Gov. Dave Heineman compared the University of Nebraska to a wealthy “special interest group” with its hand out for taxpayer dollars while the state’s citizens want tax relief. 

Heineman, in an interview Friday, said that his top priority remains passage of his proposed tax-cut package and that the university needs to reprioritize its spending or use private dollars from its foundation to finance the $91 million in new construction spending it is requesting from the state.

The university is seeking funds to expand nursing classroom space in Lincoln and Kearney, do design work on a new veterinary laboratory in Lincoln, and build a $370 million cancer research tower at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. 

“Here’s what the average Nebraskan tells me: ‘The university has over a billion dollars in their foundation, and they can’t afford $400 million to $500 million to afford that (cancer tower) project?’ ” Heineman said. “They’re offended, and they have a right to be offended,” he told The World-Herald.

Ron Withem, an NU spokesman, said the university has worked well with the governor in the past and hopes to do so again this year. Withem said, however, that 30 “average Nebraskans” were among those testifying Thursday in support of NU’s spending priorities before the budget-writing Appropriations Committee. 

“There were nurses, students, medical professionals and cattle producers telling legislators that they should invest in economic development and health initiatives at the university,” he said. “We think the average Nebraskans did speak yesterday.”

Withem added that the state’s largest business groups, including the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, also support the NU requests.

Several members of the Appropriations Committee have voiced support for the university project, although they doubted NU would get the entire $91 million. Much, they said, would depend on the health of the state economy and competing demands for state dollars, including the governor’s tax-cut proposal.

I wonder how Governor Heineman would respond if the Board of Regents declared that only people who make significant donations to the NU Foundation are eligible to receive any benefits from the research conducted at the new cancer research facility, since Heineman thinks the Foundation should bear all of the cost.

Or, let’s put it another way: If you don’t understand the myriad ways that a major research university benefits the people of your state, maybe it’s best to let someone else be the governor.

HT: Brandon Locke.

If you already don’t like the way the NCAA deals with the whole concept of paying student-athletes, then you’re really not going to like this right here:

The NCAA has placed the University of Nebraska Athletic Department under two years’ probation and enforced a $38,000 fine, which has gone to local charities, after what the department committed what the NCAA called “major violations.”

The announcement came Wednesday afternoon. It marks the end of an investigation that began last summer after the department realized nearly 500 student athletes had, from 2007 to 2010, received recommended course books under scholarship. NCAA rules prohibit scholarships from paying for anything but required materials.

Yep, the university bought required and recommended books for student-athletes, potentially opening the door to some extra learning.

Truly horrible rule violation? Or truly horrible rule?

Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman’s notebooks, manuscripts, essays, letters, journals and key contextual resources into an integrated and user-friendly website. In 2007, the Archive moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and under the co-direction of Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, has made exciting developments into both the public understanding of Whitman, as well as the potential for digitization in the future of academia.

…

“We’ve been going around to more than 30 different libraries and other kinds of repositories around the country and to some extent around the world. We’re gathering all of those poetry manuscripts, purchasing high-quality scans of them, putting them up on the web, transcribing those sometimes very messy manuscripts, and then providing annotations, explaining them and dating them.”

This process is laborious, to be sure, but represents what is likely a massive switch in scholarly research. In Price’s mind, the advent of technology allows machines to zero in on linguistic, cultural and textual patterns we were previously unaware of throughout history.

I’ve written before about the fact that Nebraska has been using a drug dealer in India to illicitly procure lethal injection drugs that are in short supply in the U.S. Today, the saga continues and this interesting example tells us a lot about the way the death penalty is perceived by its proponents, namely that the rules apply to defendants but not to the state that wants to kill them:

Attorney General Jon Bruning’s office filed documents Monday with the Nebraska Supreme Court saying a challenge by death-row inmate Michael Ryan’s lawyer of the state’s purchase of a lethal-injection drug is “frivolous, dilatory and irrelevant.”

“I think it’s outrageous that the conversation continues to be about the method of execution as opposed to the brutal murders committed by Michael Ryan,” Bruning said.

The problem for Bruning’s office — and, I think, for all the states that are faced with the same problem of procuring sodium thiopental — is that this lawsuit isn’t frivolous. I understand that a lot of people are heavily invested in the execution of Michael Ryan, who crimes were particularly heinous. Putting to death the killers in high profile cases can do a lot for one’s political fortunes. But Bruning can’t claim that the only thing that matters when it comes to executions is whether or not the drugs are available.

If proponents of the death penalty have traditionally rested on anything, it’s on the notion of following the proper procedures. Indeed, many opponents (myself included) have complained that process has often been used to trump everything else, including instances of possible actual innocence. The appeals process, about which we so often hear complaints from proponents because of their seemingly interminable length, focus almost exclusively on procedural questions and so, if proper procedures have been followed, defendants have very little recourse

Now, though, Bruning wants to claim that process doesn’t matter … or at least that it only matters when it comes to Ryan and not when it comes to him. What I mean is this: The statute says the state can kill Michael Ryan and that they should use sodium thiopental to do so. The state has Ryan in custody, Ryan has had access to the criminal justice system, and now the state has a supply of sodium thiopental. So that’s the end of the story, as far as Bruning is concerned. The statute doesn’t specify how the drug should be procured, so Bruning wants to suggest that proper procedures have been followed that Ryan shouldn’t even be allowed to ask questions about how the drug that will help to kill him made its way to Nebraska.

But we know that it made its way to Nebraska illegally. The first time, the drugs were imported in contravention to the rules set out by the federal government. And this time, the drugs were procured only because the intermediary lied about their intended destination and use. The drug company wants its property back, claiming that they would not have made it available if they’d known the truth. But Bruning is committed to the idea that none of this matters because Michael Ryan is guilty and the state is allowed to kill him.

Proper procedures were followed in Ryan’s death penalty case … right until the moment that the state used radically improper procedures to procur the drugs to kill him. That Bruning doesn’t understand that proper procedures must be followed all the way through the process, by all of the actors, says a whole lot about the way the death penalty works in this country and a whole lot about the way that Bruning understands the law.

Mr. Trotter, who notified his staff members and the patrons of a New Year’s Eve event ($295 per person) on Saturday, said he wanted to travel, attend graduate school in philosophy and political theory and, perhaps, eventually return to open a new restaurant.

Let me just say that Mr. Trotter would be very welcome in our political science graduate program at Nebraska … and, if he’s looking for a place to live in Lincoln, I would be happy to work something out with him. Just sayin’ …

HT: Jacob Levy.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) is set to announce on Tuesday that he will retire in 2012, a Democratic source has confirmed to TPM.

Nelson was already probably the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent going into 2012, and Republicans and GOP-aligned groups were already advertising against him.

Holding this seat could be difficult for Democrats, as the state voted 57%-42% for John McCain in 2008, and has not voted Democratic for president since the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide.

Nelson’s retirement was first reported by Politico.

My friend Michael Tofias and I were talking about Nelson just the other day and he made what I think is a very astute remark: Nelson is probably the only sort of Democrat who could be elected to the Senate in a state like Nebraska. In other words, only a Democrat who doesn’t really seem like a Democrat to Democrats would be acceptable to the generally quite conservative populace of Nebraska.

Or, in other words, those Nebraskans who thought Nelson shouldn’t have even called himself a Democrat are likely to be even more disappointed going forward.

(Source: cognitivedissonance)

The Lincoln Journal-Star considers the problem facing Nebraska’s Department of Corrections and wonders whether now would be a good time to consider changing the rules that govern the state’s use of capital punishment. Since they phrased it as a question, I thought I might weigh in.

The easy answer would be “No.” But you can bet that Nebraska isn’t planning to take “No” for an answer when it comes to its death penalty.

Rather than spending more time and money to “tweak” Nebraska’s execution protocols, elected officials should just admit defeat and commute the death sentences of the eleven guys they’ve been trying for years to kill to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

But that will never happen.

Instead, we’ll be treated to several more years of expensive legal challenges and delays as the state tweaks its protocol in order to get around the lack of sodium thiopental. Maybe Nebraska will switch to pentobarbital, as many states have … except we already know this:

[T]he Danish manufacturer of pentobarbital, Lundbeck, has expressed concern over its product being used for execution and said in July it would move to block sales to states that want to use it for that.

So maybe Nebraska will take the same tack as Oklahoma, which opted for generic language when it made changes to its execution protocol. Except, of course, that such language invites more expensive and time-intensive legal challenges from inmates; their lawyers will surely avail themselves of the opportunity and inmates who have been on death row for thirty years will remain there, with the added expense billed to me and my fellow citizens.

Just give up, Nebraska.

Join the other states whose elected officials have already figured out what yours seem so unwilling to admit: The death penalty doesn’t make us safer, or heal victims’ families, or make criminals less likely to commit murder, or even save us money. It’s a wasteful, shameful admission that we have failed as a society and no matter how many times we try to “tweak” it, we’ll always end up with the same useless, ineffective sham.