An Engineering Solution

Last year Richard Muller, the Berkeley scientist who headed the Koch-funded global warming study, announced that global warming was actually occurring. Now he has completed another study that acknowledges that the warming measured is completely due to carbon dioxide emitted by humans.

Muller was immediately attacked by climate change deniers like Anthony Watts, who released a dueling study claiming that NOAA artificially doubled temperature increases. Note that Watts isn't saying that there's no temperature increase, he's just quibbling over the amount.

We can now see conservatives starting to pivot on climate change. They can't simply deny it any more: climate change is obviously happening, what with the increasingly weird weather we've been having (more tornadoes, more drought), measurably higher sea levels on the east coast, demonstrably earlier springs and later winters, migrating species (resulting in dying forests and rampant wildfires in the west), and the melting of the polar ice caps.

In June Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, admitted that climate change was happening. He blithely stated that it was "just an engineering problem" and we'll just adapt. Yes, it's true: rebuilding your house after it's destroyed by a hurricane or a tornado is "just a construction problem." Moving millions of people out of Miami and Manhattan after sea levels rise is "just a relocation problem." Rising temperatures and climate shifts that turn America's breadbasket into a dustbowl are "just an agriculture problem."

As we continue to burn so much oil and coal, there will be climate winners and losers. Tillerson's "engineering problems" will cost some people trillions of dollars to fix and displace millions of people. The economies of some states and countries that just happen to be in the wrong end of the climate stick may be completely destroyed. Some island countries will simply cease to exist.

Rex Tillerson profits from the thing that causes climate change, and he wants to stick the rest of us with the bill for fixing the problems that his product causes. This attitude makes him, in engineering parlance, a "dick."

But if we're going to blithely talk about engineering solutions to climate change, the most obvious one is to stop using so much coal and oil and start generating more electricity with wind, solar and other technologies. After all, there's only a finite amount of oil left in the ground, which we will nearly deplete in my lifetime. We'll never really run out because it'll get so expensive no one will ever bother to drill the last drop.

From an engineering perspective, the internal combustion engine is a dying technology, soon to be made obsolete by a lack of fuel. Best to switch sooner than later, since it's got so many other downsides to it. And if we Americans do it, we'll get in on the ground floor and become the providers for the rest of the world. In addition to being an engineering solution, it's also a business opportunity!

Hmm....

They're All above Average

Ever notice that while everyone else's pay is going down, CEO pay is going up? There's a reason for that: they cheat.

When compensation committees (typically made up of other CEOs and their buddies) figure out how much execs should get paid, they typically create a "peer group" of similar companies, and use that information to determine how much their CEO should get paid.

The problem is the compensation committees cherry-pick the companies in the peer group, selecting companies like 3M that pay their execs more:

Indeed, 3M Co. was the most popular "peer group'' company in corporate America in 2011. It was included in the compensation analysis of 62 U.S. firms -- more than any other company, according to Equilar, an executive compensation data firm. 

Although companies use a variety of factors in selecting peers, high CEO pay plays a factor. 

"Why is the company so popular?" asks Carol Bowie, head researcher for the Americas group at Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), a proxy advisory firm. "There could be a variety of reasons, but it is certainly notable that [former CEO George Buckley's] pay was high relative to other peers.

 I guess CEOs, like the children in Lake Webegon, are all above average.

Indeed

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody Analytics, once and for all has settled (with the help of the CBO) the 500+ comments thread from a while back over at TSM.

Some supporters thought the lower tax rates would spur much stronger economic growth, and a few even hoped there would be so many new, high-paying jobs that tax revenues would actually increase, despite the lower rates. There is no evidence that this happened, however. 

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the Bush-era tax cuts cost the U.S. Treasury $1.6 trillion during the 2000s. Combined with the $1.2 trillion spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the $1.8 trillion needed to fight the Great Recession, this put the federal government deeply into the red. The nation's debt load today is as heavy as it has been since the 1940s and getting heavier.

To put it simply, they didn't generate growth nor revenue. Now that that is settled (although I'm nearly certain that the financial wizards at TSM, with their vast experience and day to day work with economics, will disagree:)), how do we solve the problem of the deficit? Well, exactly like I have been saying...one third tax cuts, two thirds spending cuts.

Extend the tax cuts for everyone except high-income taxpayers. The economy isn't great, but it is strong enough to handle higher tax rates on the wealthy. And we need the extra revenue, which under reasonable assumptions would reduce the federal deficit by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

Raising tax rates on wealthier households is necessary, but so, too, are more cuts in government spending. Washington last summer agreed to cut $1 trillion over 10 years as part of the deal to raise the Treasury's debt ceiling. Even with $1 trillion in additional tax revenues from affluent households, it will take an additional $2 trillion in cuts, under reasonable assumptions, to get our fiscal house in order. Given how politically difficult this will be, any agreement to raise taxes on the wealthy should also include more cuts in government spending.

And what will the result of all this be?

If policymakers follow this script, federal tax revenues will eventually rise to equal just over 19 percent of the nation's GDP, and government spending will fall to the equivalent of 21.5 percent of GDP. These are roughly the average ratios seen since 1980. In other words, government's role in our economy and our lives will be about what it has been for the last three decades. The deficit will still equal 2.5 percent of GDP (21.5 percent minus 19 percent); while more than ideal, this will be manageable, given the economy's expected growth.

That's right, folks, it's just that simple. Anyone think it will happen?

No Apologies Anywhere

As Mitt Romney travels abroad, it's important to point out his standard line about President Obama apologizing too much for the United States is one gigantic load of bullshit.

The Washington Post has an article detailing where this lie (see: Breaking the 8th Commandment)  originated. More importantly,.the Fact Checker illustrates, in a very complete way,  how this is lie is a four Pinocchio whopper. Example:

The Heritage Foundation list is also a stretch. Again, nothing akin to the word "apology" is ever used by Obama. In most of these cases, Obama is trying to make a clear distinction with his predecessor, much as Ronald Reagan did with Jimmy Carter, or George W. Bush with Clinton. Guantanamo or the war on terrorism figures in four of the so-called apologies -- and it is noteworthy during the 2000 campaign that Obama's GOP opponent, Sen. John McCain, also had said he would close the facility. Obama's comments express a disagreement over policy, not a distaste for the nation.

If one actually pays attention to what the president said as opposed to listening to the greatest propaganda experts since Goebbels, there is nothing close to an apology in any of his speeches.

Of course, he is Barack X, so there's no way that he can possibly be tougher than a Republican so...

I Love My Wife

Unless you live on a desert island and are completely self sufficient, you are part of our society which is, in fact, a collective. Grow the fuck up.
----Mrs. Markadelphia, last week.

Romney Didn't Build That

Last week President Obama gave a speech in which he said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Republicans have gone wild over the speech, intentionally misrepresenting what Obama said. "That" is a collective demonstrative pronoun relating to "roads and bridges." Yes, he could have said "those" or "that infrastructure" to be clearer. If Obama's intention was to say that business owners didn't build their own businesses, he would have said, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build it."

But if Republicans are going to carp about this niggling detail in Obama's speech, it's only fair to look at the niggling details of the business that W. Mitt Romney claims makes him qualified to lead this country, Bain Capital. Did he really build that?

I draw upon information on Romney's biography from this Wikipedia entry.

Romney went to public primary school, then attended a prestigious prep school paid for by his wealthy parents. He went to prestigious Stanford for a year, paid for by his wealthy parents. At age 19, during the height of the Vietnam War when men of the same age were volunteering for service or being drafted, Romney went to France for 30 months, presumably at the expense of his wealthy parents and/or the Mormon Church. Romney used four student deferments and a ministerial deferment to avoid serving in Vietnam (in 1969 his high number in the draft lottery kept him safe).

To be fair, being a missionary isn't necessarily draft dodging: all Mormons are expected to go on a mission. The Mormons I've known personally went on missions long after Vietnam was over. To be equally fair, however, the Mormons I know didn't go to France to live in a castle, eat brie and convert Protestants and Catholics to Mormonism. They went to third-world countries to build houses and feed starving kids.

Romney returned to the US and attended BYU, again presumably on his parents' dime. He then went to Harvard Business School. By all accounts Romney wasn't a stellar student (I have to wonder why all those pundits on Fox News aren't after Romney for his college transcripts).


Afterwards Romney went into management consulting. He was eventually hired by Bill Bain at Bain & Company. When Bain wanted to start a new venture in private equity and asked Romney to run it, Romney initially refused. After Bain restructured the deal so there would be no professional or financial risk to Romney, Mitt took the job. That was Bain Capital, Romney's baby.


Romney then went around trying to convince wealthy people to invest in the company. As detailed on this blog, he got about a third of the capital to start Bain from foreign sources, including many investors who eventually wound up in jail or were associated with Salvadoran death squads. I don't believe in guilt by association myself, but it's something that Republicans apparently value highly, because they constantly bring up Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, two men with whom Obama has only passing association.


Bain Capital's basic business model was explicitly to never do anything on their own: they talked other people into giving them money to perform corporate surgery on troubled companies. Bain bought businesses with borrowed money in highly leveraged buyouts. He then tried to turn them around by changing management practices, reorganizing, firing employees, etc. On several occasions the companies Bain bought went bankrupt after Bain forced them to take out loans in order to pay Bain lots of cash.

Romney never created anything in business from nothing, with his own money, his own ideas and his own initiative. The path for him was always paved by someone else: parents, teachers, professors, the Mormon Church, Bill Bain, wealthy investors, original company founders.

Are there people who do create something from nothing, people who got no help from parents, who got where they are solely through hard work and individual initiative? Yes, but they're extremely rare, and many Republicans would rather these people not be in this country. Take, for example, Harold Fernandez who is now a cardiac surgeon. Originally from Colombia, he entered this country illegally at age 13 on a leaky boat filled with illegal immigrants. He graduated valedictorian of his class and enrolled at Princeton with a fake green card and a stolen Social Security number. But even so, Fernandez didn't do it all alone: he got scholarships that were endowed by wealthy donors who were giving back to Princeton for all that Princeton gave them. Through their generosity, a person of meager means can enjoy the same advantages that Mitt Romney did.

I don't pretend I did it all myself: my parents were borderline poor, so I qualified for about $3,600 dollars in Pell grants over four years. That was almost enough to pay for tuition at a public university at the time. I also had a job and lived at home. My dad often asked to "borrow" a hundred bucks here or there to make ends meet. That small investment the government made in my education resulted in me paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal taxes, a fabulous return on the investment.

My dad, a rabid Tea Partyer, tried 50 years ago to create a business from nothing, but eventually gave up as larger companies squashed him in both building maintenance and real estate. Why? Because to succeed while going truly alone is almost impossible. My dad would hire other guys, but would never partner with them. That doomed him to always staying small. He ultimately went to to work as a bus driver and is now retired on Social Security and a pension from a municipal bus company.


And even the star of Mitt Romney's "You Didn't Build That" ad, Jack Gilchrist, received more than a million dollars worth of government contracts, tax-exempt revenue bonds, and federal Small Business Administration loans.

And, of course, Gilchrist didn't really build that company. His dad did.

The Ebb and Flow of Jobs

The other day my colleague on this blog said that jobs lost in 2008 will never come back. While some jobs may not be coming back in the next few years, he's wrong in the long term: we have seen this kind of job exodus in the past, and lot of jobs have actually returned. But it won't make Americans happy, because when those jobs do come back there may not be as many of them, they may not be in the same place and they will probably pay a lot less.

First, the article Mark referenced about the rising middle class across the world is correct: people in the developing world have been enjoying greater prosperity, in large part because American and European companies have been shipping jobs there for decades. As more people are employed in those countries the demand for their labor goes up, so their wages goes up, so more people are enjoying middle class incomes.

But as a result of these jobs being exported to other countries, competition for workers has decreased in the United States. This, combined with the destruction of labor unions, has resulted in stagnant and/or falling wages for the majority of Americans. American tax policies tilted in favor of multinational corporations have expedited job losses. Not only do Americans lose income when jobs are offshored, they wind up having to pay more taxes (or suffer larger deficits and government interest payments) because companies get a tax break for firing Americans.

Now, there are significant costs with offshoring jobs: relocating manufacturing to China has large transportation costs. For example, the United States exports iron ore to China and imports finished steel back from China. Over time transportation, energy and Chinese labor costs will continue to rise. At some point the cost of the energy required for transportation will exceed the labor cost differential between the US and China, the Chinese government will no longer be able to subsidize production, and it will no longer be cheaper to import Chinese steel. Steel production could then move back to the United States. (It could move somewhere else in the meantime, like Africa, if they have the raw materials and build the infrastructure to make exploiting low-wage workers profitable.)


How do I know this will happen? It already did in the automobile industry.

After WWII a lot of manufacturing was relocated to Japan there because labor was so cheap. "Japanese" became synonymous with "cheap," and not in a good way. Over time Japanese corporations began to expand their operations from the simple to the complex. Honda, for example, started out making motorcycles. Then they started making tiny cars for the Japanese market. In the 70s those cars were small and flimsy, but they were fuel efficient. During the energy crisis a market developed in the United States for those cars. Over time the quality of Japanese cars improved, and their exports grew. Then the Japanese made bigger and fancier cars specifically for the American and European markets. Over time time the Japanese standard of living rose to equal or exceed that of America, which meant that wages increased. Japanese auto manufacturers responded by building robots that reduced the number of employees required.

But Japan is an island with almost no resources: no coal, no iron ore, no oil. They have to import almost everything required for the production of automobiles, and then they have to ship all those heavy cars overseas. It became more and more difficult to make cars profitably in Japan, even with robots.

So Japanese car manufacturers started building factories in the United States. Production of cars used to be located primarily in Detroit at unionized factories, but the new Japanese factories were built in the non-union southern states. Toyota and Honda will build 15 million cars in the United States in 2012. Some German car makers also have plants in the USA. Even Ikea has an American factory.

At some point the same thing will happen with other industries that are currently located in China and India. Certain jobs will return to the United States as the rising price of energy drives up transportation costs. As wages in India rise and wages fall in the United States, even jobs like call center techs may move back here because the wage differential is too small to make up for deficiencies of offshoring customer service jobs: time zone differences, language differences, cultural differences, and the difficulties of managing off-site employees. Anyone whose ever called an offshore tech support line knows what I'm talking about...

In the long haul, sources of energy, the location of raw materials and the attendant costs of moving those raw materials and finished products will ultimately determine where jobs go.

There are, however, some jobs that will never come back due to changes in technology: the need for ferriers and harness makers all but disappeared when cars displaced horse-drawn carriages. The need for typists and typesetters has all but disappeared as computers entered the workplace. In the future, as oil supplies dwindle millions of people will lose their jobs in refineries and oil fields.

New jobs will be created as new sources of energy are developed. Because established business is only concerned about next quarter's profit numbers, they are terrible at investing in revolutionary new technologies.

At the same time Republicans are excoriating President Obama for loan guarantees for Solyndra (guarantees which the Bush administration was pushing for as well), the Chinese government is subsidizing renewable energy technologies, positioning themselves to dominate our energy future.

Well, At Least He Admits It

Not a single case of voter fraud in the state of Pennsylvania which makes me wonder...isn't this one of those needless laws that an over reaching government passes?

Oh well, at least GOP State House leader Mike Turzai admits what the real purpose of the law. All I have to do is let them speak:)

Yeah, seriously, WTF??!??

Be A Man...SUE!

I've always been amused when the right froths at the mouth of about trial lawyers and tort reform....and then turns around and engages in exactly that sort of behavior. 

The former top Senate staffer and key GOP strategist, who was fired after having an affair with Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, filed a wrongful termination suit Monday against his former employer that could bring allegations of discrimination, sexual affairs and backroom politics into open court. 

His complaint alleges that "similarly situated female legislative employees, from both political parties, were not terminated from their employment positions despite intimate relationships with male legislators."

Oh really? Hee hee hee....

A Severe Disconnect From Reality

This video below demonstrates how truly disconnected the right is from reality.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He's the "Obamamateur, Campaigner in Chief who hates America!"

They simply can't take yes for an answer so they have to invent a fictional person in place of the real one. Correct me if I'm wrong on this one but doesn't that break the 8th Commandment?

The Problem With Racism is Matt Drudge

I know several people that read the Drudge Report every day. This is dedicated to you.

A Wish That Will Likely Never Be Filled

As we draw nearer to election day this year, I want to reiterate one of my main complaint about the president. He (and Mitt Romney) need to be honest about the jobs that were lost in 2008. In short, they aren't coming back.

Why?

Well, here's a very good explanation. 

The middle class in the developing world is rising. The only question is how high it will go and how fast it will get there. About 85 percent of the world's people live in developing countries, yet they accounted for only 18 percent of global consumer spending just a decade ago; today, they account for nearly 30 percent. Consumer spending in developing countries has been increasing at about three times the rate in advanced countries, and we're not just seeing a growing demand for necessities, but also for middle-class staples such as meat, toothpaste, cell phones, and air-conditioners.

When you spend nearly 70 years spreading the word of free markets and capitalism, you get....free markets and capitalism. 

So when politicians complain about jobs being shipped overseas (and this is a case where both sides really are the same), it's basically a lie. If you want freedom and prosperity around the world, then you have to be able to put up with the increase in the labor pool which will result in unemployment at home.

The good news for our country is that we are providing much of the world with these products. Granted, the labor is coming from places like China and India but the higher end roles in private organizations are being filled by Americans. Bottom line...if you are unemployed, you need to continue your education so you can be more marketable in the world.

As Thomas Friedman noted last January, it's Made in The World now.

And So It Begins...

The second-guessing and accusations have begun in the shootings in Aurora. But Russell Pearce is blaming the victims, accusing them of cowardice.


Pearce is the former Arizona state senator who authored the controversial Arizona immigration law. He was recently booted out of office in a recall election. He posted the following on Facebook in response to the shootings in Colorado:

Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this "bad" man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man. Someone could have stopped this man. Lives were lost because of a bad man, not because he had a weapon, but because noone was prepared to stop it. Had they been prepared to save their lives or lives of others, lives would have been saved.

It is a delusion that someone armed with a concealed handgun could have stopped James Holmes. The events in Aurora were nothing like Flight 93, and more closely resemble the North Hollywood Shootout. In that incident two bank robbers in body armor and armed with AR-15s modified for full automatic fire held off police for half an hour. The cops had to wait for SWAT teams with rifles to show up because their handguns couldn't penetrate the robbers' armor.

Like the North Hollywood robbers, Holmes had a plan. He entered the darkened theater from an exit door he had propped open after scouting out the theater and the people inside. According to reports, he was wearing body armor, including a ballistic helmet, groin protection, and a gas mask. He announced himself as the Joker, making many think it was some sort of pre-arranged stunt. (He had even died his hair orange, though as all true Batman fans know, the Joker's hair is green.)

Holmes threw gas canisters into the audience and fired an assault rifle that had a 100-round drum. He shot babies and their mothers, children, teenaged girls, young men, even members of the military. When the AR-15 jammed he switched to .40 caliber Glocks. Anyone who got up to flee was shot.

After 90 seconds it was over. Holmes left the theater. He was apprehended because one of the officers on the scene noticed that Holmes' armor didn't match theirs.

Now look at the difficulties facing the audience. First, it was dark. Then there was the gas, obscuring their vision and making them tear up. Before charging off after Holmes, people had to make sure their children and girlfriends were safe. Then there were rows and rows of seats between them and Holmes, filled with screaming men, women and children ducking for cover. The floor was slick with blood. 

Now let's say that some of those in the audience had concealed weapons. Hitting Holmes in the dark, smoke-filled auditorium while blinking back tears would be next to impossible. Most of the shots fired at Holmes would miss. Where would those rounds go?

It would literally be a circular firing squad. If 10 people had 17-round clips in their Glock 9 mm pistols, that would be 170 more bullets flying around that movie theater. There would have been dozens more casualties.

Even if their aim were true, Holmes was wearing body armor. Like the cops facing the North Hollywood robbers, Holmes' armor would have stopped their handgun bullets. But after shooting at Holmes they would have his attention. He would return fire, hitting either them or their friends around them.

On Flight 93 things were nothing like Aurora. The heroes of 9/11 had plenty of time, in comparison to the 90 seconds the theater patrons had. The hijackers took over the cockpit at 9:31, leaving the passengers free in the cabin. Many of them made phone calls and they learned that planes had already been flown into the World Trade Center. Unlike the audience in the theater, the passengers on Flight 93 knew exactly what the terrorists had in mind. They even took a vote about whether they should storm the cabin, which they did at 9:57. The plane crashed at 10:03.

Aurora is the perfect example of why concealed handguns offer no protection. Trained cops armed with handguns were helpless against armored robbers during the North Hollywood shootout in broad daylight. What hope could the audience in the dark, gas-filled theater have against the similarly armored Holmes?

The bad guys will always have the upper hand. They have all the time in the world to plan their attack, stockpile their weapons, prepare their defenses, pick their location, find the holes in security, surveil their victims. To question the bravery of the victims in the theater and to claim that handguns would have stopped anything is the height of foolishness.

As a result of a few attacks by foreign terrorists millions of travelers must suffer long lines at airports, waste billions of hours at airports, take our shoes off, face restrictions on bringing liquids on planes, submit to intrusive body searches and repeated exposure to X-ray scans, and on and on. Republicans like Pearce are willing to disenfranchise millions of voters by requiring photo IDs to stop a few instances of voter fraud. Republicans like Pearce want to empower the police to stop anyone on the street and harass them for their papers.

Is it so unreasonable to ask gun owners to accept the same sorts of minor inconveniences that everyone else has to endure to reduce the number of people killed by our own domestic terrorists?

The Hammer Falls

Today the NCAA put the hammer down on Penn State: all victories from 1998 to 2011 will be vacated, the school must pay a $60 million dollar fine (equal to one year of profit from the football program), a loss of some scholarships, and the football program will be banned from post-season play for four years. It's a harsh penalty, but it's not the death penalty.


A lot of people, especially rabid sports fans, think this is totally unfair. They don't think the NCAA has jurisdiction, there was a rush to judgment, they didn't give PSU due process, they didn't wait until the case played out in the courts and all the appeals were exhausted. Somehow Sandusky's conviction doesn't matter to these folks.


But that's all irrelevant, because the NCAA isn't a government organization. It's a club that universities are invited to join. As such, it has the right to pick and choose its members. If one of its members does something that it perceives as corrupt, or has the appearance of corruption, it has the right to punish such behavior to discourage other schools from making the same mistakes.


The fact that Paterno wasn't convicted in a court of law is irrelevant. It's not a crime for boosters to give athletes cars or for students to play professionally before participating in an NCAA program. But such infractions will get your football program banned and its victories vacated in a heartbeat. If giving an athlete cash so he can pay his mom's rent is an infraction, letting former coaches use the shower to molest children should be an infraction as well.

The NCAA has a lot of problems. Many of its rules seem pointless and ridiculous, especially for "non-revenue" programs. The question of unpaid student athletes playing in college football and basketball programs that are essentially farm teams for the NFL and the NBA is particularly vexing. Hundreds of football players suffer permanent injuries from multiple ACL tears, to concussions, to broken necks. Some even die on the field. It makes you question why unpaid student athletes are the backbone of a multibillion dollar sports franchise, and why we even have football programs at universities. But that's a question for another day.

Yes, this punishment will hurt more than a hundred athletes and coaches who had nothing to do with Paterno's disgrace. It will hamstring the Penn State program for a decade. It will disappoint thousands, if not millions, of football fans. But maybe the next coach who finds himself in the same situation will do the right thing. Maybe the next university president will have the guts to stand up to a coach whose fans think he's the right hand of God.

The problem is, this entire fiasco was self-inflicted. If Paterno had turned in Sandusky way back when, he would have been the hero for doing the right thing, the hard thing, the sort of thing that he was famous for. Why didn't he? Why didn't he stay true to what he was?

That question is the most disturbing. Because it makes us wonder whether Joe Paterno ever really was that guy.

The Statue Comes Down

Last week someone flew a plane over Penn State trailing a banner that read, "Take the statue down or we will." Fearing violence between students standing watch over the statue and those who planned a Saddam-statue takedown, Penn State has removed the statue of Joe Paterno.

Paterno had taken on the stature of a demigod at Penn State. The Freeh report, released last week, determined that Paterno knew a lot more about Jerry Sandusky's crimes than he pretended to, and was involved in the decision to do the "humane" thing and cover up Sandusky's child abuse, allowing him to continue molesting children.

A typical reaction from Penn State was that of the statue's sculptor, Angelo Di Maria:

"When things quiet down, if they do quiet down, I hope they don't remove it permanently or destroy it," he said. "His legacy should not be completely obliterated and thrown out. ... He was a good man. It wasn't that he was an evil person. He made a mistake."

But this truly mischaracterizes what happened. In the beginning there were only vague suspicions about Sandusky, and Joe Paterno could stand by and silently acquiesce to Sandusky's evil, having no clear knowledge of it. But when Mike McQueary saw Sandusky sodomizing a child in the shower, the issue was forced. At that point Paterno could have continued to stand by and let justice follow its course. Instead, he actively intervened and prevented the incident from being reported to the police.

When you come right down to it, there is no one worthy of the sort of adulation we heap upon people like Joe Paterno, or Tiger Woods, or Barry Bonds, or Charlie Sheen, or Mel Gibson. They are all fallible people with their own blind spots and deficiencies. These guys are not heroes. They are not all that brilliant or moral. They are just like us. They are just doing a job that happens to be entertaining us.

The irony of this sorry story is that Joe Paterno was famous for being the exception to the corrupting influence of celebrity. He seemed to be a normal, moral, modest person who had not succumbed to the adulation of millions.

The people who are still trying to hang on to the Joe Paterno myth don't get it, but they share some of the blame for his fate. They put Paterno on that incredibly high pedestal and set him up for the big fall. If his fans had not built up his ego so high, had not made a college football program into the Second Coming, then perhaps Paterno would have stayed the modest and moral man he was when he started out.

A Hard Sunday Lesson Learned

Caught this headline the other day and laughed my pants off

Republican Horrified to Discover that Christianity is Not the Only Religion

But one Louisiana Republican is learning the hard way that religious school vouchers can be used to fund education at all sorts of religious schools, even Muslim ones. And while she's totally in favor of taxpayer money being used to pay for kids to go to Christian schools, she's willing to put a stop to the entire program if Muslim schools are going to be involved.

Well, that has to suck for her.

I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America's Founding Fathers' religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools. I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school.

Uh, there's only one problem there, Ms. Hodges.

As The Friendly Atheist points out, the brand of Christianity currently espoused by many in the religious right wing would be pretty unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers, who were pretty high on Deism and pretty low on Christian rock concerts/ talking about The Children's collective virginity/ having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But whatever. Facts are immaterial at this point.

The Founding Fathers came from many different religious backgrounds and were products of the Age of Enlightenment. Many viewed Christianity as I do...that Christs's moral teachings are just as important as his holiness.

And didn't Thomas Jefferson have a copy of the Koran?