Friendly Skies: United Airlines has a public relations mess on its hands. On Sunday, a flight departing Chicago for Louisville was fully loaded when a supervisor announced, “We have United employees that need to fly to Louisville tonight. … This flight’s not leaving until four people get off.” That put the passengers in a contentious mood.

The airline offered $400 and a night in a hotel and no one took it. Then they offered $800, and still no one volunteered. The crew skimped on the $1,350 maximum.

Next, the airline randomly selected four people to kick off the flight. One man who identified himself as a doctor refused to get out of his seat. Other passengers took video while several mugs wearing “Police” jackets hauled the man out of his seat and dragged him down the aisle.

Somehow the man escaped and ran back onto the plane, bloody and mussed. The airline then cleared the entire plane and removed the protesting man on a stretcher.

United CEO Oscar Munoz said in an Orwellian statement that the airline was attempting to peacefully “re-accommodate” the passengers it was ejecting.

Clawback: Wells Fargo bank is taking back $75 million from two former executives who were in charge while employees were engaged in a giant sales fraud scheme. Former chief executive John G. Stumpf and former head of community banking, Carrie L. Tolstedt, will have to cough up the money.

Sales employees were setting up phony accounts in the names of real customers in order to meet quotas. A 113-page report on the situation said executives ignored warnings signs, among them that an unusual number of customers never put money in their new accounts.

The report blames Stumpf for being trusting and out to lunch, and Tolstedt for creating a pressure cooker atmosphere among sales people. The report said, “She resisted and rejected the near-unanimous view of senior regional bank leaders that the sales goals were unreasonable and led to negative outcomes and improper behavior.”

The Bench: After more than a year with an empty seat at the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch was sworn in yesterday as the court’s 113^th justice. President Trump called the occasion “momentous” and “historic.”

Nation: A special education teacher and 8-year-old child were killed yesterday morning in a San Bernardino, Calif. classroom. A second child was wounded. The teacher was the wife of the gunman, who was known to school staff and was properly signed in. He killed himself after the shooting. — A federal judge in Texas ruled that the state’s 2011 voter identification law was designed to suppress the vote of black and Hispanic citizens in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos made a similar decision in 2014, but it was sent back to her for reconsideration by the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals. — Tesla, the electric car company that loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has reached a value greater than General Motors, which earns $10 billion. You know the old joke, Tesla loses money on every car they sell, but they make up for it with volume. — The NY Post reports that Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce, has undergone sex reassignment surgery.

Pulitzer Prize: Eric Eyre, a reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the trafficking of opioid drugs into West Virginia counties with the highest rates of opioid deaths in the country.  The paper has a circulation of just over 40,000.

Notably, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold won the prize for reporting on President Trump’s self-dealing from his own charitable foundation. Fahrenthold has done a lot of good stuff.

The Love Gov: Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, 74, pleaded guilty to ethics violations and resigned yesterday just as impeachment proceedings were getting under way. He was accused of committing four felonies and misusing state resources in connection with an affair he had with an aide while he was still married. Bentley once sent a state trooper to break up with his girlfriend, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, which is just ridiculous. Everyone knows that these days you break up by text message.

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