private schools can do that LPS cannot: discriminate. In 2017, Joshua Payne-Elliot, a social studies teacher at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, married a male teacher at another Catholic school, Brebeuf Jesuit preparatory school. Under instructions from the archdiocese of Indianapolis, cathedral fired Payne-Elliott in 2019 . Brebeuf refused to fire the oth...

So this does not violate Facebook community standards. Nor does this violate Facebook community standards. This was a comment on a story about one of Trump's sexual assault victims. You guessed it; it doesn't violate community standards. But you better not make fun of the scientology cult! This got me a 24 hour ban. Pretty funny, coming from a clam. But maybe the thetans made you do it. I am in the process of removing myself from Facebook. It makes me feel dirty.

This morning some Trumpkin yahoo sent me a link to this story . The few reporters who chose to attend huddled under umbrellas, with ponchos over their computers. Many others chose to remain at a hotel press filing center. At one point during his 10-minute speech, Trump made light of the driving rain in a cool 55 degrees Fahrenheit, telling one guest under an overhang, "You look so comfortable up there under shelter as we are getting drenched." The aforementioned right-wing rag provided a link to Sky News . The Sky news video is heavily cropped, but I found the original. Better yet, I found the official White House video. The quoted sentence is at 6:55 into the video. There's something very off, though. Where is the driving, drenching rain? The President's hair is dry at the very beginning of the video, right through to the end. There is no water dripping off the leaves. There are a few raindrops on Trump''s coat, towards the middle of the...

...has, it turns out a long history of jackassery. Way back in the 1990s, as Texas Health Commissioner, he was fired for "racially insensitive comments", caught on tape ... Archer can be heard referring several times to Montgomery's race and said, "you are fair (skinned) as a black woman, you get certain privileges in white culture that others don't get for that." Archer can be heard making references to "lynching" and suggesting Montgomery used her brain to advance her career and "that's what white people do." Before that he suggested hispanic teenagers want to be pregnant . This article summarizes his bizarre behavior in the job. Ignoring all this, Fortenberry took this guy on as chief-of-staff . And now he's back threatening my UNL faculty colleague Ari Kohen for his private behavior, and even wasting the Chancellor's time compaining about his Facebook 'likes'. And obliquely threatening to set the internet d...

The newly 'recognized' Turning Point USA UNL chapter have immediately put paid to speculation they might be any different than the other chapters of the alt-right campus freak show, by recruiting the unsavory Benny Johnson as their first speaker. Benjamin Arthur Johnson graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009. Although it's been variously reported he also has a degree in Organic Chemistry, U. Iowa seems to think he only graduated in Psychology . Since he was an honors student, I hoped to find the thesis he is supposed to have written; running that through a plagiarism checker might be a laugh riot. Unfortunately, it seems not to be in their digital repository. Johnson commenced his career with a listicle-laced gala performance of promiscuous plagiarism at Buzzfeed, which led to his firing. He stole from no fewer than 41 articles. Then, after a brief break to let the scandal die down, he got a job at IJR Review . The man has no shame; a hate click, he claims,...

Last October 1, a friend and colleague who inhabits the office next to mine, and who happens to be, ahem, somewhat right of center -- but I like him anyway, even though he's a Yankees fan -- banged on my office door, and said I'd been called out on Coby Mach's radio show, which is a low-rent local version of Rush Limbaugh. I think his exact words were 'what have you done now?' I was mystified. He said a 'retired airforce general' had reported me to the FBI, CIA (?!) and Board of Regents. I asked why? He said I had issued death threats to students. He recited some of what he'd heard, and damn it, it was the Mikado! Yes, this vicious little piece by society offenders William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. And then I realized. it was my version of "As some day it may happen.." I posted on my Facebook page two weeks previously. Apparently some right-wing loon has been patrolling my facebook page and thinks W.S. Gilbert was a terroris...