There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat
that they stop rowing.
We can never get ahead that way.
Harry S. Truman
Congratulations, Coach K!
Over the past week in which the NCAA Division 1 football all-time winning Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State was terminated over the emerging Sandusky scandal, we now have a new NCAA Division 1 basketball all-time winning coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke University notched the 903rd win of his career, eclipsing the record of his mercurial mentor, the legendary Indiana University Coach Bob Knight.
Incidentally, I want to reprint Bob Knight's statement on Coach K's surpassing his mark, because I think it is truly classy and sportsmanlike:
After reading about Roger Banister and the four-minute mile, I thought it would be neat to be the first coach to win 900 games. Once I reached that, I was hoping Mike would be the first person to surpass it. I also think it is neat for a coach and his former player to have the opportunity to win this many games while each one was coaching at nearly the same time.Mayor Bloomberg's Evacuation of Zuccotti Park:
He made great contributions to our Army team as a player, and has been a great example as a coach of how to do things the right way. There is no one I respect more for the way he went about coaching and following the rules than Mike. The history of college basketball has had no better coach than Mike Krzyzewski.
Thumbs UP!
Only the arrogance of self-entitled progressives can see equal access and maintenance of a safe, healthy environment at a public park and obeying the same laws as everyone else as a violation of the First Amendment. The fact that some progressive Democrats are attempting to align themselves in sympathy with the Politics of Envy against the Politics of Individual Responsibility; they are playing with fire, and they will be held accountable. As a libertarian-conservative, I have a great deal of tolerance for opposing viewpoints, and for the most part, although I personally disagree with almost everything they do, say, or stand for, I've barely touched on the Occupy movement. I've sat by silently while I've seen disturbing scenes from Oakland; I worked on an Oracle Consulting project for the City of Oakland for 6 months in 1998. What I saw on the streets recently was not legitimate dissent; it was lawlessness. That undermines any moral standing the movement has.
USPS Looking at Restructuring: Thumbs UP!
(But Privatization Is Better And Necessary...)
A $14B loss this fiscal year? The Postmaster can't make balloon payment to fund retiree health care benefits this Friday. Zero cash less than a year from now. 80% of USPS' costs are personnel (versus 60% of unionized UPS and 40% of Fed Ex). I've written a number of commentaries on the USPS; I pointed out that the postal unions were griping about the post office being required to fund a retiree health benefit, but I'm worried that the taxpayer, not the postal ratepayer, is going to get stuck with the retirement bills they did not oversee. USPS can't balance without cutting spending and increasing prices. Cutting spending means taking on unsustainable union contracts; raising prices means accelerating the decline of first-class mail, its major cash cow. We are not going to be able to nickel-and-dime our way to balance here: union concessions of a pay freeze are almost laughable in terms of cost controls when three-quarters of post offices are losing money.
Super Committee: Go DEEP!
Mayor Bloomberg: Let ALL the Bush Tax Cuts Expire:
Thumbs UP!
Any faithful reader of this blog knows one of my favorite statistics to recite is the fact that three-quarters of the Bush tax cuts went to middle-class (vs. upper-class) taxpayers. Obama has been trying to do everything in his power to separate out the middle-class tax cuts because, by some mystical revelation known only to Obama, they have "earned" to keep their cuts, despite trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. I am well aware that restoration of the Clinton tax brackets will have a dampening effect on growth, but I'm far more worried about the compounding effect of trillion dollar deficits, and any uptick in interest rates will not only result in interest payments crowding out necessary expenditures but will accelerate businesses' cost of doing business, leading to even more layoffs.
We need to resurrect Bowles-Simpson and other bipartisan efforts out there (e.g., the 'Gang of 6').
How do I sell this to my fellow conservatives? Well, first of all, I want to argue that if we're going to have short-term tax increases, we need to have short-term spending cuts, across the board, the end of automatic budget increases or transfer payment increass, etc. No sacred cows, including Medicare and social security cuts. I would like to see more of a shift towards consumption taxes, But bottom line, business leaders know that a declining dollar makes it more difficult to control their costs and government deficits raise their cost of capital. Yes, I want to review tax simplification and a number of other proposals out there. But EVERYBODY must have skin in the game, and we need to end trillion dollar deficits sooner than later.
How Is It Possible For News Media
To Get the Penn State Scandal Wrong?
I've heard ABC This Week panelists and Fox News America's Newsroom (this morning a jointly contemptuous discussion between a guest host for Bill Hemmer and Martha Maccallum) both discuss Draconian measures against the Penn State football program. Christiane Amanpour phrased the incident in provocative, presumptuous, judgmental terms that seemed to blur the line of journalistic ethics. Here is Maccallum's Tweet: "Should Penn State shut down the football program? if so for how long?"
First of all, I've strongly condemned in posts over the past week the circumstances involving the 2002 alleged sodomization of a 10-year-old boy in a Penn State facility shower by a FORMER coach, Jerry Sandusky. Whatever wide receiver coach McQueary, then a graduate assistant, saw and what he mentioned to Head Coach Joe Paterno is not clear. Sandusky has denied the accusation (he says that the boy and he were engaged in "horse play"; he has admitted to showering with boys after workouts and nonsexual contact) , and Paterno has said that McQueary told him that what he witnessed was suggestive of inappropriate behavior, not sexual behavior.
Coach Sandusky retired in 1999, three years before the shower incident. Sandusky's behavior occurred without the knowledge or consent of Penn State management. The issue here has to deal with the timely reporting of suspicious behavior to law enforcement. When people start talking about suspending a football problem 9 years after a single incident (to the best of my knowledge) because the athletic director and/or another administrator failed (versus the witness to the event whom himself failed to report it--see below) to contact authorities seems unfair to the student athletes and/or other coaching staff whom were in no way part of an alleged university coverup of the incident.
[McQueary in a recent email to a friend a week ago reportedly claims that he did report the incident to campus security and police and tried to stop the behavior. This is more confusing than ever if true: why wouldn't authorities have acted sooner to investigate Sandusky? Why would the authorities be pursuing Penn State administrators presumably for not reporting the incident if the police knew about the incident 7 years ago? And how is it possible that the adjacent county school district didn't know about volunteer coach Sandusky before a victim's mother came forward in 2009?]
You would think there would be enough lawyers hired by these networks (God knows how many lawyers Fox News hires as contributors: Megyn Kelly, Judge Andrew, Judge Judy, Lis Wiehl, etc.) You would think someone would discuss to what extent Penn State is implicated to the extent a suspect event allegedly occurred on campus.
I'm not a lawyer (thank God!) But there seem to be a number of salient issues that I have not even heard raised (I have not listened to Fox News 24 hours a day, so I can't be sure whether Ms. Kelly or others referenced these topics explicitly, but...)
For one thing, what legal obligation is there to report a crime? Second, assuming there is a crime, if the victim does not have legal status with the university, what responsibility does the university have to report a crime? Even if states which require reporting suspected abuse, it's usually based on some relationship between a professional and a victim, e.g., a teacher or doctor. McQueary was a graduate assistant; he was not a coach to the boy; the boy certainly wasn't a Penn State student. As far as I know, the boy was on campus without college knowledge or permission. Clearly Sandusky, as a retired coach, had access to that facility; I would assume that he had guest privileges and subject to relevant policies about other guests (especially those not part of his immediate family).
Did McQueary report the incident to campus security, which would then, I assume, have points of contact with local law enforcement? [See above note.] (Incidentally, McQueary reportedly has emailed friends, arguing that he didn't simply leave but insisted that Sandushy cease and desist.) We do know that Paterno sent McQueary's complaint up the chain (e.g., to the athletic director). Now we have a different question: if Paterno is correct, that McQueary did not report the incident as sodomization of the boy but merely deemed the behavior suspicious, does the university have a legal obligation to report a rumor of suspected activity? What if they made an allegation and then Sandusky sued them for damaging his reputation?
There's also a legal distinction between negligence and misprision (assuming statutory rape is a felony): was Penn State merely negligent in not exercising any legally mandated reporting of a suspicious incident or did it actually attempt to stonewall disclosure of the incident from the public (e.g., maybe up to the point of threatening McQueary's status with the university if he went to the police). Again, I don't have any other information beyond what has been circulated to the press. My guess is that the state of Pennsylvania is upset with the fact that Penn State knew about a suspicious incident but did not report it, for whatever reason.
And finally, the big issue I think deals more with a big loophole in Pennsylvania law about reporting an incident. (According to MSNBC, it is not one of the 18 states requiring adults to report relevant instances.) I would think if anyone had a legal obligation to contact law enforcement, it's the key witness. McQueary has not been indicted for failing to report the incident: only high-ups in the university.
The idea of sanctioning the current football team because an alleged crime occurred on campus years earlier and someone didn't report it promptly seems to be grossly unfair. We don't even know for sure what happened and what was discussed with campus highers-up. Jerry Sandusky has the American legal system's right to a presumption of innocence. Sandusky's lawyer Joe Amendola claims that they believe they know the identity of the boy, now in his twenties, and Sandusky gave the the athetic director Tim Curley contact information for the boy shortly after Paterno had spoken to Curley; the young man allegedly currently denies sexual activity took place.
[I will say one other detail I recently read about from the grand jury disturbs me: reportedly a prior boy's mother claimed in 1998 that Sandusky had showered with her young son, reported to Penn State police, but the District Attorney declined to press charges. If true, I would have expected higher scrutiny of Sandusky's behavior and a Penn State discussion with Sandusky about the use of the school's facilities.]
I have heard and read enough (including the bizarre Costas interview) to know I would never trust Jerry Sandusky with my own kids if I ever had any. I'm not sure what to make of Coach McQueary's statements. My personal opinion is that McQueary is engaging in self-serving, defensive rhetoric. There are other things I don't know--if McQueary did tell the police in 2002, what happened? Is it possible the District Attorney didn't think there was enough evidence to prosecute Sandusky? What if, say, the purported victim did deny McQueary's account? What does the prosecution think of its chief prosecution witness saying he did talk to police? Doesn't that mitigate the charges against Curley and Schultz? If what he's saying is false, doesn't that undermine his credibility as a witness?
I started off this commentary talking about two television programs where not a single voice rose up against what I regard literally as lynch mob mentality against Sandusky--and the Penn State football program. I mean literally a lynch mob mentality: Sarah Palin said on Greta van Susteren's On the Record program this evening that if the charges turned out to be true, she would personally furnish the rope to hang him. Like 3 or 4 times. However creepy this guy is--and hearing him talking about showering with boys (not his own sons) and touching them on their thighs truly nauseated me--Sandusky deserves his day in court. I think news programs need to stick to reporting the facts and leave the moralizing to op-ed columnists like myself; all that Amanpour and Maccaullum succeeded in doing is making it harder for Sandusky to get a fair trial.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Boston, "More Than a Feeling". I'm following my Foreigner series with my other favorite group from the 1970's. I mentioned in an earlier post how I had a strong disagreement with my once closest cousin Jacquie (actually, Jackie, but as a young woman, she preferred the Franco-American spelling; my late uncle was an immigrant) over the Grammy for new artist going to the Starland Vocal Band, which I correctly predicted was a one-hit wonder. My aunt and uncle had passed before my two cousins graduated from college. Jacquie is probably the closest cousin in age.
Jacquie was lead female singer for a 3-person band which did soft rock covers (e.g., the Carpenters) at various gigs (e.g., weddings) in southern Massachusetts when we were young adults. (Good pipes run in the family; I have a couple of nieces whom also have good voices. I won't mention their names, because one is/was an Obama follower and the other has personally told me she doesn't want to be in my blog. I know one of my nephews was in a garage band, and I know another has done some songwriting. I've offered to do some joint projects with some of them, but no takers.) Jacquie had a falling out with me, not over my championing Boston (like my first girlfriend, Jacquie came under the influence of a religious movement/cult, and they dropped contact with those perceived as not supportive of their choice). I would dedicate this performance to Jacquie, but it would probably tick her off. I still love you and miss you, Jacquie!
My favorite rock single from the 1970's; glorious songwriting and performance. How did they not hit #1 with this signature song? (Their only #1 was a power ballad in the mid 1980's, "Amanda".)
