It happens every time there is a natural disaster, and it’s happening in Joplin, Missouri.  As people try to put their lives back together, looters are looking through the rubble in search of anything that might fetch a few bucks.  Other than declaring open season on looters, I’m not really sure how this problem can be fixed.  If you’re stealing from people in the aftermath of a tragedy, you truly have no shame.  In the aftermath of the Iowa floods in 2008, there were instances of people the copper from inside homes.

Jim Tressel finally stepped down as the football coach at Ohio State.  He’s not the first football coach to cover up NCAA violations, and he’s not the first to lie to the NCAA about it.  However, in this case there was a smoking gun, and you can’t let one guilty person off simply because you have insufficient evidence to prove that other people are guilty.

The athletes are definitely no angels in this situation.  They should have known better.  However, they are young, and young people make mistakes.  The smart ones learn from those mistakes.  I’m certainly annoyed at the way the NCAA watered down the punishment by having it start AFTER their bowl game.  The players will miss relatively unimportant early season games.  Want to make suspensions less predictable?  Throw the names of all a team’s opponents in a hat and randomly choose which games a player will be suspended for.  It might be Central Southeast Ohio A & T … or it might be Michigan.

I’m sure some Buckeye fans will blame Christopher Cicero for the imminent collapse of the program.  Cicero is the Columbus lawyer who emailed Tressel to make him aware of the fact that his players were interacting with a known criminal.  For those Buckeye fans who feel that what has transpired is the worst that could have happened to the OSU football program … you are wrong.  The worst thing that could have happened was having a player getting mixed up in something really bad an ending up dead.  Put yourself in Cicero’s shoes – if you said nothing, and someone ended up hurt, could you sleep at night?  I know very little about Cicero outside of the OSU scandal, but if this is an indication of how his moral compass orients, I’d hire him as a lawyer if I needed one.  He had the best interests of the kids at heart.

And perhaps the mos bizarre pond scum incident from the past few weeks – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, sexually assaulting a hotel maid in his New York hotel room.  Strauss-Kahn was expected to be a leading candidate in the French presidential election.  Even if he were able to flee the country, I’m not sure how he expected this incident to remain hidden.  This wasn’t some anonymous rapist – it was really easy to figure out who it was – the registered occupant of the hotel room.  Goodbye job, goodbye French presidency, goodbye freedom.