Me @TheWeek: Elizabeth Warren's polarizing plan to make college free

My latest:

Today's rising student debt is largely a result of policy choices. The short version of the story is that student debt is rising because college tuition is rising — and college tuition is rising, in large part, because state legislatures across the country have slowly been abandoning their commitment to fund public colleges and universities.

The Great Recession is one of the villains of this story; it prompted legislatures to cut their funding commitments to higher education, and for the most part, those cuts were never restored. According to one analysis, state funding for public colleges and universities in 2018 was $7 billion below its 2008 levels — and that is after adjusting for inflation. One way public four-year institutions have stayed in business is by raising tuition by an average of 36 percent during that decade. It is no coincidence that student debt in the United States quadrupled, from $345 billion to nearly $1.4 trillion, between 2004 and 2017.

Today's young students aren't less responsible than their predecessors. They're just getting far less help.

Me @TheWeek: Reacting to the Mueller report

My take:

The Trump White House is just a high-level version of a sleazy pawn shop where the owner traffics in stolen goods. Everybody knows the owner is profiting from crime — including the owner — but as long as as he keeps his fingerprints off the precise moment the goods are stolen, he's allowed to keep making his living off the fruits of other people's wrongdoing. 

It may not be technically illegal. But it sure isn't right.

Please read the whole thing!

John Bolton's purple prose

Man, this is some speechwriting from John Bolton, announcing new sanctions on Cuba.

I have expected him to continue: "Who knows what evil lurks within? ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS!"

Mueller preview: Maybe the president is innocent. So why does he keep acting like a thug?

There’s a reason so many people think Donald Trump is corrupt: He keeps giving them reason.

On Thursday, a redacted version of the Mueller report will be released to the public. Perhaps the president is right: Maybe the document will exonerate him of accusations of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election, and maybe it will further offer reason to believe that Attorney General William Barr was correct when he decided not to pursue allegations the president obstructed justice by firing then-FBI Director James Comey.

It could happen.

But if that is the case, Trump and Barr have done the worst possible job laying the ground for the president’s innocence. Instead, they’ve seemingly done everything possible to make the release of the report look like a cover-up.

For example: The principles of transparency would usually suggest that the public — or, at least, the media — have a chance to look at the report and begin to digest its findings before Barr holds his press conference.

But that’s not the plan. As of Wednesday evening, Barr’s press conference is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. ET. The report is scheduled to come out 90 minutes later, at 11 a.m. ET. That means the attorney general’s time before the press is not designed to enable accountability or to answer any tough questions that arise from reading the report itself — it is, instead, a preemptive strike, a chance to start spinning the public before the public has a chance to see and hear the facts for itself.




The release of the Mueller report, in other words, seems expertly designed to raise suspicions instead of calm them.

It doesn’t help that Barr has taken weeks to release the report. It doesn’t help that the attorney general has been giving the Trump Administration a sneak preview of its findings. It doesn’t help that the president, who has spent weeks proclaiming Mueller’s investigation found him innocent, has in recent days waged an angry campaign criticizing its release. And it won’t help if the report released to the public appears to be overly redacted.

It’s reasonable to ask: Are these the actions of an innocent man running an honest administration?

If the president has somehow avoided committing a crime during the last two years, congratulations to him. But that falls short of the standard we typically expect of our leaders: We don’t expect them merely to avoid transgression, but also to avoid the very appearance of avoiding transgression. The reason is simple: Even the appearance of wrongdoing shakes the faith of citizens in their leaders and government. Americans don’t have to believe that their leaders are good men and women; they do deserve not to have to wonder constantly if those leaders are on the wrong side of the law.

No, it’s not always the case that where there is smoke, there is fire. But the president is constantly enveloped in a smog of lies: As of March 17, he had told more than 9,000 documented lies since ascending to the Oval Office.

With regard to the Mueller inquiry: He lied during the campaign about his business ties with Russia. He orchestrated a false press release about his son’s meetings with Russian officials. He tried suggesting there were listening devices in the Oval Office when he met Comey — there weren’t. At every step of public inquiry and official investigation, he has thrown a bundle of untruth in the path of those seeking the truth.

Simply put, he keeps acting like a thug. If the Mueller report does exonerate Donald Trump, that’s too bad. Sure, it’ll keep him out of court. But the public will keep having every reason to believe in his corruption.

Netflix Queue: The Highwaymen

Three thoughts about Netflix's The Highwaymen coming up after the trailer...

 

 • This is a Bonnie and Clyde movie that, for the most part, is lacking in Bonnie and Clyde: The filmmakers figure you've already seen the classic movie and there's no reason to compete with that. So it's the case that we literally don't see fully the faces of our fugitives until the very last seconds before they're ambushed by Texas lawmen in a hail of bullets. The story concentrates, in this case, on the hunters, played by a laconic Kevin Costner and his sidekick Woody Harrelson, playing Woody Harrelson.

 • Structurally, it plays out as a cross between the fantastic Hell or High Water and Unforgiven, but without having quite as much on its mind as either of those movies. Maybe the most potent theme is about how thrall to celebrity can turn regular people into monsters. After Bonnie and Clyde are killed, local townspeople are shown in a near-riot situation, plucking souvenirs from the criminals' bodies. 20,000 people attended Bonnie's funeral, we're told at the end of the movie; 15,000 went to Clyde's. The overall outlook borders on fascist: The masses are unruly and easily thrilled; the leaders are corrupt and phony. The only hope? Men with guns and blood on their hands.

• Still, it's a reasonable evening's entertainment. I realized, watching it, that you don't really find quiet adult-oriented crime dramas like this at the multiplex anymore — they're either indie movies (like Hell or High Water) or they're shunted off to cable channels and streaming services, as is the case here. Unforgiven, meanwhile, grossed $159 million in 1992 — kind of a big deal, and good for 11th for the year at the box office. Maybe that's possible today, but I kind of doubt it. Too bad.

FilmStruck is avenged! Long live Criterion Channel!

Criterion Channel finally launched today, a replacement for the late lamented FilmStruck. I've already watched my first movie. A few thoughts after the trailer...
 

 • Since FilmStruck's demise, I've made a concerted effort to build up my DVD collection with classic movies. I'm glad that Criterion is here, but I don't trust streaming services to have many of the movies I want when I want them. Big corporations that own the rights to those movies have already demonstrated that letting the public have access is a lesser concern, profit-wise, than promoting their more recent catalog. So I'm glad to have Criterion to expand and deepen my movie education. But I'm still buying DVDs.

 • My first movie on Criterion? Drive a Crooked Road, a tight little movie from the noir collection. It reminded me of Drive, only with Mickey Rooney (!?) in the Ryan Gosling role, and if everybody spent Drive talking about how short Ryan Gosling is. Also fun: It was written by Blake Edwards, whom I associate with kinda vulgar sex farces from the 1970s and '80s.

 • Good news on the kid front: Criterion has Godzilla movies. My son is very happy.

 

End of an era at the Lawrence Journal-World.

My motto is: "Journalism will never love you back." But I can't remember a time when I didn't love news and newspapers. Still do. I love my hometown paper, the Lawrence Journal-World.

The journalists of the LJW will be moving out of their beautiful downtown space by the end of the month, opting for smaller digs in North Lawrence at an old outlet mall. I was on staff in 2001 when we moved into this office - which had previously been the city's post office.

So I'm kind of sad about the move. I worked at LJW from 2000-2007, got to be a reporter, an editor, and the paper's first blogger. We shared the digs with 6News, a local cable TV outlet. I learned how to be a TV reporter, too.

I had so much fun. I think part of it was being the right age - late 20s and early 30s - but some of it was that it was the last possible moment to be optimistic and hopeful about working for a newspaper, as opposed to grimly determined.

The Great Recession set in shortly after I left, and newspapers haven't been the same since.

The Journal-World has passed to corporate ownership. The staff is smaller. It no longer prints its own papers. Things are different. But the folks left behind are still working like hell to cover their community.

They're led by editor and publisher Chad Lawhorn, who takes his share of criticism and jokes in the community, but who has worked like hell himself to keep the paper covering important stories in the community. The city doesn't know how lucky it is to have him.

This is the point where it's tempting to mark the moment with the -30-, but the Journal-World isn't ending -- just its residence at a particular spot downtown. The journalists are still working like hell. The headlines seen here? They were produced in different locations.

So. A moment of sadness perhaps. Time to acknowledge that times change, that the industry has changed, and that you can't go home again.

It was a great place to work. But there's still work to be done. So I wish my friends and former colleagues the best of luck in their new digs. There's news to cover!

(Many thanks to the staff of the LJW for letting me visit one last time. Y'all are awesome.)