November 2007 Archives

I know it sounds weird to say that a guy making nearly half a million bucks a year is underpaid, but Joe Paterno is underpaid.

Consider some of the coaches who make more, some a lot more, and JoePa is a bargain.

The highest-paid college is Alabama's Nick Saban at about $4 million a year. If you recall, Saban is a job-hopper who hasn't stayed at one place long enough to have any lasting impact.

JoePa has been at Penn State since the earth cooled and his impact -- on and off the field -- cannot be matched. His players graduate and his overall record of achievement on the field is nearly unsurpassed. And if you throw in the fact that over the years, he's donated and raised millions of dollars for the university, it's hard to measure in dollars his influence. Name another major college football coach who has a library named after him.

Of course, you could look at the amount of money Paterno is paid and compare it with run-of-the-mill professors and comment about how our values are skewed and that football seems to be the tail that wags the dog at a lot of large universities.

Now, we know why the university fought to keep his salary secret. They're embarrassed. I mean, look at the list of Big 10 coaches and Iowa's Kirk Ferentz leads the pack at $2.84 million.

How many national championships and undefeated seasons does he have?

A little hint: It's the same as the number of libraries Ferentz has named after him.

We all know about Jeff Koons, York County native, artist.

Well, he's no starving artist.

His sculpture, "Hanging Heart," a nine-foot-tall, 3,500-pound bright magenta red stainless steel heart hanging from a golden bow, sold this week for a record $23.6 million.

It is the most expensive piece by a living artist ever sold, according to the Sotheby's auction house.

So the feds have indicted home run king Barry Bonds on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, the result of a four-year-long investigation.

Didn't see that coming.

You know all about that. But what's interesting is that, if you recall, a couple of years ago, a couple of former Dover Area school board members were accused, by a federal judge, of lying in court in the as-seen-on-TV Dover Panda Trial.

The judge, in his devastating opinion, pretty much said that the former school board members committed perjury, lying under oath specifically about the purchase of the unintelligent design books that appeared in the Dover High library.

Whatever happened with that?

President Dubya said that if the Senate doesn't confirm Michael Mukasey to be attorney general, he would leave the post empty.

Mukasey has run into opposition because he refuses to say whether waterboarding is torture. A solution to that: Waterboard Mukasey.

Anyway, no attorney general? Considering the performance of the last person in that job -- Alberto "Fredo" Gonzalez -- that would be an improvement.

Former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld used to send out between 40 and 60 memos a day to his staff, a level of craziness that is difficult to comprehend.

He called these little memos, containing his wisdom, "snowflakes."

Courtesy of the Washington Post, here are some excerpts:

"I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started."

"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."

"There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."

The guy was hilarious.

And nuts.

Long-time confidant of President Dubya, Karen Hughes, announced this week she was stepping down from her State Department gig. Her job was to improve the image of the United States abroad.

Of course, this is the second time she's quit. She resigned from the White House once before to spend more time with her family. After spending more time with her family, she decided to take on the job of polishing the U.S. image abroad. I don't know what that says about her family.

Anyway, as she steps down, the image of the United States abroad is at the lowest point, ever. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, even Canadians hold America in bad regard. Canadians!

Large majorities in other nations hold Russia and China in higher esteem that the United States, according to the survey conducted this past summer.

So, to Karen Hughes, we say, Mission Accomplished!