“Given the fact that it’s a colleague of mine’s wife, I do apologize for saying that, because I shouldn’t have said that,” Jacobs said of Tom Brady’s spouse in an interview on “The Doug Gottlieb Show.” “It’s his wife and I should respect that just as much as anyone else.”…However, while Jacobs apologized for telling Bundchen to hush up, he refused to express any remorse about calling her cute, saying that Brady should “take that as a compliment.” “If he finds something wrong with that, then that’s his problem.”

Which means he really doesn’t get what he did, and why it was wrong. Jacobs’ comments were obnoxious not because he was impugning Tom Brady’s wife. They were obnoxious because they implied that the role of a woman was to be attractive, rather than to have opinions. The question is not whether Tom Brady has a problem with his wife being reduced to her looks. It’s whether Gisele does.

And I’ve honestly been dismayed by the idea that Gisele is obligated by contract or custom not to speak ill of her husband’s teammates or the team’s performance. Tom Brady is her husband, not her keeper. She is an independent woman who makes an income that does not leave her dependent on the Patriots. Whether she speaks publicly about his work is a matter for their marriage, not our judgement.

It’s an attitude that treats women who are married to athletes as if they’re like another set of women who are often treated as if they’re helpmeets first, and individuals second: political wives. No matter how accomplished Gisele or Hillary Clinton are in their own fields, as long as their husbands are or were preeminent figures in their fields, what Tom or Bill were up to was understood to be the priority—no matter what role those men feel comfortable having their wives take on. God forbid Gisele have opinions about football. God forbid Hillary have something to add on health care. I understand that it makes strategic sense, given the persistent and virulent sexism directed at women in politics, particularly those cast as if they’re malevolent powers behind the throne, for political wives to take on anodyne issues that are removed from the substance of the political mainstream. But that norm isn’t something we should be proud of.

Take the role of the sideline reporter. I don’t think it’s a problem for sideline reporters to be attractive—being physically attractive doesn’t inherently mean you can’t be intelligent, and television reporting of all kinds is one of the few professions where men have to meet at least some of the same physical beauty standards as women. But I think that sports networks and teams have created an environment where even intelligent female sideline reporters are treated as if they’re merely eye candy because there are enough cases where it’s impossible to imagine what other criteria a reporter was hired for other than her looks. And hiring in a way that suggests that appearance is the most important criteria gives the impression that either there aren’t qualified and attractive women available who can do things other than take rides on outfield trains and ask soft questions, or that even if said women exist, it doesn’t make sense to hire them to deliver the character fluff that is the designated role for women in sports commentary. If you’re hired (or expected) to be entertaining first and substantive as a bonus, people may react badly when you turn out to have ideas, or feel weirdly entitled to prioritize your role as an object of desire.

That kind of structural message means that within the context of sports, it’s apparently perfectly appropriate for men to behave in ways that women would be excoriated for. In a recent interview, Erin Andrews talked about dealing with harrassment from “fans” and detractors alike. When the Cleveland Plain Dealer asked her “On the college campuses, in particular, how do you handle the goofus—or 10—who yells, ‘Erin, will you marry me?’” She said, “Unfortunately, it gets a lot nastier than that. It’s why I would never bring my father or a boyfriend to the game. I’ve had security guards who followed me and said, “It’s bad that you have to listen to this.” I tell them, “I don’t. I have earpieces.’” If a female fan got all gushy over an announcer or player, it would be taken as a sign of their unseriousness—there’s even Baseball Boyfriend , an app that lets women store picks in a “Little Black Book,” and instead of trades and pickups, treats players you shed as your “exes.” But apparently you can sexually harass Erin Andrews and still retain the impression that you’re totally focused on the substance of the game.

And this is how we get to Gisele. She couldn’t possibly be upset about the game because she’s come to care about football, in addition to caring that her husband is upset. She’s just a dumb broad who’s ventured out of the spot that’s designated for her: looking cute in the owners’ box. I wish I could say that Brandon Jacobs was an isolated sexist and a weirdly sore winner. But his comments about Gisele are in line with the primary role designated for women in sports commentary: look good, and don’t have inconvenient opinions.

Feherty began the conversation by lobbying Tebow to run. “I have an idea — would you ever think of running for office, please?” Feherty asked. “We’ve got Romney and Gingrich out there at the minute, and I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but they got the sort of faces that you’d never get tired of punching.”

The deeply-religious Tebow said that politics is “something I’ll have to think about, and if I pray about, and you know, I have no idea right now, but possibly.” Watch it:

Conservative politicians have been politicizing Tebow, seizing on his popularity for their own political benefit.

In one of Tebow’s rare instances of engaging in politics, he appeared in a 2007 Super Bowl ad for the anti-gay group Focus on the Family. The ad, featuring he and his mother, was intended to communicate an anti-abortion message. Watch it here.

Miami's American Airlines Arena has taken $27.5 million in tax subsidies since 1998

But according to two Florida Republicans, the stadiums aren’t holding up their end of the deal. Despite taking more than $271 million in subsidies since Miami’s Dolphins Stadium opened in 1994, the facilities aren’t serving the homeless on off nights, and legislation filed by Sen. Mike Bennett (R) and Rep. Frank Artiles (R) would force the stadiums to refund the tax money if they haven’t complied with the law, the Miami Herald reports:

Sen. Mike Bennett (R-Bradenton) and Rep. Frank Artiles (R-Miami) have filed bills that would require stadiums to return money to the state if they have not been complying with the homeless shelter law.

“These organizations have failed to follow the law for over 20 years,” said Artiles, in a statement .”This is the simply the State of Florida holding them accountable.”

Of the $271 million taken since 1994, Miami’s Dolphins Stadium ($37 million) and the city of Jacksonville ($35.1 million) have received the most money. The state’s three NFL venues have taken more than $102.1 million from the state over that time, while its two NBA arenas have taken roughly $35.3 million since 1998. Florida’s 10 spring training facilities, used by Major League Baseball teams for less than two months a year, have taken a total of $37.5 million since 2001, and other stadiums have also taken subsidies, as shown in this chart from the Miami Herald:

While the stadiums take massive subsides, homelessness, particularly among children, has continually increased in Florida since the recession began, and it remains a problem even as the economy inches toward recovery. Bennett and Artiles’ bills, should they become law, would change that, forcing the stadiums to do their part in helping the state’s neediest residents.

Theo Zwanziger

The outgoing president of the German soccer federation, Theo Zwanziger, called on gay players today “to have the courage to declare themselves” by coming out. The captain of Germany’s team, Philipp Lahm, responded by doubling down on comments he made in August discouraging players from making such disclosures:

LAHM: Football is like being the gladiators in the old times. The politicians can come out these days, for sure, but they don’t have to play in front of 60,000 people every week. I don’t think that the society is that far ahead that it can accept homosexual players as something normal as in other areas.

By humoring the perceived homophobia, Lahm is reinforcing the very stigma that might make it difficult for players to come out in the first place. Much as the U.S. military policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell required gay troops to lie to keep this jobs, Lahm’s negative message is a strain on the trust and teamwork he should be promoting as captain. If he is the team’s leader, he should take the initiative of promoting a more welcoming lockerroom instead of catering to the homophobic status quo.

Zwanziger, however, believes that Lahm is tolerant, saying, “If that’s how he sees the situation, I am not going to be the one to criticize him.”

Alabama trounced LSU 21-0 in last night’s Bowl Championship Series National Championship game, earning the school’s 14th national championship. But while the game settled questions regarding who receives college football’s top prize, many other questions about the BCS remain unresolved.

The BCS, a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame, manages college football’s five biggest bowl games — the Rose, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar bowls and the BCS National Championship. Because those bowls are set up as tax-exempt, nonprofit charities, they pay little, if any, taxes on huge profits, even as they receive millions in taxpayer subsidies from state and local governments.

Amid recent scandals and reports involving the Fiesta and Sugar bowls, critics have raised questions about why the games are classified as charities and whether they should continue to be classified that way in the future.

The question of whether bowl games should or should not be classified as nonprofit charities is ultimately up to the IRS. But recently, public scrutiny toward the BCS has intensified. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the BCS violated federal antitrust laws, and after scandals involving potentially illegal political donations from Sugar and Fiesta Bowl employees to officials in Arizona and Louisiana, anti-BCS group PlayoffPAC asked the IRS to investigate multiple bowls. That bowl CEOs are making, on average, more than $500,000 a year and spending money on lavish trips for executives, donors, and other affiliates has raised even more questions and prompted an internal investigation at the Fiesta Bowl.

Bowl games claim that they are nonprofit charities by touting the fact that they generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefits for state and local economies, help universities, and provide aid to charities in the communities that host the games. But separate investigations into such claims have found that the bowls provide much less aid than they claim, particularly to public universities and local charities. An HBO Real Sports investigation, for instance, found that while bowls claim to give “tens of millions” to charity, they actually gave just $4 million in 2009 — despite generating $261 million in revenue.

BCS officials did not respond to requests for comment on the bowls’ nonprofit statuses. But Dan Wetzel, author of Death To The BCS, laughed off the notion that the BCS games were comparable to smaller, more traditional charities. ”They classify themselves as charities, and say they give a certain percentage to local charities,” Wetzel told ThinkProgress. “But the idea that this is the homeless shelter down the street is ridiculous. It’s not.” Of the bowls’ classifying as nonprofit charities, Wetzel said, “It’s a sleight of hand.”

Meanwhile, the games are generating huge profits and giving CEOs huge salaries. The Sugar Bowl, which hosted its own bowl and the BCS title game in New Orleans this week, made $11.6 million in tax-free profits in 2007, the last time it hosted both games. And the schools that participate, most of which are taxpayer-financed public universities, continue to lose money at alarming rates just to play in the games.

Calls for changes to the BCS from fans, newspaper columnists, and even President Obama have thus far gone unheeded, though there are signs that changes in structure could come when the organization’s current contract with the six major athletic conferences ends in 2014. But when it comes to using their nonprofit status to avoid paying taxes, the bowls may have too sweet a deal to change unless the IRS forces it upon them.

“Just like most things in America, there’s a problem, and somebody is profiting off of it,” Wetzel said. “It’s a massive boondoggle.”

When Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama meet in tonight’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) National Championship game in New Orleans, college football’s top prize will be on the line. More than 75,000 will be in attendance, and millions will watch on TV. The Sugar Bowl, host to this year’s game, stands to make millions of dollars in profits. And little, if any, of it will be subject to federal taxes.

That’s because the Sugar Bowl and the championship game, like the three other bowls that make up the BCS, are classified as tax-exempt nonprofit charities, set up with missions to do public good with the money they earn and spend. In 2007, the last time New Orleans hosted both the Sugar Bowl and the BCS title game, the games generated $34.1 million in revenue — $11.6 million of that was tax-free profit.

The BCS, a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame, has been in place since 1998 and manages the five biggest bowl games — the Rose, Orange, Fiesta, and Sugar Bowls, and the BCS National Championship Game. The revenue generated by the BCS games and other nonprofit bowls — $261 million in 2009 — along with lavish trips for executives, large compensation packages for their CEOs, and scandals involving potentially illegal political donations have raised questions about why the bowls are classified as nonprofit charities and whether they should continue to be in the future.

The reason bowl profits aren’t taxed “is because it’s supposed to be serving a public purpose,” Gary Roberts, dean of the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, told the Arizona Republic. The bowls, Roberts said, are not supposed to “squander this money that is not taxed.”

And yet, since the BCS began, average pay for the CEOs who run each bowl has more than doubled and now exceeds $500,000 a year, the Republic found. The Sugar Bowl, which has cash reserves in excess of $34 million and until recently benefited from tax subsidies from the Louisiana government, pays its CEO more than $593,000. In 2007, when the Sugar Bowl also hosted the BCS championship, it paid its CEO more than $645,000. Average executive pay at BCS bowls ranks in the top 2 percent of pay among nonprofits with similar budgets, and in the top 9 percent among nonprofits with budgets twice their size, the Republic found.

“If you’re running these bowls, it’s an opportunity to do good, not to do well,” Dean Zerbe, who investigated charitable exemptions while on the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), told HBO Real Sports. “You can pay yourself a reasonable salary…and after that it has to go to a charitable purpose.”

Charitable purpose, however, likely doesn’t include lavish trips for executives and guests, another area that has drawn criticism. Executives at the Fiesta Bowl spent more than $100,000 on a corporate golf trip, and former CEO John Junker spent more than $1,200 at a strip club, according to an investigation into the Fiesta Bowl after a scandal enveloped the bowl in 2009. The bowl spent $3.3 million on The Fiesta Frolic, an annual trip for sponsors, executives, and others involved in the game, since the start of the BCS. In the same time frame, the Orange Bowl hosted a similar trip, The Summer Splash, at an average annual cost of more than $111,000.

The bowls, in some ways, have come to resemble America’s corporate structure: huge profits, high executive pay, and little, if any, taxes paid to the government. At the same time, the bowls depend on the participation of taxpayer-financed public institutions and, at times, taxpayer subsidies. As Sharon Schneider, a director at a Connecticut-based company that runs nonprofit foundations, told the Republic, “(The bowls) are saving millions, and the states and federal governments are losing millions with these four bowls on tax revenue they would collect if they were not nonprofits.”

To win, we have to work together and look out for one another. Today, even as the city of Indianapolis is exemplifying that teamwork in preparing to host the Super Bowl, politicians are looking to destroy it trying to ram through so-called “right-to-work” legislation.

“Right-to-work” is a political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights. It’s not about jobs or rights, and it’s the wrong priority for Indiana. [...]

As Indianapolis proudly prepares to host the Super Bowl it should be a time to shine in the national spotlight and highlight the hard working families that make Indiana run instead of launching political attacks on their basic rights. It is important to keep in mind the plight of the average Indiana worker and not let them get lost in the ceremony and spectacle of such a special event. This Super Bowl should be about celebrating the best of what Indianapolis has to offer, not about legislation that hurts the people of Indiana.

Conservatives love to claim that being “right to work” helps a state boost its economy. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, “right to work” laws, far from helping workers, actually:

– reduce wages by $1,500 a year, for both union and nonunion workers, after accounting for different costs of living in the states;

– lower the likelihood that employees get healthcare or pensions through their jobs—again, for both union and nonunion employees;

– have no impact whatsoever on job growth

Indiana Republicans have, so far, not backed down in their desire to move the bill through the legislature. But as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow put it, the GOP may want to rethink that strategy considering that “”America’s most celebrated union members (the NFL players) and a whole lot of national media are coming to town.”

What’s baffling about this is why the caucus doesn’t turn to the most anodyne, psychologically unmuddled psych-up genre, the sports movie? The speeches are martial without glorying in actual violence, a parallel way to set up climactic conflicts, and leave an out to feel good about yourself even if you lose:

It’s one thing to scapegoat cultural elites. It’s another to stumble into super-awkward cultural allusion after super-awkward cultural allusion. If you care about message discipline, sports movies are totally safe and reliable, and perhaps most importantly, Heartland-appropriate.

Homosexuality is still a taboo in football in the sense that there is a different kind of cohabitation to other professions. Expressing your personal sexuality is difficult in every professional environment and even more so for a footballer who shares a changing room with his team-mates, and hence also his intimacy with others. In our world it could cause embarrassment. In a sport in which you get undressed it could cause an extra difficulty in cohabitation. In other professions such as journalists or bank employees, this doesn’t happen.For them it’s easier to express themselves. But from a personal point of view, I think you can live without showing your own tendencies or you can do so in a discreet manner.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about protecting gay players from having to feel strange and different. This is about protecting straight players from having to face their anxieties — and find out they might be false. This is about the false idea that locker rooms are already sexually neutral zones, because when it’s heterosexuality, it’s neutral and doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable, but if the specter of gayness creeps in everything is confused and weird and overwhelming. This is about the deeply illogical idea that if someone behaved in a dignified and professional fashion while they were in the closet, that they’ll suddenly become a sexual harasser upon coming out, an event that usually accords with people wanting to reassure their friends and family and coworkers that everything about them is still essentially the same.

This is the same kind of false expression of concern that happened back in August when Philipp Lahm, who captains the German national team, warned in his published autobiography that if gay players came out, they would be harassed into suicide. His only evidence for this, of course, as my colleague Zack Ford pointed out, was a teammate who killed himself over the fear that he would be arrested for sexual assault. And even if he’d had an actual example, this would be an argument about straight homophobes, not gay people living their lives openly and honestly.

In a way, this is a victory for gay people. There are no legitimate objections about the threat gay people pose to straight society. So homophobes have to find convoluted ways to pretend they care about the well-being of gay people instead. But it’s still kind of depressing.

As greenhouse pollution from oil and coal continues to build, the Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra) is on its way out of the Buckeye State. Between 1990 and 2006, United States hardiness zones shifted northward, putting Ohio closer to the southern end of buckeye viability. That trend will accelerate. A 2007 study by Daniel W. McKenney and other forest scientists of the effect of climate pollution increases on 130 tree species projects major changes in North American tree populations, as practically all of the southern and western United States grow too warm and arid for nearly all species. The Ohio buckeye’s range, now centered on Ohio and Indiana, is projected to shrink and shift drastically under business-as-usual scenarios:

Ohio buckeye range, 1971-2000 (Green marks core 5-95% range)	Projected Ohio buckeye range, 2071-2100 (NCARccsm3 A1B scenario)

Importantly, the destruction of the Ohio buckeye’s traditional range is not just a long-term phenomenon. Several of the scenarios modeled by the researchers find major shifts during the 2011-2040 period.

A simpler 2005 study that modeled the expected shift in range over 100 years due to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations found that the Ohio buckeye range would decline by 12 to 51 percent this century. At current rates, carbon dioxide concentrations are on track to quadruple.

Tell me more about Virgil’s relationship with Carrie. He appears to be very loyal to her, even when he’s chewing her out for crossing a line.

We discussed, prior to shooting the pilot, we had some rehearsal sessions, and there was a meeting with [writer] Michael Cuesta, [showrunner] Alex Gansa, and Carrie [Claire Danes] and we went over a lot of issues. We decided that Virgil went to the New Jersey Institute of Technology and studied engineering, and when he graduated, he wanted to work for the CIA and he applied for a job, and Saul was the guy I interviewed with, and he turned me down. And he hired somebody from MIT. So I just kind of was on my own, doing my own sort of freelance audio-visual surveillance, I met Carrie, and we became friends, and I sort of became, over time, like her big brother. My guess is, because I studied a little bit of behavioral psychology, Virgil was an outsider as a kid. And he grew up in a neighborhood in New Jersey where it was brawn over brains, and Virgil was a little bit of a tech nerd. And he was a brainiac and he had a sharp tongue, and you take a few beatings. You take a few shots to the ego and shots to your manhood, so to speak. And therefore, when you get older, you want to take care of people who are being abused or being ostracized. So it makes sense that Virgil would look after [Carrie], because she is an outsider, she is an outsider in this community. Also, everyone had someone to answer to. Saul has to answer to someone. Estes has to answer to answer to someone. Virgil has her back. Virgil’s going to look after her and take care of her. He doesn’t want what happened to him to happen to her…

As an actor, I have to justify how I’m behaving in the present. Everything we do as human beings in the present is the result of things that have happened to us in the past. People who become nurses are usually people who had to take care of their father or their mother. Archetypically, if you’re a caregiver, you’re a caregiver from a very young age. We choose these professions subconsciously.

Is that true for you, in terms of deciding you wanted to act?

In terms of me choosing acting, I needed to be recognized. As a child, I wasn’t recognized by my parents. My parents were divorced by the time I was 3. My father was around, I could never get his approval. My mother, she was a single mom. I was also an only child. So I had to make a lot of noise in order to be recognized. And as an actor, we choose acting because it’s an opportunity for you to hear me and to be recognized…when I first came to town, I would interview with agents, and I would say “I didn’t come here to go swimming, I didn’t come here to go fishing, I didn’t come here to get laid. I came here to win an Academy Award, an Emmy, and a Cleo. So let’s get to work.”

Do you feel like you’ve gotten the recognition from your parents that you were looking for?

The last time I went looking for my father’s approval, I was 31 years old, and I’d had a modicum of success. I was on a TV show called Civil Wars, which was created by Steven Bochco. I was a bicycle messenger. And my father came out [to visit] and my father taught me how to garden, and I wanted to show him my garden. And I took him to the back, and I presented my garden to him, and he looks to the left, he looks to the right, he looks up to the sun, and says, “What did you plant the peppers on that side for?” That was the last time I went looking for his approval. It had nothing to do with career…My father did the best that he could with the tools that he had. He just wanted me to be able to provide for myself. My father wasn’t being critical in his mind. He was trying to be helpful, but he didn’t know how to verbalize that in a manner that wouldn’t be offensive. He didn’t know how to say “This is beautiful, this is amazing. You should rotate your stuff. Maybe next year, move stuff around.”

Do you think that dynamic comes across in Virgil’s relationship with Carrie?

He is the voice of reason for her. He’s very compassionate and understanding. I believe in her. And I trust her. I love her unconditionally. There’s no reason for me to put a condition on her because she’s no threat to me. Her behavior is a threat to Estes, her behavior is a threat to Saul.

I also appreciate that Virgil’s one of the only male characters on the show Carrie hasn’t put the moves on yet. What does that say about their friendship? Could we use more relationships between male and female characters that are just strictly friendly or professional?

Virgil is married. And that hasn’t been tested. It’s never been tested. And I think that’s true. That there isn’t that dynamic going on there. And now on a larger scale, I am the Virgil to her Dante. Virgil, in Dante’s Inferno, is the character that helps Dante navigate his way through the labyrinth of hell. I’m the Virgil to her Dante. Any time she gets herself into situations that are hellish or hell-like, I’m there.

Do you guide her through or get her caught? I worry about Virgil and Max knowing about Carrie’s medication.

We’ll just have to see.

On Due South, The Shield, and now Homeland, you’ve played characters who aren’t averse to bending the rules and taking aggressive action to crack down on people who violate the law or are threats to the United States. I’d be curious as to what the persistence of those themes mean about our fears of crime and terrorism. Do we not trust the people who are supposed to protect us? Do we really think our laws are too restrictive?

It’s very interesting. I’ve been very, very fortunate. My first series was Civil Wars, and my second series was Due South, created by Academy Award winner Paul Haggis. The difficulty, I’ll talk about each one individually and try to make a summation. The interesting thing about Ray Vecchio [his character on Due South, about a Canadian Mountie paired with an American cop] is I didn’t like him at first. I had a very hard time playing the foil…The Mountie’s the hero, he’s the hero archetype. In order for him to be the hero, he has to solve the case, he has to get the girl. Which means the foil cannot solve the case, the foil cannot get the girl. So I was getting very frustrated with the role because it wasn’t very satisfying. And I called my very first acting teacher, Ingrid Sonnichsen, she teaches at Carnegie Mellon now, and I said, “I got a dilemma.” And I said, “I don’t like playing the character I’m playing.” She said, “That’s a problem.” And I said, “I know. This could run for five years.” She said, “You need to find the one thing, the one thing about him that you like.” And she said, “What’s the best quality that he has?” And I said, “He’s a true friend. He will take a bullet for the Mountie. he will give his undying allegiance to helping this outsider.” Again. An outsider. Help find the murderer of his dad, and just be his friend in a land where no one else will be his friend. That’s the parallel between Vecchio and Virgil. They both serve that same function.

Now, [Detective Steve] Billings, Billings on the other hand does not fall into either one of those characters. Billings was very self-serving, but every character was on The Shield. Self-preservation was the major theme running through The Shield. Every character had to make a choice over you or me. Vic Mackey or Ronnie. Who’s going down? Ronnie’s going down. Lem or Shane? I’m sorry Lem. You’re gone. Me or anybody else? That pervert that I planted the information on. Playing jokes on Dutch. What I did to Dutch with Alex O’Laughlin’s character…What was great about The Shield is they tapped into a side of me, which I like to play jokes on people, I like to rib you, I’m an instigator, and they understood that when they hired me. So the thing about Dave Marciano and Billings that was in common was being this little instigator, this jerk. But he does it with humor. This guy’s a ball-buster. And I am. And they tapped into that side of me.

Do all of these shows suggest that we shouldn’t trust the government?

I think we make commentaries. I didn’t mean to avoid your question earlier about that. Here’s the thing about The Shield. When I became Acting Captain, there’s a big riot…and they ask me to make a decision, and I’m like ahh, and they’re like, you’re George Bush. Just think of yourself as George Bush. The liberal Hollywood likes to point out the faults and defects of the current administration. Isn’t that what’s theater is all about? Theater was created to show the powers that be what the masses were unhappy with. And I think that what happens, when we tell stories, even in the modern day, because this is our mythology. Television and film are our mythology, in which we tell stories to the masses so they know how to behave, and it’s a mirror held up to the government or the police. We like to show the general public what the powers that be are doing to you. And we like to show them in inept ways because people want to stick it to the man. There is a lot of waste. There is a lot of ineptitude in our government, there is a lot of ineptitude in our police force. There is a lot of corruption…Dirty. Everything’s dirty. It’s not so slick. It’s very real. All these other shows are very slick. Look how slick our cops our. Look how slick our lawyers are. It’s dirty. It’s in the trenches. That’s what I loved about Michael Clayton. Michael Clayton was amazing. Here’s this big lawyer who’s helping bring down law firms…It’s always a moral dilemma. The thing about The Shield is there’s a moral dilemma every episode. That’s the whole thing that just happened with Penn State. That’s a moral crime. And a sin to morality…they’ll overlook shit for greed and power.

I think there’s often a sense that toughness and an adversarial approach are signs of principled journalism, and Costas’ questions to Sandusky certainly illustrated why, in certain cases, that can be the only route to integrity. To hear Costas ask Sandusky about reports that he showered with a particular boy and conceded to his mother that his genitals may have touched the boy, and to hear Sandusky pause (as he did often), and say, “I can’t exactly recall what was said there. In terms of what I did say was that if he felt that way then I was wrong,” is immensely revealing, even if it doesn’t elicit specific information. Even if you’re Costas, even if you’re in a position of power, even if you’ve landed an interview that a sensible lawyer would have declined, even if your audience is sympathetic, it’s not exactly easy to ask someone if they’re a pedophile point-blank, but Costas did it. “You feel horrible,” Costas asked at one point. “Do you feel culpable?” “I’m not sure what you mean,” Sandusky told him. I imagine he’ll want to rehearse his answers better before he goes on trial.

By contrast, Diane Sawyer’s approach to Gabrielle Giffords was significantly gentler, listening patiently, helping her through answers and working with Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, to help her make herself understood. As a piece of explanatory journalism, the segment was, for me at least, an extremely useful look at the therapy that can help someone recover from brain injury, and the extent of the uncertainty involved. But the show also made clear that even if Giffords’ is still intellectually capable and curious, her ability to communicate remains significantly compromised. Sawyer could have asked directly — and she did ask Kelly if, given the brutality of the attack, he was reluctant to see his wife run again — but she didn’t necessarily have to in order to get the point across:

Both approaches were perfect for their story, and both pieces were examples of the kind of thing that television journalism does best. We got to see Giffords rebuilding her body and her brain, and then the results of that work in front of us. And Jerry Sandusky was a ghost, a man who can’t bring himself to show his face even as he ventured out in an astonishingly ill-conceived attempt to defend his reputation.

Joe Nocera rightly points out that of all the kinds of people in the world to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of children, a big-time college football coach is exactly who you would expect to behave in this manner. This is an industry, after all, where “coaches take home multimillion-dollar salaries, while the players who make them rich don’t even get ‘scholarships’ that cover the full cost of attending college.”

Any coach who’s not an idiot is bound to recognize that the top prospects have economic value to the programs that hire them. Any coach who’s not an idiot is bound to recognize that in a competitive labor market, players would earn more than $0 in annual salary. Any coach who’s not an idiot is bound to recognize that he, personally, benefits financially from the existence of a cartel which prohibits paying the players. And you don’t get to be head coach of a major football program by being an idiot. It’s a difficult, intellectually demanding job. If the NCAA proposed a rule setting coaches contracts to a maximum duration of two years and a maximum salary of $150,000, then the coaches would loudly object. They would argue, accurately, that the proposed rule was unfair and exploitative and that generally speaking the formation of this kind of employer cartel is illegal. But to be a coach at a big time football program is, necessarily, to be intimately involved in operating and benefiting from exactly this sort of cartel. To do it on a viable basis, year after year, you really need to harden your heart against the exploitation of young people. To be sure, the standard thing is to exploit teenagers rather than 10-year-olds. The standard thing is to exploit them financially rather than sexually. But using positions of power to mistreat young people for personal benefit is what the job is all about.

(HT: Towleroad.)

Jerry Sandusky raped a child in Penn State football facilities. It took three and a half weeks for Sandusky to be banned from the locker room after he was caught committing sexual assault. According to the Grand Jury report on the charges against Sandusky, Paterno didn’t even attend a follow-up meeting on Sandusky’s conduct after the witness to that rape reported it to him. Even if someone under Paterno was responsible for handing out and taking back locker room keys and the rights that go with them, Paterno has some responsibility for the facilities that were a part of his program, and for whether or not the team continues to give offices, facilities access, and honorifics associated with the program to people who are no longer staff or players. You’re not providing a professional environment for your players if your locker room is a place where children are being abused. You’re not providing a safe environment for your players if you let a sex offender in their locker room, even if he’s a pedophile and unlikely to target any of them. And ESPN’s Chris Fowler made the point last night that by not encouraging or directly helping the witness go to the police, Paterno sent the wrong message to his graduate assistant — and to people everywhere — that the honorable thing to do is to keep quiet to protect powerful perpetrators, rather than to report crimes perpetrated against particularly vulnerable victims.

And yet, people seem furious at the Penn State Board of Trustees for doing the decent, professional thing and firing Paterno. Some Penn State students rallied in support of Paterno at his house yesterday (others with an appropriate sense of events held a vigil for Sandusky’s victims), unaware that the sister of one of Sandusky’s victims attends school with them. When Penn State Board of Trustees Vice Chairman John Surma faced reporters after the Board’s decisions, some of the questions were vituperative. One wanted to know why the Board couldn’t let Paterno ride out the season and finish his career “with a little bit of dignity.” Another wanted to know what Surma had to say about “the perception that the Board has been gunning for Coach Paterno since ’04″ and was simply using the scandal to push out someone they unfairly disliked. And I understand how shocking it must be to have your trust and love for a man who helped you win a lot of football games and appeared to have an appropriate sense of the balance between sports and academics betrayed. But Joe Paterno’s right to do exactly what he pleased makes the fact that he didn’t do more than fulfill his minimum legal obligations particularly distressing, and like all the other people responsible here (and there are many) seems to me, I think he’s lost the right to dictate the terms of his retirement.

Joe Paterno’s right to his dignity is not more valuable than the right of children not to be assaulted by adults.

Joe Paterno’s right to employment if he can’t perform up to standards is not more important than the right of Penn State to run a safe campus.

If Joe Paterno’s highest priority is truly providing quality education, his loyalty to those values should have been higher than his loyalty to a man whose conduct represents a hideous rot in those values. You only stand for what you say you represent if you stand for it when it’s hard.

I cannot possibly imagine a cause so mighty and righteous that it outweighs shrugging aside child abuse and child assault. Certainly not football. College sports may be a business with deeply engaged consumers. But it’s still just a business. And Joe Paterno is just a man, subject to the normal rules of accountability and decency. These are the basic facts of which moral educations are made. Some of us, apparently, need remedial lessons.

During the interview in which Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom,” he told the British reporter, “He’s the other type of Negro, he’s not like me. There are two types of slaves. Frazier’s worse than you to me…. One day he might be like me, but for now he works for the enemy.”

It wasn’t just Ali. After Frazier beat The Champ in the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden in 1971, Boxing Illustrated posed a question to readers: “Is Joe Frazier a white champion in black skin?” By that time, Frazier had been alienated by much of America’s black community, seen by many exactly as Ali had painted him.

Joe Frazier, to be sure, wasn’t Muhammad Ali. But does that diminish Frazier’s accomplishments, either as an athlete or as the change agent he (perhaps unintentionally) was? It shouldn’t. Frazier’s career began when he fled the racism of the Jim Crow South, moved to Philadelphia, and learned to fight. Like Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, and, incidentally, Ali before him, Frazier highlighted America’s racial injustice by winning a gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics while representing a country that didn’t represent him. A few years later, it was Frazier who lent money to Ali, who had been imprisoned and stripped of his title for dodging the Vietnam War draft. Frazier later petitioned President Richard Nixon to get Ali reinstated into boxing.

After his career, he started a charitable foundation and opened a Philadelphia gym to give troubled youth a place to go to ease their frustrations and learn to box, much as others had done for teens like Ali and Frazier years before. Well into his fifties, Frazier still fought charity bouts to raise money for troubled youth in communities across the country.

Plenty of black athletes, Ali included, used their platform to become outspoken activists for American racial injustice and inequality. Plenty of others, like Frazier, highlighted social injustice and inequality simply through their accomplishments, accolades, and acceptance by mainstream America. Perhaps none, however, was demonized by other black athletes quite the way Frazier was by Ali. Ali was flashy, bold and outspoken, and imprisoned for his beliefs, and his activism rightly endeared him to millions of people around the world both during his career and after.

“I don’t want to be no more than what I am,” Frazier once said. But while it may not be his enduring legacy — or, for all I know, the legacy he’d choose for himself — Smokin’ Joe Frazier played a positive role in the change of America’s racial norms during his lifetime. Just because he wasn’t Muhammad Ali shouldn’t diminish that.