NEWARK, N.J. — Julie Hermann is not resigning as Rutgers' incoming athletic director following a report that 16 years ago she humiliated and emotionally abused players while coaching the women's volleyball team at Tennessee. And the university is standing behind her. "I never considered withdrawing because I feel very qualified to lead Rutgers into the future and into the transition into the Big Ten," Hermann said Monday during a conference call in response to a report in the Star-Ledger of Newark. "And I do feel the support of the Rutgers community." Embattled Rutgers President Robert Barchi said in a statement the university looks forward to her running the athletic department. He added that she was the best of the 63 candidates interviewed for the job of succeeding Tim Pernetti. "Rutgers was deliberative at every stage of this process," Barchi said. "Over the course of the search, Julie's record established her as a proven leader in athletics administration with a strong commitment to academic success as well as athletic excellence, and a strong commitment to the well-being of student athletes. Despite the Star-Ledger report, Barchi said Hermann's entire career is stellar and "We remain confident that we have selected an individual who will work in the best interests of all of our student athletes, our athletics teams, and the university." Speaking to four reporters on a conference call in which each participant was allowed two questions, Hermann denied having knowledge of a letter written by the 15 players on Tennessee's volleyball team. She said her former boss never heard of it and she never heard her former players make the allegation. Rutgers officials have talked to her about it in recent days, she said. Hermann acknowledged she was an intense coach and may have made a few mistakes handling her team. The 49-year-old administrator said she has matured and believes she is qualified to lead the scandal-marred Rutgers program. Her first day on the job is June 17. It was Hermann's first comments since the Star-Ledger's story Sunday revealed that the Tennessee volleyball team in 1996 sent a letter to the school in which the players said Hermann called them "whores, alcoholics and learning disabled." Hermann left the following year to work with the United States national volleyball team. "As I recall, Julie Hermann did not continue as our head coach only due to a lack of significant improvement in her final season overall record with the Lady Vol volleyball program," former Tennessee athletic administrator Debby Jennings wrote in a message to the AP. Jennings filed a federal lawsuit against the University of Tennessee last September alleging age and sex discrimination led to her forced retirement at the age of 57 in May 2012. In the past two days, state lawmakers have criticized Hermann's hire and Gov. Chris Christie has said he will speak with school officials about the report. Barring a resignation, only the university's board of governors can withdraw Hermann's appointment. The governor appoints six of the board's 11 voting members and can wield pressure through a variety of ways, perhaps by threatening to cut school funding or refusing to renominate a board member who doesn't support his view. With President Barack Obama scheduled to tour the New Jersey shore Tuesday to see the rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy, it is unlikely that Christie will turn his attention to Rutgers until Wednesday. Former New Jersey Gov. and current State Sen. Dick Codey was furious with the latest controversy at Rutgers, saying officials made Pernetti the scapegoat after video of men's basketball coach Mike Rice physically and verbally abusing his players during his three-year tenure came to light in early April. Rice, who initially had been suspended, fined and ordered to undergo anger management counseling, was fired by Barchi the day after the video was broadcast. Pernetti was forced to resign two days later. "His successor is someone who is an obvious liar, a flat-out liar," Codey said in a telephone interview with the AP on Monday evening. "She shouldn't be the AD anywhere, whether it's Rutgers or anywhere else. She should stay in Louisville and not come back to the state, and Barchi should go to Louisville himself because he is not a leader. It's dumb and dumber." Hermann believes she can be an effective leader at Rutgers, which also had several other key officials resign. And after hiring former Scarlet Knights star Eddie Jordan to become the men's basketball coach, the university mistakenly called him a graduate when he had never finished his degree. "All of my life has prepared me to lead this organization," said Hermann, who would be the first woman to serve as Rutgers' athletic director and only the third female AD at the 124 schools playing at college football's top tier. "Whatever mistakes you make as a young person, you've got to learn from them and go and grow," she added. "It is my intent to go to Rutgers with this vast experience of super highs and super lows and lead what I hope is an outstanding team into the Big Ten." On other comments from the 10-minute call included: _Hermann said the company that vetted her for Rutgers did ask about a lawsuit filed by one of her assistant coaches over a job termination. _Hermann believes she can raise funds despite what has happened. _Hermann denied the name calling, specifically when asked about calling the players "whores." "That's not part of my vocabulary. ... Here's what I would say. Am I an intense coach? Absolutely an intense coach as many coaches are," she said. "But there is a big canyon between being super intense and abuse, and this was not an abusive environment for these women. Was it challenging? It was incredibly challenging. Was I aware that there were players that were unhappy? I was aware of that at the end of the season and I was unhappy." ___ AP Sports Writer Teresa Walker in Memphis, Tenn., and AP newsman Bruce Shipkowski in Trenton contributed to this report.

Juan Williams, The HillIn June the Supreme Court is set to make history with a ruling on the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. This is potentially the biggest ruling on racial politics since the 1954 Brown decision on ending public school segregation.As this century gets started, the nation lives with a deep racial divide in Congress and at every other level of American politics. At the moment there are no black Republicans in the House. Barely 20 percent of the Latinos in the House are Republicans (7 of 34).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wall Street JournalI've seen this before. A Muslim terrorist slays a non-Muslim citizen in the West, and representatives of the Muslim community rush to dissociate themselves and their faith from the horror. After British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death last week in Woolwich in south London, Julie Siddiqi, representing the Islamic Society of Britain, quickly stepped before the microphones to attest that all good Muslims were "sickened" by the attack, "just like everyone else."

Eric Garcetti has just been elected one of Los Angeles' youngest mayors ever. Eric was a Rhodes scholar in Oxford from about 1993 to 1995. We were close friends and he was a regular at my Oxford University L'Chaim Society. One unforgettable incident defined his character for me in a moment of terrible tragedy for one of our students. One day in the late afternoon in 1995, I received a phone call from a student who was one of my wife and my closest friends and the president of our student organization. She was crying bitterly. Her name was Jordana and she was almost incoherent with grief. Jordana, who has given me her permission to use her name, was studying in Oxford far away from her home in Canada. She had just received a phone call that her beloved father, with whom she was very close, had died in a terrible accident. She pleaded with me to come around to help her in this moment of agony and incomprehensible pain. I reached her family and we all decided the best thing would be for her to return home as soon as possible. I told them I would drive her to the airport in London. There was one problem. That night I had already invited Eric over to our home for a private dinner with me and my wife. Given that this was before most students had cell phones, the only effective way of communicating with the students was through the University's painfully slow 'pigeon post' system. I could not tell Eric in time that the dinner was being canceled. I drove to Jordana's college where some of her friends were already helping her pack her things. I attempted to comfort her in the tragic news and then brought everything to the car for the trip to the airport. We drove straight to our home where my wife could speak to her and where she could eat something quickly prior to the long night ahead of her. As we walked into the house, there was Eric, smiling and looking happy to be at our home for dinner. He had no idea of the night's events. I quickly introduced him to Jordana. Her eyes were red and she was pale from grief. I said to Eric, "This is Jordana and I'm so sorry that we have to cancel dinner tonight. You see, she has just learned that her father passed away just hours ago." Moments like this are what show the true character of an individual. Here was Eric, a young, popular Rhodes scholar at Oxford who had simply come to have dinner at his Rabbi's home. Now, he was being confronted with a total stranger's grief and tragedy. How would he react? And here was an interaction that has lingered in my mind and that I will never forget. Eric looked right at Jordana and, in the softest gentlest words, said to her, "I am so sorry for your pain. I'm heartbroken to hear the news. Please tell me if there is anything I can do." His face was contorted in agony. He spent the next few minutes speaking with her. It was not what he said but the way he said it. He spoke with extreme empathy and understanding. It is quite remarkable that nearly 20 years later I can remember the scene so vividly. What I saw was genuine human compassion for the plight of a complete stranger. I remember thinking to myself that here was a young man with a soft and special heart, that he had the ability to connect genuinely and compassionately with those who were suffering. Jordana reciprocated the effort. Amid mind-altering loss, she kept her composure and apologized to Eric for having to cancel his dinner. She thanked him for his sympathy and did everything in her power to interact with him on a human level amid her shattered heart. She told him she looked forward to getting to know him better when she returned and under better circumstances. It was a herculean effort at composure. Eric refused to leave the home until Jordana and I departed. He waited around, told me how he of course understood the need to postpone our dinner, and kept on emphasizing that he wanted to help in any way that he could. About 20 minutes later we departed for London. Interestingly, over the years to come, whenever I visited Jordana and her husband she would inquire how Eric was doing, so deeply had she been touched by his caring at that moment. Conversely, Eric regularly asks me about Jordana's welfare. I'm not sure they ever met again but for me, as a witness to a brief exchange between two people in a moment of extreme crisis, it was a demonstration of Eric's desire to always be there for those who are suffering. Indeed, Eric's caring for those who are struggling would become his defining political legacy as a Los Angeles council member and as President of the Council. In Oxford, our organization specialized in hosting world personalities lecturing on values-based issues. A few months after this painful story, Eric was instrumental in helping me host his father, Los Angeles DA Gil Garcetti, to lecture to our students. Gil was all over the news at the time, having been involved in the high profile cases of O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and others. I remember witnessing just how close Eric was to his father and the special bond they shared. It was something that I was reminded of recently, when I was invited to the birthday party of a Garcetti family member, seeing the deference and respect Eric accords his parents and the loving bond with his wife Amy, whom I also knew at Oxford. Gil is now an accomplished photographer and the son he mentored has grown to become L.A.'s first Jewish mayor. Shmuley Boteach, "America's Rabbi" whom The Washington Post calls "the most famous Rabbi in America," has just published his newest best-seller, "The Fed-up Man of Faith: Challenging God in the Face of Tragedy and Suffering." Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

When news broke Monday that John McCain had snuck into Syria to meet with members of the opposition, his daughter found out the same way many of us did -- on Twitter. Meghan McCain noted the surreal experience in a tweet Monday evening. Not wanting people to think she was complaining, McCain followed up with another tweet a few minutes later explaining that she admires her father's actions. The Arizona Senator's eldest child is set to launch her own talk show in August on the Pivot channel, entitled "Raising McCain." "We're told ... that young people can't have news because we're just tweeting all the time, and that's just bullshit," she said at the announcement of the show's upcoming launch. Score another point for Twitter, apparently. (h/t Jezebel)

n 1998, after nearly 30 years working in the entertainment industry and living in Los Angeles, I moved to San Francisco to run the local PBS station, KQED. Moving from a company town like Hollywood where I had developed many professional relationships and personal friendships, to a totally unfamiliar, cosmopolitan city like San Francisco was nothing short of culture shock. My life, which revolved around the ups and downs of the network television business and living the good life, took on some novel dimensions. Instead of spending time at smoky comedy clubs with up and coming comedians, or at lavish movie premieres with movers and shakers, or at all night parties at the Playboy Mansion, I was now going to the ballet, the Philharmonic, exclusive dinner parties on Nob Hill, art openings at SF MOMA, Shakespeare at Stinson Beach and poetry readings at Francis Coppola's Napa winery. And, instead of being surrounded by the "beautiful people" I was now hobnobbing with local politicians, having intense conversations with community activists, sipping tea with wealthy dowagers and sitting in think-tanks with Silicon Valley moguls. My new colleagues at PBS liked to say they "rescued my character" from a decadent life in Beverly Hills. One Bay Area event that's become a regular occurrence on my schedule is the annual Memorial Day ceremony in the San Francisco National Cemetery, a breathtaking final resting place for 30,000 of the nation's military veterans. The cemetery rests on a slope in the Presidio, a national park and former military base characterized by majestic wooded hills and scenic vistas overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. Every year, the 90-minute ceremony draws many hundreds of people who remember our deceased veterans with great respect and style. There's an Armed Services Orchestra playing stirring patriotic music, political and religious leaders who give moving speeches, poets, singers and others who offer other forms of tribute. The event ends with a flyover of Coast Guard Helicopters, a 21-gun salute and Taps played by a lone uniformed bagpiper standing amid endless rows of simple white tombstones. All and all it's an impressive experience that gave me a heartfelt sense that I had expressed some measure of gratitude for the supreme sacrifice made by my fellow countrymen, before I went to the beach or a barbecue or to take advantage of the Memorial Day sales. But since the end of the Iraq War and now that Afghanistan is winding down, and so many living Veterans are returning home, I've become increasingly discontent with the quality of my tribute as compared to the sacrifices these brave people continue to make on my behalf. I realize that for all these veterans have given, many of them are coming home wounded in body or spirit to a society that, while it unanimously honors their service, doesn't really know how to reward and repatriate them. For a few years, I've been looking for a way to do more to make a real difference in the lives of these heroes and maybe in the country whose future I've become increasingly concerned about. As I've thought about this and listened to people like Paul Reickhoff, the Iraq War vet who started the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association, and Eric Greitens, the Rhodes Scholar, author and former Navy Seal who founded The Mission Continues, I have realized what they understood years ago -- that veterans are a major asset to this country. They haven't changed. Only their circumstances have changed. So rather than giving them something for their past service, I think we should honor them asking them to give even more. Now that they're back home, I'd like to ask them to use their skills, their training, their experience and their passion to teach people like me how to help make this country a better place for all of us. In the coming weeks, people whose names you'll actually recognize will lend their voices and their support to an effort to put our Veterans front and center here, at home, the new front lines of a new war against poverty, pollution, ignorance and polarization. The blogs they will write will be under a banner that will read OPERATION: USA. Please look for it. Lend your voices and your opinions to it, and let's actually do something to get this country moving again. On the morning of every Memorial Day, the flag of the United States is raised briskly to the top of the staff and then solemnly lowered to the half-staff position, where it remains only until noon, when it is raised to full-staff for the remainder of the day. The half-staff position remembers the more than one million men and women who gave their lives in service of our country. At noon their memory is raised by the living, who resolve not to let their sacrifice be in vain, but to rise up in their stead and continue the fight for liberty and justice for all. It's time to raise the flag.

In testimony last week, Apple CEO Timothy Cook proudly described the ingenious ways in which Apple tax attorneys have gamed the U.S. tax system to make sure their company pays a whole lot less in taxes to the USA -- their supposed "home country" -- than U.S. users of their products or tax writers in Congress might have expected. Apple's tax wizards have created whole new stateless corporate entities, into which they have transferred many of the intellectual assets of their high tech consumer products company. Thus, their profit-producing crown jewels are not subject to taxes in any country. And, Cook hastened to proclaim, it is all completely legal under U.S. law. But Cook also laid out a corporate plan for "reform" of corporate taxes that, if passed, would make it easier for other corporations to follow Apple's lead, by: Lowering the tax rate that all big corporations pay for the roads, schools, R&D and other government investments that have made their economic success in the U.S. possible; Instituting a tax holiday during which these companies would pay even lower tax rates on profits held overseas when they decide to bring those profits into the U.S.; Adopting a new "territorial" tax system, permanently excluding from U.S. taxes any profits a company claims were made in some other country -- whether it has paid taxes to that other country or not. The Apple agenda for corporate tax reform is not different from most of the organized groupings of corporate CEOs and their lobbyists who, having survived a small increase in their individual tax rates after the 2012 election, are getting ready to engineer a windfall of tax savings through the process of political payoffs and organized greed they will call corporate tax "reform." The wealthy corporate barons who are pushing for these tax giveaways to corporate America are the very same ones who have been lecturing Americans about the need to reduce the Federal deficit and debt. Their greed seems to make them immune to all shame or charges of hypocrisy. A prime example: the "Fix the Debt" group of more than 80 corporate executives, led by hedge fund mega-billionaire, Peter G. Peterson and deficit scolds Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson -- whose official anti-deficit agenda is full of austerity and budget cuts for regular people -- are pushing at the same time for a switch to a territorial system under which corporate foreign earnings would be permanently exempted (instead of being taxed when they are returned to America). Just how reducing corporate taxes would help fix the debt is as hard for them to explain. Anew report from CAF and IPS also finds that almost all their companies pay their top executives mega-millions, while writing most of it of as a tax deduction. Defeat the corporate plans to "reform" corporate taxes. A political mobilization by citizens is clearly necessary to prevent politicians in the Senate and House from embracing the corporate version of corporate tax reform. And coalitions like Americans for Tax Fairness are gearing up to make sure that the only kind of corporate tax reform that passes is the kind that produces more -- not less -- tax revenue for both deficit reduction and for the public investment we all need for job growth and corporations need to be successful in America. And groups like the Tax Justice Network-USA and their Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Campaign are leading efforts to get governments to track the corporate money hidden all over the world make tax rules more fair and transparent -- starting with Senator Levin's Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act. A Better Way to Tax All Multi-Nationals Who Make Profits in America. Our system for taxing corporate profits is obsolete. It harkens back to a time when even the biggest U.S. companies actually were U.S. companies. Today, as we saw in Timothy Cook's testimony, even our national champions, like Apple are no more American than Toyota -- or LG (which sells TVs for a giant South Korean chaebol business conglomerate). And these stateless multi-nationals can use the magic of transfer pricing to fool tax authorities in any one country that most of their profits were made in another. In a very important article last week (May 23) in the Washington Post's WONKBLOG, reporter Jia Lynn Yang summarized the thinking of a new group of tax thinkers -- and the successful tax experience in states like California that have tried a whole new approach. She wrote: The U.S. corporate tax system is needlessly complex, dysfunctional and needs to be fixed. Could there be an elegant solution right under our noses? [A] number of states have come up with a simple way to calculate what firms owe them in taxes: If a company sells its product or services in a given state, it pays a tax proportionate to the sales in that state. Here's how it would work. Let's say a company earns 20 percent of its sales in California. The company would pay 20 percent of its worldwide sales to California at the state's corporate tax rate. No need to worry about where the firm has offices or where its employees work -- and no chance of the firms shifting their income to other states using elaborate, hard-to-trace methods. Just last year, the state of California passed just such a law moving to a sales-based corporate tax system. Bill Parks, a retired finance professor, recently wrote an op-ed in USA Today proposing that the entire country move to a similar approach. "Adopting California's sales-based corporate tax system would simplify the tax code and level the playing field," he wrote. "Under sales-based apportionment, it is conceivable that a medium-size corporation could file its report on a single sheet of paper attached to its annual Form 10-K filed with the SEC without needing the help of a tax attorney." In 2007, Kim Clausing, a professor of economics at Reed College, and Reuven Avi-Yonah, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, produced a paper proposing the U.S. corporate tax system adopt the states' model. Such a solution, they wrote, would reflect the globalized way that companies actually do business now. Rather than figure out the location of a company's production -- which can get complicated when an iPhone is designed in Cupertino and manufactured in China -- the taxes would be based on where customers are located. "Absent tax incentives to shift income away from the United States, U.S. corporate tax revenues would likely increase significantly," they wrote. And, Clausing and Avi-Yonah wrote, the tax rate could be cut "substantially." Reporter Yang notes that, "The United States, with its army of consumers, would certainly stand to gain." But the other winners would be U.S. workers. This new tax system would provide companies absolutely no tax incentive to move production to lower-tax countries. And with the costs of transportation and wages going up around the world, U.S. and non-U.S. companies would likely accelerate the trend toward manufacturing (and hiring) where they sell. And small businesses, now at a disadvantage against big companies able to hide profits all over the world, would be back on a level playing field. Clearly, the corporate "tax reform" agenda needs to be stopped because it would take us in the wrong direction, reducing revenues America needs, and encouraging (with their territorial plan) off-shoring of jobs and profits. But perhaps a more important reason to stop the multinational corporate tax agenda is to make it easier to establish a new simpler corporate tax system pioneered, like so many innovative American policy ideas, in California. Don't let bad ideas get in the way of an idea whose time is coming.

WASHINGTON -- Veterans were celebrated on Monday afternoon at the eighth annual National Memorial Day Parade. One of this year's highlights was honorary grand marshal, Redskins quarterback, NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year and groom-to-be Robert Griffin III. The athlete rode in a car with his parents, U.S. Army veterans Robert Griffin, Jr. and Jacqueline Griffin. Check out some scenes from the 2013 parade -- story continues below: The yearly tradition honors American veterans of all wars. The 2013 event had a special focus on some major anniversaries: World War II's 70th, the Korean War's 60th and the Vietnam War's 50th anniversary. Special guests this year included "American Idol" winner Taylor Hicks, actors Joe Mantegna and Gary Sinise, Army veteran, "Dancing With The Stars" winner and would-be script-writer J.R. Martinez, country star Trace Adkins and Miss America 2013 Mallory Hytes Hagan. Previous year's parades have drawn over 250,000 spectators to Constitution Ave. NW.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street JournalIn the spring of 1959, Yang Jisheng, then an 18-year-old scholarship student at a boarding school in China's Hubei Province, got an unexpected visit from a childhood friend. "Your father is starving to death!" the friend told him. "Hurry back, and take some rice if you can."Granted leave from his school, Mr. Yang rushed to his family farm. "The elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk," he recalled, "and even its roots had been dug up." Entering his home, he found his father "half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken...

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Huffington PostDanish Ambassador Peter Taksoe-Jensen spent a weekend in Vermont this month traveling with me to town meetings in Burlington, Brattleboro and Montpelier. Large crowds came out to learn about a social system very different from our own which provides extraordinary security and opportunity for the people of Denmark.Today in the United States there is a massive amount of economic anxiety. Unemployment is much too high, wages and income are too low, millions of Americans are struggling to find affordable health care and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider.

Sally Pipes, ForbesSen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) raised eyebrows across the country last month when he publicly fretted about an Obamacare “train wreck” as the Administration rushes to implement the many provisions of the law that take effect in 2014.President Obama has attempted to assuage Sen. Baucus’s concerns, saying that his staff was “pushing very hard to make sure that we’re hitting all the deadlines.”

Jamelle Bouie, Wash PostEven after it becomes law, major legislation is always subject to tweaks, additions and reforms. For something as large and sprawling as the Affordable Care Act, changes should be a matter of course. After all, this law promises to transform U.S. health care as provisions are implemented and benefits begin to trickle to ordinary people.But as the New York Times reports, partisan opposition to Obamacare has thrown a large wrench into the normal process of legislative revision. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that “technical revisions” to the Affordable Care Act will be...

Peter Wehner, Wkly StandardSome conservatives think that the elite media are finally turning on Barack Obama and his administration.The argument goes like this: The trio of scandals that have burst forth in the last couple of weeks—the events before, during, and after the deadly attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi; the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups; and especially the Department of Justice’s secret subpoenas of Associated Press phone records and targeting of Fox News reporter James Rosen as a potential co-conspirator in a leak investigation—will mark an...

Scott RasmussenDespite a tough couple of weeks, President Obama's job approval ratings are holding up fairly well. As I write this, 47 percent of voters nationwide offer their approval. That's little changed from attitudes of late and essentially the same as the president enjoyed during most of his first term in office.But if you dig just a bit beneath the surface, it becomes clear that the controversies dogging the White House have had an impact.

Kara Swisher, Vanity Fair

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is looking to get his groove back – at the beach. A post-Hurricane Sandy tour of the New Jersey coast line on Tuesday, gives the president a chance for a three-point play that can move him ahead of the recent controversies that have dogged the White House. With New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie at Obama's side, effective government, bipartisanship and economic opportunity will be the unmistakable message in the face of the coastal recovery. For Obama, the tour helps him continue redirecting the political conversation after two weeks of dealing with the fallout over the administration's response to terror attacks last September in Benghazi, Libya, the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department's review of journalist phone records as part of a leak investigation. The visit occurs as Congress is away for a Memorial Day holiday break, a weeklong recess that likely will silence the daily attention lawmakers, particularly Republicans, had been paying to the three political upheavals. It also comes just days after Obama started seeking to change the subject in Washington with a speech defending his controversial program of strikes by unmanned drones and renewing his push to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility. On Sunday Obama traveled to Oklahoma to view damage from the recent tornado and console victims of the deadly storm. For Christie, the president's appearance is yet another way to showcase his beloved Jersey Shore. The Republican has been touting it throughout the Memorial Day weekend as a destination point that is back in business and he broke a Guinness World record Friday by cutting a 5.5 mile ceremonial ribbon that symbolically tied together some of the hardest-hit towns by Sandy. The state has a $25 million marketing campaign to highlight the shore's resurgence in time for the summer season. Both men will reprise the remarkable bipartisan tableau they offered during Sandy's immediate aftermath when Obama flew to New Jersey just days before the election to witness the storm's wreckage. Politically, the visit plays well for both men. Christie, seeking re-election this year, will stand shoulder to shoulder with a president popular among Democrats in a Democratic leaning state. And Obama, dueling with congressional Republicans on a number of fronts, gets to display common cause with a popular GOP stalwart. (Obama has not scheduled any face time with state Sen. Barbara Buono, Christie's likely Democratic opponent in the governor's race). Christie, in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer on Friday, downplayed the politics, even when asked if ties to Obama could hurt him among conservatives if he were to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. "The fact of the matter is, he's the president of the United States, and he wants to come here and see the people of New Jersey," Christie said. "I'm the governor. I'll be here to welcome him." To be sure, New Jersey is still rebuilding. Obama is visiting those regions that have been among the first to recover – Christie ranks the recovery of the state's famous boardwalks as an eight on a scale of 10 but concedes that in other parts of the state many homeowners are still rebuilding six months after the devastating superstorm struck. Overall, the storm caused $38 billion in damages in the state, and harmed or wrecked 360,000 homes or apartment units. But the coastal recovery is a big potential boon for the state where tourism is a nearly $40 billion industry. For Obama, coming off a week that had the IRS in the crosshairs of a scandal, the trip also offers an opportunity to demonstrate the work of another part of government that provides a foil for the IRS: the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose response to disasters has been met with bipartisan praise. Indeed, inside the White House, FEMA is perceived as an example of what's best about government. The agency, panned for its response under President Bush to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has made a turnaround under administrator Craig Fugate and has been commended for its work in disasters from the Joplin, Mo., tornado in 2011 to Hurricane Sandy last year. Obama's trip Tuesday also comes two days after he toured the tornado devastation outside Oklahoma City, Okla., where FEMA has been the face of the federal government as well. Josh Earnest, the White House's deputy press secretary, says FEMA represents "competent, efficient government that meets the needs of the people." "The renaissance of the agency embodies what the president ran on," he said. Overall, the federal government has directed more than $14 billion so far in aid to help families, support state and local rebuilding efforts, and assist major transportation reconstruction and in community development grants to states affected by Katrina, the bulk of which has gone to New Jersey and New York. Even as Obama meets businesses and homeowners who have benefited from recovery work, the White House says he also plans to talk about the importance of renewing economic opportunities for middle-class families still getting their lives back. It's a message that dovetails with Obama's attempts to keep the economy prominent by highlighting economic growth after the Great Recession while also making his case for additional initiatives to keep the economy from stumbling again.

"He has the presence of a great man. He would tell the truth even if it hurt his cause. Congress always respected him." - House Speaker Sam Rayburn speaking about George C. Marshall "I answered the questions that were asked of me." - White House Press Secretary Jay Carney "I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any I.R.S. rules and regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other Congressional Committee." - Lois Lerner, Director, IRS Exempt Organizations Unit, just before taking the Fifth Amendment While the factual record on the current IRS scandal is not complete, it is clear that the agency used search names such as "Tea Party" to create a "Be on the Lookout" list for organizations claiming Section 501 (c) (4) tax exempt status, thus substituting political leanings for evidence of actual, prohibited tax exempt practice. It is also clear that, for nearly a month, a series of IRS and now White House officials have sought to defend the IRS action as purely one of "foolish mistakes" (the term applied by now outgoing Acting Commissioner Steven Miller). And it is also clear that the standard set by some current officials for truth and transparency falls far short of the standard set by Army Chief of Staff (and later Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense) George C. Marshall. Instead of Congress finding it relatively easy to get the truth from people who want to tell the truth, they and the public have been treated to a series of officials offering partial disclosures, reluctant admissions of omissions, and claims that they have not lied. Were the public not so used to such behavior in recent decades, they would probably be even more angry. Some pundits have noted that the President's job approval rating has not suffered (yet), as if that signified that the damage being done to public trust in government is not that big a deal. It is easy to lose the forest for the trees here. The trees are all those little facts as to who knew what when, who ordered whom to say what, who intended to do what to whom, and whose statement was factually accurate or not. The forest is character. "Character is the only secure foundation of the state," Calvin Coolidge said after the scandals of the Harding Administration. Character seems in short supply these days in parts of the IRS and the White House. Character demands primary loyalty to the Constitution not to one's superiors. Character requires telling the whole truth, not evading or omitting it in an effort to be legally correct though not fully forthcoming. Character means having a strong sense of duty and honor and the moral courage to do the right thing. Character means you do what you know you should do rather than what you think you can get away with doing. Character requires selfless service, not self-protection. What seems troubling, in addition, is that all the officials involved in this may well have started out their public careers as bright, capable people intent on doing something good for the country. But being intelligent is no substitute for the character required of a public official. As Abigail Adams told her young son (and future president) John Quincy: "Great learning and superior abilities . . . will be of little value and small estimation unless virtue, honor, truth, and integrity are added to them." Even if we give IRS officials the benefit of the doubt - that confronted with a two-fold increase in Section 501 (c) (4) applications and insufficient resources they chose a terrible short-hand way to get their work done - we still have to question why they lacked the foresight to see the ethical problem they were creating. Their technical smarts were not matched with the moral insight that should have alerted them to the minefield they were entering. A third of the recommendations in the Treasury Inspector General's report call for more and better training of IRS workers involved in making these tax exempt determinations. Joseph Grant, the Acting Commissioner for Tax Exempt and Government Entities in the IRS, responded that the IRS would develop such training - shortly before he announced that he was leaving in June along with Miller. What the IG never asked for, and what the IRS seems to miss, is that their problems were not merely lapses in technical knowledge and the application of legal or regulatory principles. They were also lapses in character and ethics. No training was recommended or offered on these topics. While such training would help, it would need to be accompanied by leaders at all levels who model character as well as technical competence. Terry Newell's newest book, Statesmanship, Character, and Leadership in America, deals expressly with the importance of leadership character in government.

By Corrie MacLaggan AUSTIN, Texas, May 26 (Reuters) - Texas lawmakers on Sunday gave final approval to a two-year budget that restores money cut from schools in 2011, adds funds for mental health services and calls for an 8.3 percent increase in state spending over the previous cycle. The Republican-majority House on Sunday voted, 118-29, to send Governor Rick Perry the $94.6 billion spending plan for 2014-2015. The Senate, which also has a Republican majority, approved it on Saturday on a 27-4 vote. The total budget, including federal funds, is $196.9 billion, a 3.7 percent increase. "It's a great budget," House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts, a Republican, said after the vote. "We gave money to public education, we gave more money to higher education, we gave state employees a pay raise. The thing we're most proud of is what we've done for mental health." Lawmakers have said that the nearly $300 million extra for mental health came in light of recent school shootings, including the December massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The budget debate was less contentious than in 2011, when lawmakers cut $4 billion from schools because of a budget shortfall. The new budget - a compromise between the House and Senate - includes an additional $3.4 billion for schools. When the Legislature convened in January, state comptroller Susan Combs said that lawmakers would have more revenue to spend than they did in the previous cycle thanks to higher-than-expected tax collections boosted by economic growth. Lawmakers were expected to consider more than $1.3 billion in tax cuts and rebates late on Sunday before the conclusion of the biennial legislative session on Monday. That includes about $1 billion in tax cuts for businesses and about $300 million in electricity rebates. Perry, a Republican, has called on lawmakers to pass tax cuts for businesses. He has the option of vetoing specific items in the budget. In another bill passed by both houses Sunday, lawmakers approved taking $3.9 billion from the state's economic stabilization fund - known as the rainy-day fund. That will leave an estimated $8 billion in the fund, which is generated mostly from oil and gas production taxes, by the end of the 2014-2015 cycle. The bill, which also will be sent to the governor, calls for spending $2 billion from the rainy-day fund to finance water infrastructure projects in a state suffering from two years of widespread drought, assuming Texas voter approval of that money this fall. It also calls for spending $185 million from the rainy-day fund to pay mostly for fighting wildfires in 2011. Of that, $15 million would go to a disaster fund to which certain communities - including the city of West, site of a fertilizer plant explosion in April - could apply. In addition, the measure would take $1.75 billion from the rainy-day fund to pay for a deferral in payments to schools, a budget tool used during the 2011 crunch. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based think tank that advocates for small government, criticized the state's spending plan and said lawmakers should not have tapped the rainy-day fund. "Texans ought to be concerned about traveling down the road of unsustainably high government spending, dealing a blow to the prosperity that has sustained our homes and communities as the rest of the nation has suffered the worst economic times since the Great Depression," Chuck DeVore, the foundation's vice president for policy, said in a statement. Texas' rapid growth - including 80,000 new public-school students each year - puts enormous demands on the state's infrastructure and budget, said Republican Senator Robert Duncan, who supported the spending plan. "The good news is, we're growing faster probably than any other state," Duncan told fellow senators on Saturday. "The bad news is, we're growing." (Reporting By Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Bill Trott)

MADERA, Calif. -- After Paulino Mejia crossed the border illegally into the U.S. in 1980, he picked grapes, peaches and other crops in California's agricultural heartland, lived in crowded rental housing, hid from immigration agents and sent paychecks to family in his native Mexico. His life, however, changed in 1986, when Congress agreed to allow immigrants who were in the country illegally to get legal status – with a special provision that focused on farmworkers. Mejia then stopped living in fear. He left agriculture to join a construction company that hired only legal workers, sent his two daughters to college and bought a house in Madera, near Fresno, instead of wiring money to Mexico. "Immigration reform changed my life. It gave my family freedom," he said. "It allowed us to reach the American dream." With Congress considering a new immigration proposal that includes a speedier process to legal status for farmworkers, experts say the best indicator of how such an overhaul would play out is to look at the fate of the generation of farmworkers legalized over two decades ago. In Central California, the nation's agricultural powerhouse and a region with one of the highest poverty levels, the 1986 law had a profound impact on people like Mejia. And like him, many other farmworkers legalized after 1986 have left the fields, moving to jobs in packing houses, warehouses and factories, attending college and working as professionals. And many who remained in agriculture became supervisors, crew leaders or labor contractors. As their wages soared, they bought cars, houses and trailer homes – and many airplane tickets to visit family south of the border. Workers, advocates and experts say immigration reform could again lift many farmworkers, one of the poorest groups of immigrants, out of poverty. But this time, they say, legalization's impact would be much bigger: in 1986, many farmworkers were single men; today most have families. Unlike in 1986, growers and worker advocates say the current reform proposal would also ensure that a poor, illegal class of farmworkers isn't created again – by including a viable guest worker program that would allow for a flow of legal temporary workers into California's fields. "Nobody knows the future, but if the past is any guide, the farmworkers who get legalized, many of them will leave agriculture pretty quickly," said Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at University of California, Davis. More than 1 million farmworkers applied for legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. After the corresponding drop in the number of farmworkers in the country illegally, federal data show that farmers failed to retain their legalized workers and turned again to hiring employees from the groups of people entering the U.S. illegally. Today, experts say, at least two-thirds of the nation's farmworkers are in the country illegally and those legalized thanks to the 1986 changes make up just 12 to 15 percent of the agricultural workforce. Experts say newly legalized farmworkers sought non-seasonal, year-round employment with a steady income and benefits such as health insurance or vacations, which are rare in agriculture. "If you're a seventh-grade educated worker, after legalization you're still a seventh-grade educated worker, but you have more confidence that you will get another job and more opportunities are open to you," Martin said. Even those who remained in the fields due to lack of language skills, little education or other barriers still benefited, because they were able to claim unemployment insurance and other benefits when farm work dried up for the season. Other farmworkers went to college. Fausto Sanchez, of Arvin, Calif., left agriculture for a job as a certified interpreter of Mixteco, an indigenous Mexican language spoken by many farmworkers. He then got his high school diploma in adult school and an associate's degree in human services. He now works for a nonprofit, educating farmworkers about pesticides, heat rules and workers' rights. He and his wife own a house and two cars – and he is planning to return to college to become a social worker. "If I didn't get legalized, all this would not have been possible for me," Sanchez said. California growers and labor contractors acknowledge many farmworkers would leave the fields if granted legal status. "There's no question that once farmworkers get a green card, many will apply for other jobs and leave agriculture," said Tom Nassif, president of Western Growers, an industry group that represents California and Arizona growers. "We support the pathway to citizenship at our own peril, knowing we will lose the people who are most skilled and most productive employees within a short time." But the flight from agriculture may not happen as fast, Nassif said, because the current version of immigration reform requires farmworkers to remain in agriculture for at least five years to qualify for the speedier legalization process. The current reform proposal, Nassif said, also includes a viable guest worker program to provide a future flow of workers. And once legalized, some farmworkers will choose to stay in the fields – as was the case with Julia Cervantes, Mejia's wife, who still occasionally picks grapes and other crops. "I like fresh air. I sincerely like working in the fields," she said. For Mejia, it came down to wages: He and his wife could not make ends meet with what farmers paid in the fields. "Our family started growing, and we didn't have enough to survive," Mejia said. Legalization allowed Mejia to get a job erecting the metal frames of big box stores. His brother became a roofer. Other friends became plumbers and electricians, or field supervisors. "The work is easier and the money is better," Mejia said of his new profession. Prior to the 1986 Amnesty, Mejia wanted to return to Mexico and wired money to build a house in Oaxaca, in southwestern Mexico. But after reform, Mejia's new construction job and his newly acquired social security number allowed his family to buy a home in California. Paying a mortgage and taxes cemented their decision to remain in the U.S. "Before reform, we were afraid to buy anything or to settle here, because if they deported us, we would lose everything," he said. "Reform helped us to invest here."

Just as markets over-built housing, mispriced mortgages and bid up prices beyond the real financial capacity of homebuyers, America's colleges and universities have over-expanded and over-priced their product. We are getting an education bubble with dynamics similar to the late housing bubble. As more and more students find themselves with debts that exceed the salaries offered by the current job market, colleges have expanded beyond the capacity of their markets. Some kind of shakeout is coming. The question is: what kind. During the long boom in higher education, colleges have also dramatically increased salaries and staffing levels of administrations. Some of this reflects efforts to game the rankings, which also is another aspect of the same imbalance. For-profit universities, with high dropout rates, heavily reliant on federal Pell grants and student loans, are only the more explicit and extreme expression of a general trend of colleges and universities becoming more marketized. Colleges are doing deals to set up satellite campuses in sheikhdoms, recruiting full-tuition state-supported foreign students and creating vanity diploma mills as profit centers. The flip side is a massive disinvestment by state legislatures in America's great public universities and an under-investment in community colleges. Despite the broad premise that the cure for America's poor economic performance is more and better colleges, resources have been skewed in exactly the wrong direction. A report by the Century Foundation released last week reveals that per-pupil spending in community colleges, where 44 percent of post-secondary students attend, most of them children of the non-rich rich, has been flat since 1999, while spending at elite private universities is up 31 percent. There is a huge mismatch between the greatest need -- affordable public universities and community colleges -- and where the investment has gone. Basically, it has gone to overbuilding and hyper-competition in elite universities, too much money for administration and marketing, for-profits siphoning off resources and graduates being saddled with lifelong debt (except, of course, for graduates with affluent parents, who generally pay the freight, leaving their offspring debt-free.) So now comes the shakeout. What form will it take? One trend is a shift to the German model of one Herr Doktor Professor and lots of adjuncts. More and more courses, even at elite universities, are being taught by graduate students or permanent part-timers who barely make a living and have little time for students. Another trend is the shift to one form or another of computer-based distance learning, as "massive open online courses" (MOOCs) become the next new thing. Despite the adjective, open, this also being seen as a profit center or a way to cut costs. Udacity, one of the for-profit MOOC vendors, has announced a partnership with Georgia Tech and AT&T that get you an MS degree for $7,000. There are good and bad versions of the promise of online education. It forces the question: what is the function of the university? Is a university a community? Is its purpose the broad education of young adults, or is it a glorified trade school? You can do trade school perfectly well from a distance at a computer, but at what cost to a "liberal" education? Or has a liberal education just become a fancy term for a finishing school and connections to the right people? If you believe that there is some value-added to spending four years on a campus in a community of scholars, getting course credit for studying online with America's superstar professors can be a terrific complement to what you do locally, but not a total substitute. On the other hand, if elite education is just a four-year vacation for the children of the elite, bring on MOOCs. Meanwhile, the risk is that a decent higher education gets further and further out of reach of the working class kids who most need it as a ladder of mobility. These are precisely the ones who are getting destroyed by student debt. They have higher dropout rates, partly because so many have to work part-time. Jason de Parle's authoritative piece on student debt and social class in the New York Times showed just how higher education increasingly reinforces class. Clearly, our society cannot afford the current rate of expansion of higher education costs. We've reached the limits of piling these expenses onto students. But as resources become more scarce, as the consequences of over-expansion hit, the social risk is that the shoe will pinch even more intensely in the wrong places. Everywhere you look in our new Gilded Age, public policy reinforces the lines of social class. Even in the original Gilded Age, America was also building free public universities. The Postwar boom was built on the free higher education of the G.I. Bill. Surely, one area were we should counteract the inherited effects of class and emphasize upward mobility is the promise of higher education. But all the signs point to a shakeout in which elite universities and elite students come out fine, and others suffer. Robert Kuttner's new book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos. Like Robert Kuttner on Facebook.

Ron Reagan and Mary Matalin debate Obama's speech refuting Bush-Cheneyism on terrorism. Was it transformational or largely rhetorical? No more treating local thugs as UBL? And despite Noonan's & Will's best efforts to blur Obama & Nixon, 44 has the Teflon of 40. LISTEN HERE:

As Americans enjoy the holiday weekend, does anyone know how Memorial Day originated? On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day -- a day set aside "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land." At the time, the nation was reunited politically, but it remained culturally divided, and so did Memorial Day observations. In the North, the federal government created national cemeteries for men who died in the war, while state governments from New York to Michigan gradually made Decoration Day an official holiday throughout the 1870s. In the South, from April to June, women dressed in white and knelt beneath statues of fallen Confederate leaders; they told stories about the men who appeared in portraits lining the walls of many Southern homes. By the early 20th century, as Americans faced enemies abroad, many of the surviving Civil War veterans recognized their shared wartime history and reconciled their differences -- turning Memorial Day into a national holiday. As America recognizes the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclaimation, we would do well to revisit the origins of Memorial Day among freedpeople in Charleston. While they honored those who fought for their emancipation, it was not simply a moment of great triumph and celebration for freedpeople, but a complicated process that led to the unexpected death of hundreds of thousands of former slaves. While former slaves venerated the staggering number of Union soldiers who died during the war, few have observed the ways in which war and emancipation led to the astonishing mortality of many ex-slaves. Former bondspeople liberated themselves from chattel slavery and entered into an environment that was plagued by cholera, dysentery, and yellow fever -- devastating 19th-century illnesses for which the medical profession knew no cure, and from which the poor and the marginalized suffered disproportionately. One of the most often-forgotten facts among the public displays and memorials about the Civil War is that the vast number of soldiers died from disease and sickness, not from combat wounds or battle -- in fact, the war became the largest biological crisis of 19th-century America. In their journeys toward freedom, ex-slaves often lacked adequate shelter, food, and clothing. Without the basic necessities to survive, freed slaves stood defenseless when a smallpox epidemic exploded in Washington in 1863 and then spread to the Lower South and Mississippi Valley in 1864 to 1865. A military official in Kentucky described smallpox as a "monster that needed to be checked," while another federal agent witnessing the "severity and almost malignancy of the epidemic" believed that the virus was on the increase and predicted that "before the coming summer is over it will decimate the colored population." In the end, the epidemic claimed the lives of over 60,000 former slaves, while other disease outbreaks and fatal epidemics raised the death toll of freedpeople to well over a million -- more than a quarter of the newly freed population. When historians describe casualties of the war, they uncover photos of mostly white enlisted men -- bodies strewn across an image of a battlefield or, worst, piled on top of one another in a deep ditch, dead from the effects of a cannonball explosion. What we don't see is dead freedpeople. The death of white participants in the Civil War is both valued and commemorated: framed as part of a larger saga of war and victory, and then propped up as the heroic embodiment of nationalism on Memorial Day. White people's death is reenacted annually by thousands of people-who, for a hobby on a holiday weekend, get to play dead. There was no rebirth for former slaves who died of disease and sickness after the war. There was no chance of them coming back to life in a costume worn by an admirer a century later. Buried under the fallen cities and the new harvests, the South, at its foundation, is a graveyard: a place where black people died in unimaginable numbers not from battle, but from disease and deprivation. In the recognition of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, let us not forget that freed slaves created Memorial Day. Let us remember that their prayers and observations were not just for the deceased Union soldiers on that first Memorial Day, but also for members of their families and their community who died in a war that was meant to free them. Jim Downs is the author of Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford U.P., May 2012). He is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College and has a MA and PhD from Columbia University.

At one end of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., in the expanse between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, the Bush administration authorized a memorial to World War II.