Super PACs raised about $181 million in the last two years — with roughly half of it coming from fewer than 200 super-rich people.

That’s the news from a study called “Auctioning Democracy” jointly conducted by Demos, an organization that says it practices “advocacy to influence public debate and catalyze change,” and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Both groups seek to strengthen, if not compel full disclosure and expenditure rules.

Super PACs’ power stemmed from the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2010 SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission decision. The Court’s Citizen United decision further strengthened corporations’ claim to personhood and weakened the requirement for full disclosure of donations to super PACs.

Politico’s Ken Vogel and Abby Phillip’s analysis of the study noted that

A relatively few wealthy backers are keeping super PACs afloat — and they’re saying so. Last year alone, individuals gave super PACs $63 million.

The news only worsens.

Again, from Politico:

That includes 15 people who gave $1 million or more, such as DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave $2 million to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting President Barack Obama, and John Paulson, a hedge fund billionaire who gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential campaign, according to FEC reports.

The figures don’t even include the $10 million that Adelson and his wife gave from their personal accounts to the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s GOP presidential campaign after the year-end FEC reports.

And from the Demos/USPIRG report itself:

For-profit businesses use Super PACs as an avenue to influence federal elections. 17% of the itemized funds raised by Super PACs came from for-profit businesses—more than $30 million.

Because Super PACs—unlike traditional PACs—may accept funds from nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors, they provide a vehicle for secret funding of electoral campaigns. 6.4% of the itemized funds raised by Super PACs cannot be feasibly traced back to an original source.

Super PACs are a tool used by wealthy individuals and institutions to dominate the political process. 93% of the itemized funds raised by Super PACs from individuals in 2011 came in contributions of at least $10,000, from just twenty-three out of every 10 million people in the U.S. population.

And still more from the report:

Nearly 20% of active Super PACs20 received money from untraceable sources in 2011. Six out of the 10 Super PACs that raised the most money in 2011 received money from untraceable sources. [emphasis added]

I have nothing to add except revulsion and disgust. Is this the method the Founders imagined would provide the United States with its best and fairest political leadership?

Fair enough. But before this particular runaway bandwagon crashes the gates of Canton, I’d like to ask a question: is Belichick really a Hall of Famer?

Let’s consider a few brief facts.

• He cheated. Yes he did. Stone cold busted. (Apologists can argue that what he was doing was no big deal if they like. But as bad as I detest the guy, I respect the hell out of his ability. He’s brilliant and even the slightest edge is something he can make hay with. Also, if it didn’t give him an advantage, why did he risk the punishment that was going to attend getting caught? Smart people simply do not bet high-risk/no-reward propositions.)
• One of his protégés, Skippy McDaniel, replicated the same crime when he was head coach in Denver. And got busted. This doesn’t automatically reflect on Belichick, but it does suggest something systematic, something programmatic, doesn’t it? Which means we might be skeptical about any claims that what the Pats got nailed for was a one-off.
• Most critically: Belichick has won three championships, but none of them since his cheating was exposed.

The Patriots might win Sunday, and if they do then it takes some steam out of the question I’m posing. But:

• if the Giants win, and
• if Belichick never wins another title (which would be consistent with what has historically characterized the careers of most NFL championship coaches more than a few years removed from Super Bowl wins), and
• if you had a Hall of Fame vote…

…would you cast it for Bill Belichick, whose résumé would, at the time of consideration, include zero Super Bowl wins that you could assume were clean?

I don’t know. I might vote for him eventually, but not on the first ballot. And maybe never, because I’m one of these self-righteous dinosaurs who thinks that sportsmanship and ethics matter.

What do you think?

We were so naive back then about purchasing power financing campaigns. How times have changed despite the continuing fiction of claims by candidates of “popular” support. Our small $201 checks no longer matter. Other people write bigger checks. Corporations can write indescribably large checks.

A report from the Campaign Finance Institute following the 2008 election refuted their claims. Looking at small donors (at least $201), mid-range donors ($201-$999) and large donors ($1,000 and up), the CFI concluded that nearly half of the 450 million donations to President Obama’s campaign committee came from the $1,000-and-up donors.

Both Obama’s and McCain’s campaign made use of bundlers (fundraisers who package checks from other donors), a practice perfected by President George W. Bush. Each raised tens of millions of dollars through the bundled checks of large donors.

Well, presidential candidates are populists no more. Super PACs, organizations freed by the Supreme Court to raise unlimited amounts of money for electioneering communications, have killed that lingering civics-class fantasy.

President Obama’s campaign continues to try to perpetuate the myth that his principal support comes from “small” donors. He has raised about half of his campaign committee’s $125 million (so far) from under-$200 donors. The man of the people, Mitt Romney, has pulled in about $56.5 million for his campaign committee — and less than 10 percent came from small donors.

But enter folks like billionaire Harold Simmons. According to the Center for Responsive Politics:

Simmons and his holding company, Contran Corp., gave $8.5 million to three super PACs, two of which support candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, in the last quarter of the year. [emphasis added]

Enter casino mogul Sheldon Adelson et familia. Without the $11 million-plus given to super PACs by him and his family, Newt Gingrich would quietly drown in the political quagmires of his own creation.

And that small-donor populist, President Obama? First, he has a network of 445 bundlers who bring in millions of dollars to his campaign committee; 61 of those brought in at least a half-million dollars each.

Second, there’s the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action. Sadly, it’s relatively poor ($4.1 million) compared with pro-Newt and pro-Mitt super PACs. But give it time: As The Boston Globe reports, “reliably liberal donors” contribute. You know the ones: Hollywood and labor unions. They’ll eventually open their wallets. But will they be needed?

“That [super PAC] hasn’t really caught on with progressive donors,’’ said Anthony Corrado, professor of government at Colby College. “There are plenty of ways to support the president without having to give to a super PAC. At this point, the expectation is the president’s campaign committee will be very well-funded, and he’s not going to need the additional resources a super PAC might generate.’’

I’m not so sure. At least 290 super PACs exist. Of the top 10 grossing super PACs, conservative-oriented ones have raised nearly $60 million; liberal-oriented ones only $17.3 million.

The CFI report defined “large” donors as those who gave $1,000 or more to formal candidate campaign committees. But even those donors were limited to a maximum total donation. Not so the donors to super PACs. Thanks to reporting by Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo of The New York Times, we learn:

Close to 60 corporations and wealthy individuals gave checks of $100,000 or more to a “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses, according to documents released on Tuesday, underwriting a $17 million blitz of advertising that has swamped his Republican rivals in the early primary states. [emphasis added]

The law says super PACs cannot “coordinate” with candidates’ own campaign committees. But Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have exploded that particular legal dodge, haven’t they?

Super PACs, because they are permitted to spend half their revenues in “electioneering communications,” will have a far greater influence than candidates’ own campaign committees. In the four GOP primary contests, super PACs have spent about $44 million. And on what? Attack ads. Vicious, unrelenting, often misleading attack ads.

After just four nominating contests in January, the super PACs already account for nearly half of all television ads bought so far, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. Meanwhile, ads funded by the candidates themselves dropped 40 percent.

Super PACs are accumulating extraordinary amounts of political money. We’ve all been focused on the role of super PACs in the presidential campaigns. But as I wrote more than two years ago, billionaires rule politics beyond presidential campaigns. Think Bloomberg for mayor. Think Whitman for governor.

Super PACs will have more than enough money to pour into presidential politics. But the spending won’t end there. They’ve taken aim at backing candidates for or re-electing incumbents to Congress. Reports Dan Eggen of The Washington Post:

The powerful political groups known as super PACs, whose heavy spending has become a significant factor in the presidential race, are also beginning to play a role in congressional races around the country. The groups have set off a scramble among candidates in both parties, who are now struggling to cope with a flood of negative ads run by organizations that are outside their direct control.

Targets of super PAC money in recent months include at least two dozen pivotal House districts around the country, along with high-profile Senate races in states such as Massachusetts, Ohio, Utah and Indiana, according to Federal Election Commission data and interviews with political strategists.

Can super PAC-funded advertising in gubernatorial races be far behind?

Big political money, it seems, follows a basic Reaganomics principle: Trickle down. So much money controlled by the very wealthy, corporations, and unions now rules politics at an increasing number of levels.

If you take pride in giving the reportable $201 donation to a candidate’s campaign committee, you’re still living in a a fantasy that your gift matters.

Yeah. This is a sweet gig. I want to stay here. In fact, I want to … move up. Be in the leadership. Be a mover and shaker. Now how am I gonna do that beyond kissing the speaker’s ass (and those of his damn deputies, too) and voting however he (or she) tells me to?

It will take money for that Republocrat to ascend higher in the House’s toadying ladder of leadership. Lots of money. And as we know, House members (and senators) have a vehicle to collect and dispense money to other House members — the leadership political action committee. A principal reason for the existence of leadership PACs to is buy friends and influence on Capitol Hill. Apparently, hard work and intelligence are insufficient.

For example, suppose our young Republocrat wants to donate money to another incumbent (or challenger identified by the National Republocratic Party as worthy of being admitted to the club) or to the national party itself. As a private citizen, she can only give the legal maximum of $2,100 to her would-be friend’s campaign committee. But if that incumbent has a leadership PAC, then she can give $5,000 per year from her leadership PAC to that PAC.

If our Republocrat’s sitting in a safe district, she can encourage donors to give to her leadership PAC instead of her re-election campaign committee. She can use the donations in the leadership PAC to make friends with others in the House — by giving $5,000 to the leadership PAC of someone she wishes to be friendly with (or buy, to be blunt). The more money in her leadership PAC, the more influence she can peddle.

As the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

By making donations to members of their party, ambitious lawmakers can use their leadership PACs to gain clout among their colleagues and boost their bids for leadership posts or committee chairmanships. Politicians also use leadership PACs to lay the groundwork for their own campaigns for higher office. And some use their PACs to hire additional staff—sometimes even their family members—and to travel around the country or eat in some of Washington’s finest restaurants. The limits on how a politician can spend leadership PAC money are not especially strict. Also, lacking a requirement that lawmakers disclose their affiliations with leadership PACs, these committees have been able to slip under the radar for years.

And big money is involved. And big donors chip in. Contributions to politicians’ leadership PACs reported to the Federal Elections Commission from 1990 and into the 2012 election cycle total $286,110,856. Only about $3.5 million came from individuals; $268,358,732 came from other PACs. On the Hill, outside PACs feed leadership PACs at five grand a clip. That adds up over time.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision of two years ago, so-called super PACs are getting most of the media attention — even though super PACs were created as a result of the Court’s July 2010 SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission decision. Leadership PACs have been overlooked because, it appears, super PACs raise (and hide) a helluva lot more money. But leadership PACs, over time, have raised enormous amounts of moolah.

Super PACs differ from leadership PACs, according to the center. Such PACs, also known as independent-expenditure committees, may raise as much money as they want. No limitation are placed on the size of donation a contributor may make. Super PACs may not donate money directly to political candidates. But they can spend as much money as they want to “overtly advocate for or against political candidates.” According to the center, at least “290 groups organized as Super PACs have reported total receipts of $32,008,813 and total expenditures of $34,335,760 in the 2012 cycle.” (See the list here.)

The 2012 election cycle is far from over, with the greatest amount of spending yet to come. But in a little more than a year and a half, super PACs have pulled in more than $32 billion. You’ve seen how that money has been used in advertising to support or, more often, attack presidential candidates in the primaries so far. Florida’s a pricey state for ad buys, so super PACs will raise even more and spend even more.

So far, in the 2012 election cycle, leadership PACs have pulled in nearly $12 million, a third of the identified super PAC donations. But in the 2010 election cycle, the leadership PACs hauled in more than $52 million. That’s a lot of $5,000 checks.

The current speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner, wrote plenty of them. In fact, in 2006, when he wanted Republicans to vote for a free-trade agreement with Oman (Oman? Really?), he had already “invested” in the vote of my then-congressman. Boehner’s leadership PAC, the Freedom Project, gave my then-House rep $10,000 — $5,000 in the 2004 election cycle and $5,000 in 2006. From a post I wrote in 2006:

In fact, Rep. Boehner’s leadership PAC since 1997 has disbursed more than 530 checks worth $5,000 each to House incumbents and GOP House candidates. That’s more than $2.6 million of largesse spread among the faithful. The PAC shipped off more than $189,000 in 64 smaller checks. And there’s the $15,000 sent each year since 2002 to the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Here’s the list of recipients of checks from the Freedom Project.)

Boehner is speaker in significant measure because he spread the wealth and, in turn, received political support as he climbed higher in the House. (But apparently he didn’t spread enough to the tea party conservatives swept into the House in 2010. They’ve balked several times at his leadership. And they’re learning how to play the PAC game.) That’s the primary role of leadership PACs: financially support other incumbents and candidates in return for political support later.

You’ll read a great deal in coming months about super PACs and their big-money influence on the 2012 elections. But over the long term, political power in Congress is heavily influenced by leadership PACs and how they’re used.

Oh, by the way, leadership PACs are regulated — but loosely. Funds in leadership PACs cannot be allocated to personal use. But after a senator or representative leaves Congress, that prohibition no longer applies.

Here’s the lede from a November 2010 New York Times story by Eric Lipton about abuses of leadership PACs:

Henry Bonilla, a Texas Republican and former member of Congress, has tapped into his political piggy bank to fly around the United States, eat at some of San Antonio’s finest restaurants and to cover bills at luxury hotels like The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla. [emphasis added]

And later in the story:

Former members are largely free to spend the money left over in their political action committees however they choose. [emphasis added]

Apparently, you can take it with you.

Nice gig, eh?

Had the last few months not happened we’d now be anointing JoePa for sainthood. As you’ve been told so many times before, and are now hearing all over again, he was all that was good and true in collegiate athletics, a man who did things the right way, etc. The thing is, that’s a woefully simplistic commentary on Paterno and how he did business. Also, the last few months did happen. So we now find ourselves needing to address Paterno’s legacy in two parts. Let’s do the ugly bit first.

1: Paterno and the Sandusky Scandal

There is no pretending it didn’t happen. There is no excusing Paterno’s failure to make an end of it. And in my book, there is no forgiving it. Paterno, for whatever reason, abetted the actions of a serial pedophile and rapist. These are the facts of the matter.

That said, we’re dealing with human behaviors here, which means unimaginable complexity. In a comment on Brian’s post the other day, my friend and colleague Marti Smith offered some thoughts toward perhaps explaining why Paterno didn’t do anything and everything necessary to end Jerry Sandusky’s victimization of children. Her remarks were, I think, insightful and helpful, and it’s always important to understand that explaining and excusing are different things. Nobody here is excusing (except the occasional dimwit commenter or PSU alum).

Paterno’s own remarks, toward the end, illustrate the conflict he must have felt. On the one hand, what he was being told was no doubt unspeakable for a man of his generation and upbringing. On the other, men of his generation and upbringing were organizational men, and one behaved according to the rules of the system when it was transgressed. This would have been a basic assumption for Paterno, I imagine.

When that system failed, I imagine he might have reacted as I would if, sometime this afternoon, the law of gravity were to suddenly stop working. This doesn’t make it okay, though. I’d be obliged to improvise, grabbing something and hanging on, lest I float into space. And when the system failed in the Sandusky affair, Paterno was likewise obliged to improvise. He had all the power one would have ever needed.

His failure to do so resulted in what I believe is probably the second greatest fall from grace in the history of American sports culture (behind OJ – and we might well argue that Paterno’s crash was the worse of the two). He paid for his crime with his reputation and his death last night assures that he will have no chance to repair it.

2: The Saint in the Swamp: Joe Paterno and College Football

Joe Paterno won more games than any coach in college football history. And for all those decades of victorious Saturday afternoons and national titles (and should-have-been national titles) there was never even the slightest whiff of impropriety. Well, mostly. He recruited clean and brooked very little nonsense from his players (up until some off-field issues in recent years, anyhow). By the standards of big-money intercollegiate athletics Joe Paterno was Mother Teresa.

The problem with that, and accordingly the problem I have with attempts to canonize any college athletics figure, is that the system itself is corrupt to the core. I can spend quite a bit of time delineating a long list of specific indictments, but in the end it all boils down to one simple fact: revenue-generating university sports are, in every way, the antithesis of what a university should be. Universities are about cultivating minds and spirits in ways that enrich the society, that advance the store of human knowledge, that exalt the potential of the intellect to accelerate the evolution of the species.

University sports, though, breed an apartness between the star athlete and the mere student, insisting that intellectual genius bow down to the primacy of the jock. Said jock may be a genuine scholar-athlete but is in too many cases a challenge that the athletic department has to sneak through the side corridors and and back alleys of NCAA eligibility requirements. Big-money sports add literally nothing to the legitimate mission of a university and ethically they have as much place on campus as a Provost-administered prostitution ring.

None of this is terribly easy for me to think about because I love sports. I lament the state of my Wake Forest basketball team and cautiously hope that things are on the way up for my Buff football team. I watch March Madness with as much excitement as the next guy and bitch to no end about the charade that is the BCS. All three of the universities that have awarded me degrees are in major conferences (ACC, Big 12, Pac 12) and two more where I have served as a professor play D-1 in some sports. So there’s a part of me that feels like a hypocrite, and that’s a feeling I don’t care for.

But at least I recognize my inconsistencies. I’ll always remember a letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register one Sunday in the late ’80s. I was an MA student at Iowa State and the Big Peach was a ritual during my two years there. The University of Iowa had, as I recall, brought in a new president and said president was proposing some big, if not radical reforms to its athletic programs, all aimed at better integrating its NCAA sports into a proper understanding of the purpose of a university.

Reaction was swift and predictable. One Hawkeye fan wrote something to the effect of “if we aren’t careful we might end up like Northwestern.” Yes. The gods forbid that Iowa City turn out to be like those yutzes up in Evanston, who are, you know, one of America’s premier academic institutions. I do not recall any subsequent letters to the editor calling that writer out for being an anti-intellectual jock sniffer, which only added to my disappointment.

That, friends, is the context in which all eulogies for the late Coach Paterno exist. The Sandusky scandal notwithstanding for a moment, perhaps the thing that can be said for JoePa is that he was the best a profoundly corrupt system can possibly hope for. This is not mild praise, mind you, because corrupt systems corrupt those that exist within them. Still, given what I said above, it’s also like being acclaimed as the most compassionate pimp in the entire slum.

Of course, all the comment on the life and times of Joe Paterno emerge from another context, and this one is equally important. Here in America, Hollywood has crafted four boxes into which all human beings can be neatly dumped: heroes, villains, victims and pawns. You’re great, you’re evil, you’re an unfortunate plot hook or you really, honestly, do not matter. We are not comfortable with figures who cross these boundaries. Take another great, but flawed college coaching icon, Bob Knight. He is unquestionably one of the greatest basketball minds in NCAA history. He is also, unquestionably, one of the biggest bullies and most arrogant douchebags in NCAA history. Is he a genius or is he an asshole? Well, yes. Yes he is.

In the Paterno movie Jerry Sandusky is clearly a villain. For a lot of people, so are the members of the Board of Trustees. The kids Sandusky raped – victims. The university’s faculty? Its world-renowned scholars? The students who were back in the dorms studying instead out destroying things as the story unfolded? Pawns. If you’re nodding and agreeing with me, you’re one, too.

What we’ll be seeing as the mourning period for Paterno unfolds is less about a clear-minded assessment of the facts and more about crafting a narrative. Think of it as hundreds and thousands of people subconsciously collaborating on a Hollywood script for a blockbuster about the coach’s life. In order to sell it to the studio, though, we have to make sure it speaks to the deep psychological tropes by which the masses make meaning out of life. In other words, this isn’t an investigation, it’s a ritual. The audience won’t be comfortable putting a man they felt so positively about for so many decades, the grandfatherly icon meeting with students on his lawn, in the villain box. The pawn box is right out. Which leaves us with hero box and the victim box. As you read what people have to say today and in the coming days, think about this.

In the end, it’s nearly impossible to be a saint in a swamp. Too many Americans seek to iconize those who come closest, but others of us have a better solution: drain the goddamned swamp.

The five are fired football coach Joe Paterno, former president Graham Spanier (who remains a tenured faculty member, as does Paterno), assistant coach Mike McQueary (who is on paid leave), former vice president for finance Gary Schultz (who resigned), and former athletic director Tim Curley (who is also on leave). The latter two are facing criminal charges of perjury and failure to report alleged sexual abuse. Penn State is reportedly paying for their legal defense, as well.

Pennsylvania’s freshly minted public records law, which was revamped and updated in 2008 and took effect January 1, 2009, does not mandate the disclosure of all public employee salaries. Michigan, to its credit, does, as it should. In fact, Michigan’s freedom of information law specifically states that public universities, school districts and community colleges “shall upon request make available to the public the salary records of an employee or other official of the institution of higher education, school district, intermediate school district, or community college.” Taxpayers fund, at least partially, state located public universities. And what these employees are being paid should be available to the public.

The four “state related institutions” listed in Pennsylvania’s statute are Penn State, Temple, the University of Pittsburgh and Lincoln University. (The University of Pennsylvania – aka Penn – is a private university founded by Ben Franklin).

The law requires that by May 30 every year these four universities have to report their IRS Form 990s, the salaries of the officers and directors, and the highest 25 salaries paid to employees of the institution who were not included in the list of officers and directors. Spanier made $813,855 in 2009. Paterno’s pay was more than $1 million, which is not unusual for football and basketball coaches at schools like Penn State. What the others made is anybody’s guess.

What is unusual, or at least unconscionable, is Penn State’s refusal to release salary information. Penn State is a public university supported, at least in part, by its tuition-paying students and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. It should reconsider its stand on this and opt for transparency. The school will be in the crosshairs as a defendant in a whole lot of civil lawsuits as the alleged victims and their families  sue for millions in damages. Penn State is more collectable than Jerry Sandusky.

Several key officials apparently kept a dirty little secret for years. Transparency now is a small step in a positive direction.

Unfortunately for James the candidate, he now finds himself embroiled in a controversy that has gone viral. Just Google “Craig James killed five hookers” and you’ll see what I mean. The story has even infiltrated a site dedicated to soliciting donations for James, with one donor insinuating a poem with a clever acrostic calling James a “hooker killer.” (Note the first letters in each line of the “Ramzy” item in the second screen grab below.)

Some are chalking the story up to something called a “Google bomb,” which sources describe as a sort of search engine hijacking. To see an especially successful example, go to Google and search for “Santorum.” NSFW, indeed.

Still, I cannot find any indication that the James campaign has so far denied the charge, nor do I find any official comment as to whether James consorted with prostitutes, alive or dead.

Caution is urged, as this story is potentially a hoax, but voters are always encouraged to fully inform themselves, especially in an age so rife with partisan media-generated controversy. Witness the ongoing battle over whether evolution is factual or merely a theory, which plays out in debates over whether or not to teach creation science in schools. Or the raging conflict over climate change – is it real or is it the product of a media-driven liberal agenda? And what about President Barack Obama’s nationality? Many remain unconvinced that he was born in the United States. It can be difficult to know what sources to trust, so the only reasonable recourse is to gather and consider critically as much information as possible. Nor should we rush to judgment, one way or another. The stakes are simply too high, and if it takes months, even years, to reach a definitive understanding of the events surrounding the James/hooker killer mystery, it’s time well spent.

The citizens of the state of Texas should demand that James, who seeks one of the highest offices in the nation, address these allegations forthrightly, making available all documents that might potentially be relevant to the allegation, even if such documentation proves personally embarrassing.

As we do not currently have before us sufficient evidence to rule out the possibility that James is a serial murderer, it seems appropriate to call for more data and to initiate a vigorous public debate on the issue. Information is the lifeblood of participatory democracy, and voters are sometimes justified in their reservations regarding candidates who seem elusive about their personal and professional pasts.

Thanks to Frank Balsinger for the screen shots of the donation site shown above.

• In a post on the University of Colorado’s unconscionable decision to make Bruce Benson its president, I called Bruce a “perennial pigfucker.”
• Commenting on his censure by the Colorado legislature for an overtly racist attack on migrant workers, I referred to him as “Colorado’s most famous asspipe.”
• In a piece on why CU will never get another penny of my money I said this: “may Bruce die soon and rot in Hell for all the damage his malevolent bullshit has wreaked on the citizens of Colorado.” (The CU development office called me the other night, by the way, so their records do not yet include a note wondering if it’s possible to get someone’s diploma rescinded.)
• In an article on Colorado Springs, America’s Teabagger Paradise, I referred to Bruce as “one of the most notorious political pigfuckers in America.” (I know, I’m overusing “pigfucker.”)
• In an unusually charitable follow-on to that post I characterized him as the patron saint of anti-tax extremism.
• Then there was a scathing attack on a mealy-mouthed John Hickenlooper for Governor ad where I encouraged J-Hick not to settle for being a kinder, gentler Douglas Bruce.
• My analysis of CUs rebranding efforts made mention of “half-witted legislation like Douglas Bruce’s ’Taxpayer Bill of Rights.’”
• In comparing Bruce to fellow tax cheat Al Capone I allowed that “[h]ad he lived during prohibition Bruce would perhaps have been a lot like Capone, except instead of mowing down rival gangs one imagines him targeting schools, the poor and Mexicans.”

On the whole, I think my opinion of Mr. Bruce is clear. Then yesterday, Christmas came early in the form of this headline, which Brian noted:  Colorado anti-tax extremist Douglas Bruce convicted on multiple charges.

Oh, dear. So much internal conflict. Part of me wanted to sing and dance. Part of me wrestled with an impulse to hope that Bruce dies in prison, preferably a victim of gang-rape. But dammit, I’m not going there. I’ve put a lot of effort into my Sam 2.0 project, trying diligently to be a better man. That kind of hatefulness is beneath me, and besides, it’s Christmas. Where’s my charity?

So instead, I’ll simply note that Bruce faces up to 12 years in the hoosegow for his crimes against the citizens of the Centennial State. And in the spirit of generosity that marks the season, let me be the first to wish him Happy Holidays. For many years to come. Cañon City is lovely this time of year.

It feels good taking the high road.

The question, of course, is not why Sandusky and Fine did what they are alleged to have done. We know why they did it. Why do cats chase mice? Nor is the question, really, why Penn State bureaucrats chose to cover for Sandusky. Because that’s what faceless bureaucrats get paid to do–dig holes and bury things that smell. It would not surprise me at all if the regret felt by those now-out-of-work bureaucrats is less about not stopping Sandusky, and more regret they didn’t dig the hole deeper. No, the real question is why decent people didn’t do more—McQueary, Paterno, Laurie Fine.

The simple truth is that this is a crime that until very recently was not treated as a crime. Powerful old men have been buying and bullying young boys for sex forever, and by and large people have turned their heads. Maybe those involved would have jumped if it had been stranger-on-stranger sexual assault, or if the victims had been female, or if the predators had not been at the top of the social stratum and the victims lower down. Perhaps, if this had been a man in a van cruising a wealthy suburb and pulling a young girl in, those same people would have camped out on the door step of the police department until someone listened to them. But not for a poor boy sitting on the lap of rich old Uncle Bernie.

It is only now that our society is finally starting to really treat it as the crime it is. Good. It’s about time we stopped the bastards.

When I was a paperboy in Waycross, Georgia in the late sixties, there were two houses we were not allowed to enter if invited in by the owners—both middle aged white males. If told to come in to wait for our money on collection day or if offered a Coke, we were told to get on our bikes, ride away and tell Mr. Cardinal, who ran the circulation department. The owner of one of these ran a popular vegetable stand, and always had a young boy, working alongside him. Always a different boy and always from out of town. Mr. Cardinal knew enough to tell us to steer clear of these men, so he must have known. It’s certainly reasonable to think others must have known as well, but it was not talked about.

There was also a middle aged man, Jim, who delivered papers to the rural routes in a car. He always had a helper with him, a young boy. Mr. Cardinal also told us that none of us were allowed to ride in the car with Jim under any circumstances. Later, one of those helpers and I were both eighteen and living in Atlanta. One drunken night he told me that he’d been paid to have sex with Jim, not deliver papers. He boasted that he’d never touched a rolled up newspaper in his life. And then Rob told me that he’d been a male prostitute since he was 12, standing on the street behind our only hotel, The Ware, and waiting for the town’s doctors and lawyers to pick him up in their Cadillacs and offer him for a ride. It is impossible to believe that the police, and many other people, didn’t know what was going on.

It’s not that people in Waycross approved of sexual assault. We had a boy from my high school, a prominent athlete, who “went away” my junior year, allegedly for raping young girls. But rather, the crime of older men getting sex from young men by giving them gifts and money was not seen as a crime, but rather an embarrassment. Nor were the victims seen as child victims, not really. They were seen as whores.

Partly, that is because they are male. Female school teachers who prey on their boy students typically get far lighter sentences than male teachers who prey on girl students. Society still tacitly acts as if males, whatever their age, are capable of making decisions about sex. If we believe that, then we as a society are stupid. They are children for Christ’s sake.

I know it’s easy to piss on Mike McQueary. I wasn’t there. I don’t really know what he did and didn’t do. It’s not always as easy as it seems. I once worked in oilfield construction with a man who traveled with his “step son,” a relationship that decidedly smelled and one where we all had our suspicions. Eventually I heard the man ended up in prison for child pornography. Should I have gone to the local police in Abbeville and told them that a guy I worked with had effeminate mannerisms and traveled with his step-son? Oilfield workers like me were the lowest form of trash in Abbeville, and they probably would have laughed me out of the station. Suspicion is not knowledge.

But I will tell you, looking at McQueary and Paterno and Laurie Fine, if I was in the same situation today, I think I would give it a try. Indeed, I think a lot of people who might have not done something before will do something now. Yeah, the cops are going to get flooded with false alarms. Tough. Let’s catch some of those assholes.

I am sorry for Bobby Davis and all those kids in State College, but guys, believe me: Because of you, all of us are a little more likely to pick up the phone. Thanks, man.

That’s Lt. John Pike of the UC-Davis Police Department, and his moment in the sun probably isn’t going as he might have hoped. Not only that, his 15 minutes have stretched into hours and days and interminable weeks, and unfortunately for him there’s every reason to believe that he’s going to famous for a long, long time to come. In an age of ubiquitous Photoshop, it starts here…

…and there’s no telling where it ends. Or if it ends.

It’s easy enough and obvious enough to conclude that Lt. Pike (now on paid administrative leave) is a bad guy, especially once you learn that the university had to cough up nearly a quarter million dollars to settle a discrimination suit against him a few years back. But there is now a conversation afoot – predictably, perhaps – that considers Pike’s actions less in terms of the “individual bad actor” motif and more in terms of systemic, institutional dynamics.

Writing at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal details the “strategic incapacitation” paradigm being employed by police agencies in the increasingly securitized post-911/post WTO United States.

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

Madrigal’s take is detailed and devastating. If it feels like the tone of police response to civil disobedience in America – even relentlessly peaceful disobedience of the sort that typifies the Occupy movement – you’re not imagining things, and Madrigal’s article explains why. However, he comes in for a bit of critique from Marc Bousquet at the Chronicle of Higher Education. While acknowledging the validity of institutional analyses, Bousquet accuses of Madrigal of over-servicing his readership’s smugness and its need to feel innocent. In short, he lets “us” off the hook.

We are Eichmann. Arendt wasn’t trying to get us to “feel bad for” Eichmann, but to see his evil in our ordinary selves, recoil, and change. The discovery that Lt. John Pike is a nice fellow to watch the game with and a good scratcher of puppy ears isn’t meant to lift his moral responsibility—or ours. His and our failure to refuse the system is the system.

Madrigal’s note erases personal, moral agency on both margins of his caricature. The lieutenant—and a few tens of million like him—have not resisted the inner Eichmann. They have chosen obedience and the warm praise of their masters, and the material rewards of their complicity.

By contrast the objects of Pike and his masters’ brutality have chosen the brave, difficult, path of refusal.

I get both arguments. I’m certainly glad that the institutional frame was raised. I also appreciate the tenacity of the Bousquet rebuttal, which very neatly examines the institutional frame that drove Madrigal’s institutional frame in the first place. There is much to think about here, and the debate arrives at a time when we as culture need to be thinking deeply about who we have become and who we want to be.

In 1992 Body Count released a song called “Cop Killer.” Before we continue, take a few moments to watch the video (live at Lollapalooza). If you’re having trouble following along, here are the lyrics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you were around, you recall the Category 5 shitstorm that “Cop Killer” touched off. If you weren’t around, well, it was everything you might imagine and then some. The “establishment,” if I might use the term, was indignant that a gangsta thug was inciting blacks everywhere to round up some caps and then find themselves a cop to bust them up into. At a glance, this might be how it looks from a certain white, suburban, middle-class perspective. But in truth, that’s not what was going on at all. As Ice T says in the intro to the video above, “Cop Killer” isn’t about all cops. Instead, it’s what we would have recognized, in another day and age, as a dramatis personae.

I saw Body Count on that tour, at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem, NC. Sweet hell, you want to talk about a town wound tighter than a banjo string as black-clad Armageddon advanced up I-40 toward the city limits? Winston had its share of racial tensions surrounding the police force already and talk radio, not an engine of progress to start with, certainly didn’t see any profit in trying to calm down the jittery white folk.

The show was freakin’ awesome, end to end. But the moment that everybody came for didn’t go off like some might have expected. Let me paraphrase T’s preface as best I can.

This next song is not about all cops. We all know there are some crazy motherfuckers out there and the cops risk their lives trying to deal with them. Every hand in the air right now: peace to the cops! [Every hand, every fist in the building was in the air, along with Ice T's, saluting the police.]

But we also know that there are some power trippers. Little motherfuckers that nobody has ever respected who use the badge to abuse those they’re supposed to be protecting. This song is about a man who’s been beat down one time too many because of the color of his skin and he’s about to snap.

Yes, that’s right. Ice T, the man who enraged America with “Cop Killer,” led the crowd in praise of the police and recognition of the dangerous job they have to do.

I couldn’t help remembering a night a few years earlier when I found myself sitting across a table from a cop who was clearly the sort that “Cop Killer” was about. (And yes, I’m working my way around to a relevant point. Stay with me.) I worked for the Wake Forest University campus police when I was in school. The department employed a number of students at jobs like foot patrols, desk duty, dispatch, etc. I was even the student supervisor for a couple of years. During that time I got to know some of the officers pretty well (including the two who later went to prison for using their access to steal school property). Especially on third shift the students would sometimes ride with the officers on patrols and we’d frequently take middle-of-the-night coffee breaks with them at this little greasy spoon just off campus. City police officers took breaks at the same place sometimes.

One night we wandered into the diner and a Winston-Salem cop (whose name I remember, but won’t use here) was sitting at a table near the door. The officer I was riding with knew him and we sat down. Ordered a glass of tea and a slice of pie, as I recall.

Over the next few minutes I heard the word “nigger” more times than you probably get at the average Klan rally. Now, I certainly knew the word. I grew up in the 19th century and had my own embarrassing past. But I was working diligently to become a civilized kid. And the world I lived in at that point had no room for the N-word or any other words like it. I was absolutely shell-shocked by what I was hearing.

My whole life, it seemed, I had heard African-Americans complaining about how they were treated by the police. Stories from faraway cities like Philadelphia were in the paper all the time, but I grew up in a society that made clear what those complaints were: criminal blacks bitching because they got caught.

But here I am, sitting across the table from a city cop (who I fear was actually a distant relative), and every word out of his mouth was evidence that all those blacks with all those complaints about all those cops were telling the stone cold truth.

So, smart-assed kid that I was, I looked across that table and said something to the effect that “you know, you almost sound kind of racist.” I’ll never forget the reply, if I live to be 1,000: “Hell yeah, I’m racist. Ain’t you?”

I don’t honestly remember what I said to that, but I’m certain it was insufficient. I do recall the next time I heard anything about that officer, though. A few years later he had been put in charge of the drug enforcement unit in the city’s most heavily black (and poor) neighborhood.

Back to the debate about Lt. Pike. I don’t want our considerations of the role institutions play in creating thugs with badges to miss out on an important point. It seems to me that a couple of things are true here.

• Yes, Lt. Pike is a bad actor. Whatever dynamics might be at work in the UC-Davis PD or with police philosophy generally, he acted appallingly and others in the same system or the same kinds of systems daily resist the impulse to unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters.
• Yes, the system is a serious problem. It encourages those who work in it to behave in egregious ways that are antithetical to the function of a working democracy.

However, one more thing is also true, and it goes to the lesson of “Cop Killer” and my own late-night coffee break experience in the early 1980s. And that is that bad people seek out systems that empower their personal evil. Ice T’s homicidal maniac wasn’t after a cop who’d been created by the LAPD. His target had been a pencil-dicked punk his whole life and had sought out the badge because it would allow him to inflict his own pathological rage on the world, making people he hated feel his own powerlessness. And the Winston-Salem city cop across the table from me was a racist a long time before he became a cop. The force, though, provided him with a legitimizing platform to do something about all those dirty, thieving, drug-addled niggers in his precinct.

I don’t know Lt. John Pike. But I can’t help making some guesses based on his behavior. I make some assumptions based on the casual, matter-of-fact tone with which he pepper-sprays those students. I don’t know how he feels about blacks, Mexicans or Arabs, although that lawsuit suggests something about how he regards gays. All of the evidence before me makes me believe that he’s a type I have known before, a man frustrated by his powerlessness in the face of social change that he feels threatens his place in society.

I think he’s probably the kind of cop who, had he been working 400 miles to the south 20 years ago, might have inspired a controversial song about a man who’d been beaten down one time too many.

Stuart, longtime friend to S&R, is a veteran stage actor who portrays the former president in the Longmont (Colorado) Theatre Company‘s ambitious take on Frost/Nixon.

I had the great pleasure of recently seeing the production. As a politics junkie and student of American political history, particularly of the Watergate debacle, I couldn’t pass it up. And I anticipated from having seen Stuart’s remarkable performance as Robert Scott in 2009′s Terra Nova that he would surely immerse himself in this unique role as well.

My high expectations were more than exceeded. I was treated to marvelous performances by all involved, particularly Stuart and Robert Mess as his counterpart, David Frost. The clever usage of manned TV cameras on the stage to show a live feed of the principals on a big screen over the seated actors really drove home the feeling that you were witnessing history anew. Actors in supporting roles, particularly Michael Stedman as Jim Reston and Nicholas Lee as Swifty Lazar, were memorable and engaging. All in all an impressive depiction of one of the most compelling and peculiar spectacles in the annals of American popular culture.

The Denver Post would tend to agree, calling the play “fascinating” and “intriguing” and saying of Stuart, “O’Steen plays [Nixon] cool, with an easygoing charm that relies on truth over caricature or mere impersonation.”

If you’re in the Denver area this evening, make the short drive north to Longmont and take in the company’s final performance of the play. Tickets available here.

Further reading…
Longmont Times-Call: Longmont Theatre gives ‘Frost/Nixon’ regional premiere
Boulder Daily Camera: Boulder Theater: Frost, Nixon
Washington Post: The Watergate Story
Wikipedia: Frost/Nixon (Play)

So the Penn State sex abuse scandal, which last night claimed the jobs of university president Graham Spanier and head football coach Joe Paterno, at some level feels like more of the same. Sure, it involves a school that has historically run a clean athletics program (as far as we know). And the most visible player in the drama is hardly a fly-by-night with a suitcase full of cash. Unless you’re at least in your 70s, you have no real memory of a Nittany Lion football game without Joe Paterno on the sidelines. We toss terms like “epic” and “icon”around pretty casually these days, but JoePa is, by any definition, a legitimate sports icon. When you hear an outraged student being interviewed on ESPN saying that Paterno is Penn State football, that student is right. He or she may be wrong about a great many other things, of course…

In 2003, the St. Bonaventure University community was rocked by what OnlineColleges.net ranks as the seventh worst scandal in American collegiate sports history. I joined the faculty of that university the following year, after the school had cleaned house. I hadn’t paid much attention to the uproar when it happened. I knew about the Bonnies’ proud history, but a scandal at a small school in the A-10? Eh.

I arrived on campus, though, and began to meet people. The subject came up – invariably. I had a PhD from the University of Colorado, which was just above SBU at #6 on that list, providing a nice topic for polite conversation. I quickly came to understand that what had happened the previous year was more than just a little dustup in the hoops program. I realized that it had taken a serious emotional toll on the entire community, and you didn’t have to be a basketball freak to be affected. It was so bad that the chairman of the SBU board of trustees had taken his own life.

In short, the members of that community were in mourning. A couple of stupid people, trusted leaders who should have known better, decided to play fast and loose with a university’s reputation (and in that community, Bonas is the absolute center of the community’s life). When things blew up, people who prided themselves on character and integrity felt humiliated in front of the nation.

What happened in Olean, New York in 2003, of course, wasn’t a fraction as bad as what the Penn State community has to confront, though. It’s sort of like dealing with the loss of your beloved grandfather, except that your grandfather probably wasn’t complicit in covering for a pedophile.

I know a lot of people with Penn State ties (including my close friend Brian Angliss, one of the co-founders here at S&R). Some are obviously hurting, others are enraged, but all are stunned. All feel betrayed, and I don’t think any of them can quite believe that the institution they have always been so proud of is now a 24/7 media spectacle because one of its coaches is alleged to have been the lowest of the low and that the men entrusted with the integrity of the school’s most visible arm chose, at most, to live up only to their basic legal obligations.

I don’t think PSU is an outstanding institution because of its football program or because of the legacy of Joe Paterno. I think it because of the quality of the human beings that the school has produced. And because of that, I know this community will bounce back better than ever. Yes, St. Bonaventure and the University of Colorado, along with the Duke lacrosse team and the Georgia basketball team and the SMU football program, which was the first to receive the NCAA’s “death penalty,” and the other five schools on that list of infamy will all be moving down a notch, because what Jerry Sandusky allegedly did and what his superiors allegedly enabled is hands-down worse, by far, than any other scandal in American sports history. But the university will redeem itself.

In the meantime, I offer my condolences to all the men and women of character and integrity who are or have been associated with Penn State. I know you’re suffering in ways that most people around you don’t fully understand. And I know most of you are further bewildered by the behavior of some of the students last night.

But we don’t judge the school according to a few bad examples. All schools have those. We judge the school, instead, by you, and by that standard you should feel tremendous pride.