“Joe Paterno’s tenure as coach of the Penn State football team will soon be over, perhaps within days or weeks, in the wake of a sex-abuse scandal that has implicated university officials, according to two people briefed on conversations among the university’s top officials.” [NYT]

Our guest columnist has submitted a request to the White House petitions website.

We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.

Since these petitions are ignored apart from an occasional patronizing and inane political statement amounting to nothing more than a condescending pat on the head, we the signers would enjoy having the illusion of success. Since no other outcome to this process seems possible, we demand that the White House immediately assign a junior staffer to compose a tame and vapid response to this petition, and never attempt to take any meaningful action on this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.

We the People [White House, via @tomtomorrow]

Photo: White House Flickr feed [via @daveweigel]

We don’t recall whether our career as a high-school journalist lasted one year or two, but we can state with confidence that we were an abject failure: Not once did we piss off the Administration.

Don’t worry — we atoned for our sin in college. Big time. But that’s another story.

Sadly, we lack the confidence to proclaim that we would have handled our Fantasy Indiscretion properly. For all we know, we would have made the same fundamental mistake as our colleagues in Seattle:

A proposal being considered by the Seattle School Board could have a chilling impact on free speech in the city’s high schools, First Amendment activists say.

The proposed policy would give principals the authority to review high-school newspapers before they are published and would allow them to stop publication if they deem material to be libelous, obscene or “not in keeping with the school’s instructional mission and values,” among other criteria.

Do you see the problem here? How about a telling clue?

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“The federal government also impedes economic growth by interfering in the employer and employee relationship.” [Cain 2012, via @jonlovett]

“I emphatically deny that I have at any time under any circumstances ever said or remotely suggested that Mr. Hoover was a homosexual.” —LA Times reporter Jack Nelson in 1971, responding to J. Edgar’s fears he was about to be outed. [LAT, via TPM]

“A new woman alleging sexual harassment by presidential hopeful Herman Cain[!] will break her silence at a news conference with her powerhouse attorney Gloria Allred Monday afternoon in New York City, RadarOnline.com is exclusively reporting.”

Ross Douthat, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, as well as common sense and a humanity he must have lost in a tragic childhood accident, thinks the last decade was a failure of meritocracy:

For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.

And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.

We can’t disagree with Douthat’s general point that humility is the cure for hubris — the idea goes back to at least Socrates, who argued that acknowledging your own ignorance is the path to wisdom.

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