(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
Young Ben Sasse had a great gift for dazzling the easily dazzled. He was young, good-looking, and a man of the storied American “Heartland” of Nebraska. And he was a much more talented fake historian than J. Divan Vance is. His first book, The Vanishing American Adult, was one of those tiresome tomes about how we’re all raising participation-ribbon children who never grow up because it is never demanded of them, and because they were never taught self-reliance the way Young Ben was, or the way his own children were. Ben was raised to wear onions on his belt, because that was the fashion back then. Give your fat, lazy spalpeens some chores to do, and do it now, because tomorrow might be too late. Young Ben Sasse demanded that America “build a culture of self-reliance.” He said so right in his subtitle.
Well, Young Ben Sasse certainly built himself a culture of self-reliance when he left the Senate and took the job running the University of Florida. He seems to have relied on himself to loot the joint. The latest on Young Ben Sasse’s life of luxury comes courtesy of WUFT, public radio for north central Florida. It seems that Young Ben liked to paaaaaarrrrrrr-TAY!
At the Dec. 7 holiday party, Sasse hosted about 200 guests who dined on fresh sushi that two dedicated chefs hand rolled alongside traditional dishes of beef, chicken and sweet desserts. The event, detailed in a newly released list of more than 500 itemized catering expenses obtained under Florida’s public records law, cost $176,816, or roughly $900 per person. The guest list that night included UF’s top brass and officials with the university’s fundraising foundation, who solicit big checks for education programs from wealthy donors. With a student choir caroling in the background, Sasse personally welcomed guests as they arrived at the old president’s mansion on campus, and later toasted them from two open bars serving unlimited alcohol. The bill for the liquor was listed as $7,061. Sasse’s yuletide soirée was the largest single expenditure—nearly 15% of his total catering spending—until he abruptly resigned in July after 17 months in office. The new details about his catering costs add to disclosures about his office’s multi-million dollar spending on lucrative consulting contracts and high-paid, remote jobs he awarded to Republican former staffers and allies that have generated bipartisan scrutiny and promises of government audits.
Sasse did not immediately respond to questions emailed to him about his catering expenses.
C’mon, Young Ben. That’s not exactly taking responsibility for your own actions the way you recommended in your book.
Home football games on Saturdays are huge on campus, and the catering bill for tailgate parties that Sasse hosted reflected that, too, as did food served in the president’s massive, well-appointed suite in the stadium. Football catering accounted for more than one-third of Sasse’s overall spending. Typically, about 100 major donors, administrators and state officials cycle through the president’s luxury suite at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium during home games—a practice maintained by Sasse and Fuchs.
One such event came with a price tag of $31,312, or roughly $313 per person. At another game, food costs exceeded $30,000. Guests in the stadium’s luxury suites that day were treated to brisket coated in peach-flavored barbecue sauce, bacon-wrapped hot dogs and a caramel macchiato cheesecake. Sasse racked up more gameday charges than his predecessor by holding additional tailgates at the president’s mansion before kickoff, a new practice. Before the Gators faced off against McNeese State on Sept. 9, 2023, Sasse entertained about 225 donors, student government members, faculty and administrators at a tailgate where the bill was $26,543, or roughly $118 per guest. Over 40 charges among the itemized expenses—ranging from $495 to $19,600—included vague, incomplete descriptions like “dinner” or “lunch.” One invoice for $14,892 dated in July 2023 was labeled “Chris.” UF declined to answer questions about the events or their purposes.
Jesus H. Christ on a jet sweep, that’s a helluva lot of money to watch a team that went 5–7 last year.
All of this comes as Young Ben Sasse’s stewardship of the university is under intense scrutiny for a number of different reasons, all of them having to do with money. The UF student newspaper opened the ballgame on him. From KMTV in Omaha:
According to Alligator, a UF media outlet that covers university news, Sasse tripled his office’s spending from nearly 6 million to 17.3 million dollars. Putting money towards things like consulting contracts and high-paying positions for previous GOP colleagues, he hired six ex-Senate staffers and two former Republican officials.
Which, the Alligator says, accounted for nearly 30 percent of his offices spending. One example is James Wegman; he was Sasse’s former Senate communications director and hired to be UF’s vice president of communications. His salary was $432,000, a large leap from the previous VPC, who made $270,000.
Truth be told, Young Ben Sasse had a good reason to step down at Florida, as his wife has suffered a galaxy of serious health problems. But he walks away with $1 million a year. Young Ben Sasse once wrote:
“A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work rather than freedom from your work, even when work might hurt.”
Eating a few too many bacon-wrapped hot dogs will do that to a fella.
The Independent picked up a completely bizarre episode in the spin room that followed Tuesday night’s presidential debate. During their encounter, Vice President Harris had confronted the former president* with the full-page newspaper ad he’d taken out demanding the death penalty for the five defendants in the Central Park rape case. Trump, as is his wont, refused to acknowledge that he’d been proven wrong when the five defendants were later exonerated.
They’re destroying our country. And they come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years, when a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five. They admitted—they said they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty—then they pled we’re not guilty. But this is a person that has to stretch back years, forty, fifty years ago, because there’s nothing now.
Anyway, after the debate, the former president* made a surprise visit to the spin room. Also there was Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five who was elected to the New York City Council. The Independent has what happened next.
Likely expecting to be fielding another question from a reporter, Trump instead found himself facing Salaam, now an elected member of New York City’s council, who had joined the scrum of reporters surrounding the former president. Salaam, a Democrat, was one of the many Harris campaign allies marked for interviews with press after the debate. It wasn’t clear if Trump immediately understood why Salaam was there, but he grinned and pointed at him, quipping: “That’s good, you’re on my side!”
Salaam, obviously taken aback, laughed along with some of the reporters around him. “No, no, I’m not on your side!” Salaam shot back. The former president then waved and stepped away to take questions from reporters standing further away.
“You’re on my side!”
Good God.
Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “This Bitter Earth” (Irma Thomas): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1949, is the reopening of a movie palace in London after a ten-year blackout. Ahhh, when movie theaters were palaces. In 1939, when Gone with the Wind opened at the Loew’s Poli in Worcester, my grandfather’s sign company got the job of creating a life-size Clark Gable and a life-size Vivien Leigh for the lobby. History is so cool.
September 11 came and went this year with what seemed to me to be far less fanfare than it used to receive. Maybe it’s settled into history now—worthy of an annual commemoration but less of a reenactment of the national trauma. It’s possible that one day 9/11 will join November 22 and December 7 as dates of which we have to be reminded. We are a strange country that way.
Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:
The boulder features a carved figure draped in robes with a cross in front of his body. Experts think it may represent Otto of Bamberg, the bishop and missionary credited with spreading Christianity to the region. It’s also the only known picture stone to depict a figure with a cross….“The significance of this find cannot be overestimated,” says Detlef Jantzen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s chief archaeologist, in the statement. “The new find from Klotzow is the only one that could depict a Christian dignitary. Now, we are going to try to learn more about the stone’s original location.”
Born in 1060, Otto of Bamberg dedicated his life to converting populations in an area known as Pomerania, located in parts of present-day Germany and Poland. According to some accounts, the number of people he baptized may be in the tens of thousands. “With this exceptionally significant find, we can add another important piece to the mosaic of our country’s history,” says Bettina Martin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s culture minister, in the statement. “Bishop Otto of Bamberg undertook his first missionary journey to Pomerania in 1124. The fact that a picture stone from this period has now been found exactly 900 years later is an extremely fortunate circumstance.”
Otto, it should be noted, is considered the saint whom you turn to if you happen to have rabies.
SciNews, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
First described in 2000, this ancient bird had a long skull and teeth only at the tip of its beak. “Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the body, and Longipteryx’s tooth enamel is 50 microns thick,” said Alex Clark, a Ph.D. student at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago. “That’s the same thickness of the enamel on enormous predatory dinosaurs like Allosaurus that weighed 4,000 pounds, but Longipteryx was the size of a bluejay.” Scientists previously suggested that a kingfisher-like elongated skull of Longipteryx chaoyangensis meant that it hunted fish. However, this hypothesis has been challenged by a number of studies. “There are other fossil birds, like Yanornis, that ate fish, and we know because specimens have been found with preserved stomach contents, and fish tend to preserve well,” said Dr. Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles in the Field Museum. “Plus, these fish-eating birds had lots of teeth, all the way along their beaks, unlike how Longipteryx only has teeth at the very tip of its beak. It just didn’t add up.”
Hard-toothed vegetarian dinos. You never know how they might have lived to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the folks in Winder, Georgia, and the people in Vietnam and in New Orleans, both places that faced the storm this week. And those people in Japan coming out from under Typhoon Shanshan, and those living through the aftermath of Hurricane Ernesto, and in Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zones in India and Bangladesh, Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and Sudan. and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and Brazil, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in and around Los Angeles, and in Wyoming, Oregon, and western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.
