With great power comes great responsibility.

— Uncle Ben to Peter Parker

We know approximately what then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary told Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno when he came to Paterno’s house the morning after witnessing the rape of a ten-year-old boy in the football locker room shower. That’s pretty much summarized in the grand jury presentment charging retired assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with that rape and 39 other counts of sex crimes. (You can read the presentment here; be warned, however: it is one of the most sickening documents I’ve ever read.)

What I’d like to know is what Paterno said to McQueary.

There’s one thing I’m sure he did not say. He did not say, “Mike, you have to go to the police about this. Right now. Don’t even think about possible consequences to yourself. I’ve got your back on this. I’ll protect you from the athletic department, I’ll protect you from the administration. But you’ve got to report this.”

How do I know Paterno didn’t say this? Because if he had, McQueary would have gone right to the police. He would not have waited until he was subpoened by a grand jury nine years later. Read more »

According to the grand jury indictment, it was a regular house of horrors:

The clinic reeked of animal urine, courtesy of the cats that were allowed to roam (and defecate) freely. Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were reused, over and over again. Medical equipment — such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff — was generally broken; even when it worked, it wasn’t used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut. And scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal remains. It was a baby charnel house.

Sounds like one of those back-alley abortion mills women who wanted to exercise their reproductive rights were forced to go to back in those bad old days before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion safe, legal and rare. At least, that’s the narrative.

But wait a minute. Roe was handed down 38 years ago. This indictment was handed down just last week by a Philadelphia grand jury after an investigation lasting nearly a year. You mean Roe didn’t make abortions safe, legal and rare?

Nope, it just made them legal. For any reason. At any time.

As for the clinic that was subject to the grand jury report, the paragraph quoted above is the least of it. According to the indictment, the doctor who operated this clinic “regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.” And the women who got these “abortions” didn’t fare much better. Read more »

It’s Christmas morning and my thoughts are on giving. And about who gives and who doesn’t.

It might surprise you — though it doesn’t surprise me — to learn that those who are loudest in trumpeting their compassion toward their fellow-man, namely liberals, “progressives”, social democrats or whatever you want to call them, turn out to be regular Scrooges in their personal giving to charity. Conservatives who, liberals claim, want to give tax cuts to the rich and care nothing about the poor and disadvantaged, give far more per capita than liberals, both absolutely and as a percentage of income.

This is actually old news, but I was reminded of it by Arthur C. Brooks’ op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Brooks was the author of a 2006 study relating people’s giving habits to their ideologies. In his op-ed, he reports,

The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

And it goes beyond just giving money. Brooks reports that the 2002 GSS found that anti-redistributionists were more likely to give blood, and also “to give someone directions on the street, return change mistakenly handed them by a cashier, and give food (or money) to a homeless person”. Read more »

Simon Property Group which, according to its website, is the “largest public U. S. real estate company”, has made it clear that it doesn’t want pro-freedom people on its property. At least, that’s the message the company has sent in two of its actions in the past month.

This week, the Charlotte, NC, station News Channel 36 (WCNC) reported that The Free Market Warrior, a kiosk that sells bumper stickers, posters and tee-shirts with such incendiary slogans as “Work harder, Obama needs the money”, “Impeach Obama” and “My parents chose life”, is being evicted from Simon Property Group’s Concord Mills outlet mall at the end of the month. I was alerted to this story by paleolibertarian blogger Karen De Coster.

Loren Spivack, owner of the kiosk chain, told WCNC that mall management contacted him after the Charlotte Observer published a letter from Jennifer Ibanez, a recent UNC-Charlotte graduate, who wrote to complain that items sold by the kiosk “support ideas such as racisms (sic), sexism, and even slavery”. Read more »

Wouldn’t you know it? Exactly one month after I wrote here about the common thread in the vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, they both get slimed on the same day.

Gov. Palin was visiting New York to help raise funds for a charity for special needs children, and while there took in a Yankees game with her 14-year old daughter, Willow. So, Tuesday night, late night talk-show host David Letterman decided to have some fun at their expense, joking about the governor’s “slutty, flight attendant look” and about Willow getting “knocked up” by Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez.

Ha-ha-ha! Now, isn’t that hilarious? I just wonder what kind of response Rush Limbaugh would have gotten if he made the same joke about Michelle Obama and the Obama girls, Malia and Sasha? Never mind. We don’t have to wonder. Limbaugh would be off the air — immediately and permanently. But Letterman, you can be sure, will continue to occupy his late night slot on CBS while his ratings resume their slide after enjoying a brief uptick following Jay Leno’s departure from NBC. Read more »