Tag Archives: myke atwater triebold
PSU Alumni Trustee Voting is Over–35,000+
More than 35,000 Penn State graduates had voted in the race for three trustees seats as of early Wednesday. Voting closes at 9 a.m. today. Penn State spokesman David La Torre said ballots will be tabulated after voting closes. The university hired KPMG, an international auditing company, to oversee that process. Results will be announced during the trustees meeting, which starts at 1:30 p.m. Friday in the Nittany Lion Inn. Each year, three of the board’s nine alumni seats are up for election. An unprecedented 86 candidates are running in this year’s race. The meeting will be streamed live at www.centredaily.com.
Penn St. Trustees Seek to Rebuild Communications
By GENARO C. ARMAS Associated Press
April 1, 2012
Trustee candidate Joanne C. DiRinaldo, an educator and researcher, said this week the board has shown “from my eyes, incremental baby steps. I would like to see more drastic attempts with transparency.”
She suggested potential changes in bylaws that govern rules of confidentiality of dissent on the board, and to open up trustees meeting to public participation.
Unlike other vocal critics on social media, DiRinaldo said she does not favor the entire resignation of the board because she could not judge how they made their decisions behind closed doors. “I will say they arrived at their decision hastily and without due process.”
Joe Paterno’s Last Statement About Sandusky Scandal
Let me begin by offering Sue and my prayers for all of the people impacted by these events. I know it is small comfort given the circumstances.
I also understand that there are a lot of questions regarding the events involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz. However, because of the status of these ongoing legal matters, I will not speculate or answer questions about the charges or the people involved beyond this brief statement.
As the Grand Jury report notes, I was subpoenaed last January to testify regarding an incident in 2002. As my very brief testimony established, my role was limited to a single report made to me by an assistant coach in 2002. The coach in question came to my house on a Saturday morning and informed me that he witnessed former coach Jerry Sandusky in a shower with a young boy. The coach made it clear that he felt strongly that there was something inappropriate going on and that he was very upset by what he saw. The coach made no specific allegations of any identified sexual act, nor did he use any graphic terms – just the idea that what he saw was wrong and that he did not know what to do next.
At that time I told the coach that he had done the right thing and that I would take the appropriate next step. After consideration I determined that, given Sandusky’s status as a retired employee governed by a retirement package negotiated with the administration, I had no authority to act directly. The next day, in accordance with University policy, I contacted the head of my department and related what was told to me. That was the last time the matter was brought to my attention until this investigation and I assumed that the men I referred it to handled the matter appropriately.
I know that there are many other questions that people want to ask, but I ask that we all be patient and give the judicial process time to do its deliberate work. Finding the truth is what will benefit the victims most of all, and that is who we should all keep in mind as we deal with this tragedy.
In order to give that process adequate time I will not be answering any questions on this matter, nor will I have further comment, until the legal process is completed
Shakeup at Penn State might — or might not — cause renewed interest in board of trustees election
Written by Jeff Frantz, Harrisburg Patriot News
Welcome to the political science experiment that is the Penn State board of trustees election.
Will there be a few thousand voters or half a million?
No one knows.
Will those voters know more than a handful of the 86 candidates or what they stand for?
No clue.
Will the alumni casting ballots be motivated by Joe Paterno’s firing, which brought protests online and at town hall meetings? Or will they care about issues impacting tomorrow’s students, such as tuition, research and academic reputation?
Flip a coin.
Does the record number of candidates mean alumni angered by the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal will turn out in droves? Or will the passing months, and new board leadership, be enough for alumni to once again become complacent observers of the university?
No one is sure what will happen April 10 when alumni begin voting for three of the 32 seats on Penn State’s board.
Individual candidates — and groups of candidates — have been working tirelessly since December to win a spot on a board that is increasingly questioned about its power structure and transparency. They’ve started websites and held meet-and-greets. They’ve raised questions about one another’s fitness to serve.
One candidate even aired a TV commercial.
One group endorsing candidates — Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship — and one group of candidates — Penn State Alumni Trustee-Choice — established themselves early. Both strongly support the Paterno family. Their names come up repeatedly among the most-likely voters.
How much of an advantage is that really?
Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship’s Facebook page has less than 4,600 friends. The three Penn State Alumni Trustee-Choice candidates with dedicated campaign Facebook pages each have less than 100 people “liking” them.
More than 100,000 Penn State alumni association members automatically will receive ballots, and any nonmember alumni can request one. Everyone guesses there will be more votes than in recent elections, when around 10,000 alumni cast ballots, but nobody knows how many more.
How much support will a candidate really need?
Maybe less than you think, said Christopher Borick, a professor of political science at Muhlenberg and a Penn State graduate.
“As much as [alumni] are invested, it’s still not going to probably be the type of turnout where a majority of alumni cast ballots,” Borick said.
Voting advocates are thrilled when they get 50 percent turnout for a presidential election, Borick said. Alumni traditionally ignore the trustee election. Anything close to 50 percent turnout would be a surprise, he said.
If the votes get spread out across the field, a candidate could win with a relatively low percentage of voters.
Alumni probably will scan the daunting list of names for people they know, Borick said, and then people they recognize. If they haven’t picked their three candidates yet, they’ll look for people who graduated in the same year, people who live in the same area or work in the same field. If trends from traditional elections hold, some women will want to pick a woman candidate, Borick said.
Name recognition will be huge. If a candidate isn’t well known for something such as playing football for Paterno, his or her best bet is probably to join a group.
Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship formed as a group of alumni who wanted to change the board but focused their public rhetoric around Paterno’s firing. More than 50 people asked for the group’s endorsement. The three people it ultimately backed all wrote about the need to apologize to the Paterno family in their official position statements. One of them, Anthony Lubrano, has traveled the state with Franco Harris demanding justice for the legendary coach.
They enjoy a first-mover advantage in claiming to be the most righteous Paterno defenders on the ballot.
Could it backfire?
The majority of candidates focused their position papers on keeping Penn State affordable while restoring its worldwide brand as an elite university. With another state-funding debate looming in Harrisburg and the current board having discussed a private-school model with Cornell, might alumni be more focused on what’s next?
Perhaps, Borick said. But who knows if those people will show up?
The alumni focused on Paterno? They could be the all-important base.
“I can’t only talk about [Paterno], but I certainly make that the focus of my outreach efforts,” Borick said. “If you want to reach out to the masses, and those masses were engaged because of this issue, your sales pitch on it is crucial.”
The Paterno issue has caused some friction among the candidates.
“He was a fabulous football coach, and he did fabulous things for Penn State,” candidate Jayne Miller said. “For that to be the sole issue for someone to get on the board of trustees — if anything, it misses the point of what this university faces.”
More than 50 people asked for Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship’s endorsement. More than 20 of those endorsement seekers ran even after they were passed over.
They complain that the group now censors its Facebook page, and tries to control information such as the current trustees. The group counters that it is simply promoting its message.
Getting good information has been an issue. Penn State did not let the candidates include a website with their 250-word biography or position statement. The student radio station has interviewed some candidates and streams those sessions online.
Penn State now is hosting a meet-and-greet for candidates during Blue-White weekend, when thousands of alumni return to campus for the spring football game. But with the event being held in the center of campus, a decent walk from the stadium, turnout is uncertain.
The alumni association also has asked each candidate to answer three questions. It will post the answers on its website the day before voting begins. None of the questions address the board’s handling of the Sandusky investigation or the ensuing scandal.
Nikos Phelps, the president of the Harrisburg Chapter of the alumni association, said alumni seem interested to him but aren’t sure how they will approach the ballot.
“I think [turnout] will be half-decent,” Phelps said. “The question is, with that many candidates, is it feasible for anyone to do their homework?”
Voting will continue until May 3.
What’s next for the 84 losers? For many, May 4 is the beginning of campaign 2013.
“It will show who’s committed to the cause,” candidate Marlene “Myke” Atwater Triebold said.
Maybe by then, we might have a better idea how this experiment works
Voting Instructions–PSU BOT
ballot links are provided automatically to alumni (with email addresses on file) who are members of the Penn State Alumni Association, have held membership within the past two years, or have contributed to the University within the past two years.
Additionally, any alum is eligible and encouraged to participate. All they would need to do is email BOT@psu.edu and provide the following:
1. Full Name
2. Year of Graduation
3. College/Major
4. Current Home mailing address
If alums submit this information by Thursday, March 29, we can add them to the list of those individuals receiving a ballot link on April 10. Any requests received after March 29 will be processed after April 10. Alums can request to participate until May 2, close of business (5 pm). However, it is advisable for alums to submit their request as early as possible in order to participate.
Follow the Timeline–High Profile Scapegoat-Joe Paterno
Following Tom Corbett‘s election as governor in November 2010, more troubling writing soon emerged on the wall. In this case, the electronic wall.
In this politically charged environment, about the time of Corbett’s election as governor, AG’s Office narcotics Agent Anthony Sassano conducted a routine “toll search” in connection with a State College-area drug investigation and got a surprise hit on his PACE Explorer computer database.
Narcotics Agent Sassano discovered that a pedophile complaint concerning Jerry Sandusky had been filed in Corbett’s office way back in early 2009. What’s up with that?
Once the right hand was aware of what the left was not doing, other things became apparent.
Agent Sassano quickly learned that Centre County DA Ray Gricar had investigated a pedophile complaint against Sandusky in 1998. The agent soon helped piece together another story, told in public postings in Internet chat boards, concerning Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary.
McQueary saw something that deeply troubled him in 2002 involving Sandusky and a boy in the PSU shower room. He’d reported it to Penn State officials, including Coach Paterno. But had those PSU officials reported anything to DA Ray Gricar?
DA Ray Gricar, and what Gricar may or may not have known about Sandusky and these complaints, suddenly became, well, important. Trouble was, DA Gricar had mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth in April 2005. Ray wasn’t going to be talking to anyone in the AG’s office any time soon. Nor could invisible Ray provide much insight about Sandusky’s earlier legal treatment, status, or much of anything else, for that matter, including the weather, or what he might have for lunch.
As Clarence the Angel tells George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
By now even Inspector Clouseau could divine there was more amiss than just DA Ray in Tom Corbett’s troubled AG’s office.
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It became all too apparent that here was multi-layered in the office of the state attorney general. And it was heading to the governor’s office.
Why hadn’t Corbett pushed to solve DA Gricar’s disappearance, or even seemed much concerned about it?
Following DA Gricar’s much celebrated strange vanishing, AG Corbett had just as mysteriously refused to allocate much in the way of resources to address Gricar’s non-existence. Oh, a state police unit was assigned to supposedly look into Gricar’s non-whereabouts. But that was just another one of Corbett’s Keystone Kops details, one State College private investigator tells me. “Those guys didn’t know shit from shinola.”
AG’s office flaks were still putting out the line that perhaps DA Ray, looking forward to retirement in a few months, had simply “wandered off,” leaving behind his family and his well-vested pension, and that DA Ray was most likely not the victim of anything untoward. Like the 2008 Sandusky complaint, the disappearance of DA Ray Gricar was for some reason never at all a priority of Tom Corbett’s.
The one law enforcement official — Ray Gricar — who could best shed light on the multiple Sandusky pedophile complaint(s) himself was long gone, and AG Corbett had long ago allowed the trail to go stone cold, cold, cold.
What was up with that?
Corbett avoids assigning Sandusky case to AG’s Child Predator Unit: ‘Could have done a quick grand jury in two months’ time’
Why had there been no serious investigation or prosecution of Jerry Sandusky before the 2010 governor’s election? Do we really need to ask?
Tom Corbett simply did not want a Sandusky pedophile investigation to go forward, going back to 2009, those with knowledge of the case say.
Now that he’d won the governor’s office, Corbett was out of the way. He’d used the AG’s office as a political stalking horse, and now he climbed off the broken beast and sauntered away to greener pastures. Corbett got what he’d wanted, and that was all that mattered to him.
“Corbett didn’t want the Sandusky investigation to go forward. He resisted it for some reason. There was no priority at all to it. He told his staff he didn’t want to do it. Corbett was the problem.”
Corbett associates point out that AG Corbett had every opportunity to pursue the investigation for a year and a half, and had many venues available to him to do it, his lame excuses involving “Bonusgate,” and “slow grand juries” notwithstanding.
For example, AG Corbett could simply have assigned the 2008-2009 Sandusky complaint(s) to the AG office’s much-hyped Child Predator Unit, which would have been a normal and logical course of action for a case like this.
“In order for law enforcement to stay one step ahead of … sexual predators the Office widened the scope of the Attorney General’s task force into a larger, broader statewide Child Predator Unit,” the AG’s office website explains.
“In January 2005, a dedicated Child Predator Unit was created using a group of specially trained agents and prosecutors across Pennsylvania to identify and capture … predators before they can harm children,” the webpage goes on to tell voters.
The webpage reminds us, “The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that one in five girls and one in ten boys are sexually exploited before they reach adulthood.” Tom Corbett would do nothing to improve those statistics.
In 2011, in fact, the AG’s office crowed that its hard-working Child Predator Unit had, since its inception in 2005, arrested 298 child predators. Jerry Sandusky would never be among the hundreds arrested by the unit.
“The Child Predator’s Unit could have done a quick grand jury in two months’ time back in 2009, arrested Jerry Sandusky like all the other predators and got him off the street.”
But that never happened. AG Corbett didn’t seem to trust his own vaunted Child Predator Unit to handle the Sandusky case, or to get the job done.
Or, alternately, Corbett could have chosen to assign the Sandusky case to his Child Sexual Exploitation Task Force, which was formed in 1995.
“The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General has also been recognized as a leading law enforcement agency in this area with respect to its proactive ‘sting’ operations aimed at pedophiles and child pornographers,” the AG’s Child Exploitation Task Force’s webpage explains. “These ‘sting’ operations are designed to arrest and convict those individuals who actively seek teen and pre-teen children to engage in deviate sexual conduct. Through continued cooperation and support, the Child Sexual Exploitation Task Force will work to eradicate crimes against our children while keeping pace with today’s technology.”
The Child Sexual Exploitation Task Force evidently couldn’t keep pace with the AG office’s own PACE computer system, where evidence lurked for a year and a half of the languishing Sandusky pedophile complaint(s) referred to Corbett’s office in March 2009.
You begin to get the picture. AG Corbett had many venues available to him to get the Sandusky case moving, if he so chose. He simply chose not to, as those around Corbett say.
Making sad matters even more ridiculous, after the nationwide public relations fiasco of the Sandusky case hit the fan in November 2011, Gov. Corbett would disingenuously propose yet another agency in the AG’s office to supposedly follow through on child abuse complaints. Talk about the fox watching the hen house.
Informed parents and children for their own safety would be better advised to avoid the office of Pennsylvania Attorney General altogether. It’s simply not a safe or responsible place, at the moment, for kids.
In fairness to the hard-working and genuinely concerned members of these child predator units, I should point out the obvious: Tom Corbett was the problem here, not them. It was the injection of politics into the office of attorney general that’s the problem. The inherent political nature of the office remains. And that’s a big problem, as we now see.
A moveable scandal: Gov-elect Corbett removed as obstacle, AG office nabs Sandusky in several months’ time
It’s a matter of public record how fast things happened once Tom Corbett won his governor’s election and was on his way out the AG office door, leaving behind a broken and demoralized AG’s office staff.
It was a magic moment, a transition time between two attorneys general where the professional staff has greater-than-normal latitude.
The involvement of the narcotics unit officer, and the subsequent discovery of the two earlier Sandusky complaints, tied together with the vanishing of DA Ray Gricar, now made the case compelling, to say the least.
No time was now wasted. In December 2010, Mike McQueary was finally put in front of the soon-to-expire Thirtieth Statewide Grand Jury. “The graduate assistant was never questioned by University Police and no other entity conducted an investigation until he testified in Grand Jury in December, 2010,” the Sandusky grand jury presentment tellingly concludes.
On January 12, 2011, less than a week before Tom Corbett was sworn in as governor, Penn State officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz finally made it before the Thirtieth Grand Jury, perjuring themselves, the AG’s office later would allege.
Like the earlier grand juries, those grand jurors wouldn’t be given much of a crack at the case. In fact, the Thirtieth Grand Jury was set to expire at the end of January 2011, only a month after they’d first heard from McQueary. In February a new statewide investigating Grand Jury, officially numbered the Thirty-Third, loaded with newcomers, would have to be convened and sworn in to take fresh testimony long overdue in the Sandusky case.
Meanwhile, late in January 2011, seven additional state police and AG office agents were now assigned to the Sandusky investigation(s). The priorities and resources were finally beginning to be placed.
Karen Arnold would be one of the witnesses to testify before the new, Thirty-Third Statewide Grand Jury. Arnold was a Centre County Assistant DA (ADA) working under District Attorney Ray Gricar when the first complaint had been filed against Jerry Sandusky in 1998. She briefly was assigned the Sandusky case.
Former ADA Arnold tells me that she only had the 1998 Sandusky case for “two or three days” before DA Gricar, without explanation, took the case from her.
“Ray was my boss and he said he would handle it,” former ADA Arnold says. “I only had the Sandusky case for a few days. I don’t know why Ray handled it the way he did. I can’t read his mind. I’m not a mind reader.”
She says Ron Schreffler of the PSU police department originally referred the Sandusky case to the DA’s office way back in 1998. Schreffler was an investigator with the university police department. He handled the original 1998 Sandusky complaint. Schreffler in those days oversaw most of the important investigations at the university, including those involving drugs, football betting, arson and bomb incidents. Schreffler helped produce the 100-plus-page report about the 1998 Sandusky incident that was referred to DA Gricar. That report has become one of the more sought after Pickwick Paper / MacGuffins in the current media paper chase for Sandusky documents.
Former ADA Arnold says she was contacted in February 2011 by a woman in the AG’s office. She asked Arnold to testify before the new grand jury.
“‘You shouldn’t worry if you’re not familiar with the grand jury process,’” Arnold says she was told by the AG’s office contact, “‘as these jurors are new too.’”
Arnold says she testified before the newly seated grand jury the day after Ash Wednesday, which places her testimony on March 10, 2011. Ash Wednesday is what is known as a “moveable feast.” That’s fitting, for a moveable scandal like this. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the 40 days Jesus fasted before beginning his ministry, during which time he was tempted, Scriptures say, by Satan.
“The grand jury experience was one of the more negative experiences in my life,” Arnold says. She adds, “There are aspects of the Sandusky case this grand jury ignored and that will bite them in the ass if the case goes forward.”
She wondered aloud about the multiple grand juries involved in the case, and how much of the hundreds of pages of testimony had been produced by which of the jurors. “You have to wonder what’s going on,” she says.
Within a few months of her testimony — and more than a dozen years after DA Ray Gricar took the 1998 case away from her — Jerry Sandusky would finally be arrested for predatory acts against children.
Karen Arnold would suddenly be inundated with telephone calls from media, and a New York Times reporter would be pounding on her door.
Like some long overdue bill, the grand jury presentment finally was delivered and Sandusky arrested in November 2011. Much of the glory would go to a newly appointed and confirmed Attorney General Linda Kelly. But she hadn’t come to office until late May 2011.
Not many in the public nor the media understood that the ball really got rolling in the Sandusky case when the AG’s office was helmed by Acting Attorney General William Ryan, who had been passed over by Gov. Corbett for the AG’s job. Ryan accomplished in several weeks and months’ time what AG Corbett could not do in a year and a half.
And what became of Bill Ryan?
On August 19, 2011, less than two months before Sandusky’s arrest, Governor Tom Corbett announced he’d appointed Ryan chairman of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. The former Acting AG would now be in charge of the state’s casinos and racetracks.
“Bill’s proven integrity and more than three decades of experience as a prosecutor will serve him well as the new chairman of the Gaming Control Board,” Corbett said.
Ryan obviously knows more than just prosecuting. Ryan obviously knows something about gambling, and politics, and how both games are played.
JoePa takes the fall for TomCo
For Gov. Tom Corbett, meanwhile, there remained one more important task following the nationwide public relations fiasco of Jerry Sandusky’s long-overdue arrest. Corbett had to protect his own carcass, and cover his own ass for the nuclear blast he now feared was about to blow.
It wouldn’t do to have the public focus on Corbett’s own refusal to investigate or prosecute Jerry Sandusky for a year and half. Corbett sought to change the conversation. He looked around for a likely scapegoat(s) to take the fall for him. What’s one more victim, or two?
Corbett incredibly settled on a beloved 85-year-old to take the fall. The Gipper was down, why not kick him down some more? Gov. Corbett landed on the brilliant idea of throwing Joe Paterno under the bus. As Nixon observed, when the wolves are gaining, it’s time to toss a baby from the sled.
After all, hadn’t Joe Paterno failed to follow up by calling the university police or DA Gricar in 2002? It wasn’t nearly as bad as deliberately sandbagging the Sandusky case for a year and half, and actively shielding and protecting Jerry Sandusky, as AG Corbett had done.
But Corbett knows from first-hand experience that today’s corporate media is servile, for the most part isn’t all that smart or morally scrupulous, and doesn’t look into things all that deeply or for very long. And more and more these days they simply write what they’re handed. Corbett himself learned this on his long slog for the governor’s chair, and all through the recent years of growing corruption in Pennsylvania. That business with the 6,500 kids sold down the river in Wilkes-Barre had blown over. Maybe the serial rape of innumerable kids at Penn State will blow over too.
Corbett’s job as attorney general had been to prosecute. To uphold the law. To protect the public. He didn’t do so well in that job. Now, as governor, the job was altogether different.
A competent governor, and a good man, would have, and should have, asked the public not to rush to judgment against Joe Paterno. A competent leader, and a good man, would have asked the public to wait for all the facts to come in. A competent governor, and a good man, would have reminded the public of the great and exemplary services performed for Pennsylvania, and Penn State, by Joe Paterno in over 60 years on the job. A competent governor, and a good man, would have pointed out that that Joe Paterno was Our Coach.
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‘Joe Paterno was Pennsylvania’s Coach, and we owed him, in his final days, our debt of gratitude, not a death of instant scandal and ruin’ |
Joe Paterno was Pennsylvania’s Coach, and we owed him, in his final days, our debt of gratitude, not a death of instant scandal and ruin.
“It’s going to kill Joe,” suddenly was on everyone’s lips. “It’s going to kill him.”
Tom Corbett, as usual, had his own not-so-sorry ass to worry about. It would be the pathetic act of a desperate, morally bankrupt man.
On November 9, 2011, Gov. Tom Corbett indulged the Penn State board of trustees, by telephone, to throw Joe Paterno under the bus. At the moment of the vote to fire Paterno, Corbett said over the speakerphone, “Remember that little boy in the shower.”
From the 31 trustees in the room there was no response. No question. No objection. Just silence. Despite the illustrious backgrounds of most of them, they all marched in lockstep, following Corbett’s lead.
Corbett wasn’t there to look them, or Paterno, in the eye. He wasn’t there to explain why he had done nothing to help that little boy. He wasn’t there to explain why he himself had prevented any investigation for a year and a half. He wasn’t there to explain the double standard. Why should the coach be punished, but not the attorney general/governor? As I say, in Tom Corbett’s Pennsylvania, some are more privileged than others.
That night Corbett got his scapegoat, and the students rioted in State College. A weary nation turned its eyes to the fleeting images of the saddened cries, groans and crashes of the decline and fall of Pennsylvania.
A simmering story in the sports columns in moments ignited into an all-consuming firestorm, a national disgrace, and a world-class scandal.
Tom Corbett’s self-serving decision to sack Coach Joe Paterno and make Paterno the fall guy in this long-running tragedy was as if, one observer told me, “the A-bomb had been used to detonate the H-bomb.”
But competence, and properly handling a delicate, important matter, after all, has never been Tom Corbett’s forte. Tom Corbett’s forte has always been fixing cases.
This time, if there remains any justice at all on earth and in heaven, the fix might yet fix him.
As I finish writing this essay, sadly, news arrives of the passing of Coach Joe Paterno.
How had we come to this?
It is Acting Attorney General Bill Ryan’s role as state attorney general in the magic moment period between Corbett and Kelly that bears our close consideration.
It is that magic moment itself, that period between the transactions, when politics is there, and isn’t there, that deserves our thoughts.
It is indeed a magic moment. It is a moment when law enforcement professionals in Pennsylvania can, in the most amazingly unfettered fashion, do something extraordinary.
With the Sandusky case, after all, Acting Attorney General Bill Ryan didn’t have to do much of anything but give proper priority to the case, assign it proper resources, and sit back and watch the process take its normal course.
It’s one more measure of our collective sickness, and our jaded expectations of political machinations, that we have to wonder at all about the motivations behind this once-normal process.
Enforcing the law, it used to be called at the attorney general’s office.
– Bill Keisling IV
posted January 22, 2012
This is the second of a planned three-part essay.
Read the first part, Busted: Narcotics officer nabs Sandusky, here >.
The Magic Moment Part 2: The Elected Years 1980 to 1995
Related:
Timeline: An insider’s timeline of the Sandusky/PSU/Corbett scandal
Paterno Family Statement–How About Some Courage From the Current Board
“The Paterno family is surprised and saddened that the Board of Trustees believes it is necessary and appropriate to explain — for the fourth or fifth time — why they fired Joe Paterno so suddenly and unjustifiably on Nov 9, 2011.
“The latest statement is yet another attempt by the Board to deflect criticism of their leadership by trying to focus the blame on Joe Paterno. This is not fair to Joe’s legacy; it is not consistent with the facts; and it does not serve the best interests of the university. The board’s latest statement reaffirms that they did not conduct a thorough investigation of their own and engaged in a rush to judgment.
“At various times, university officials have said that they fired Joe Paterno. At other times they have said they didn’t fire him. They have simultaneously accused him of moral and leadership failures, and praised him for the high standards he set for the university.
“The tough questions that have yet to be addressed relate not to Joe Paterno, but to the board. Two months ago, as Joe Paterno was dying, the board conducted a series of media interviews condemning him for ‘moral’ failures. Now they are trying a different tack and accusing him of ‘leadership’ failures. The question we would ask is simply this, when will the board step up and acknowledge that the ultimate responsibility for this crisis is theirs? Everyone who cares about Penn State is longing for strong, courageous, honest leadership. Today’s statement is anything but that.”
Paterno had a “failure to lead?”
So now they say that Paterno was fired because of a “failure to lead?” I wonder how many former football players and other alumni feel that Paterno was not an adequate leader–He is the best example of a leader in the history of Penn State University. The current Board of Trustees must go–and not three at a time. Replace, Restructure, Renew. Shame on them for their sorry attempt to give the alumni a “reason” for the firing of a legendary leader, educator, coach, and humanitarian. Shame, shame, shame.
Lame excuse--Shame on them, Shame, Shame, Shame
PSAT Choice Positions on Ballot
There are 86 nominees for the Penn State Board of Trustees for the 2012 elections. The ballot positions for the PSAT-Choice candidates are:
Joanne DiRinaldo, EdD Position 28
Sam Y Zamrik Position 27
Scott Munroe Position 31
Scott Fozard Position 50
Myke Atwater Triebold Position 60
