So many people wanted to place Andy Griffith in the past, in a place
Andy Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor circa 1963 (Michael Ochs Archives - GETTY IMAGES) that never really was. Griffith himself preferred to live in the present.

There was surprise and some disappointment when in 2008, Griffith reteamed with his TV son, Ron Howard, to reprise their roles in a black-and-white, tongue-in-cheek, pro-Obama video message. The president, in a statement mourning Griffith, who died on Tuesday, said, “A performer of extraordinary talent, Andy was beloved by generations of fans and revered by entertainers who followed in his footsteps.” 

Griffith supported another Democrat, N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue, in her campaign. Counting down the days of her lame-duck tenure and fresh off the GOP legislature’s successful override on three bills she vetoed, she said in her statement: “Throughout his career, he represented everything that was good about North Carolina: a small town boy and UNC graduate who took a light-hearted approach to some of the attributes he grew up with and turned them into a spectacularly successful career.”

In 2010, an ad in support of health care legislation seriously dented Griffith’s approval numbers in his beloved North Carolina, a poll showed. Which was enough of a shock that a Democratic consultant suggested to the News & Observer, “It's a good time to call up Barney Fife.”

Oh, you’re right; it is unseemly to speak ill of the dead. But I’m making an exception for the winningest coach in college football, the beloved icon, secular saint and pedophile protector Joe Paterno.
Signs and flowers are seen at the statue of the late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, before the annual Spring football scrimmage in State College, Pennsylvania April 21, 2012. Paterno died on January 22, 2012. (PAT LITTLE - REUTERS) Joe Pa made plenty of exceptions in his time, after all, covering up for his players in matters large and small, and quite directly permitting his former defensive coordinator, child rapist Jerry Sandusky, to carry right on ruining young lives.

Ahead of former FBI director Louis Freeh’s report on Penn State’s handling of the Sandusky scandal, CNN has reported that emails between fired school president Graham Spanier, former athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz suggest that it was Joe Pa who talked the others out of reporting Sandusky to the authorities. The Paterno family has countered that the emails are misleading and the story a smear.

But even if that’s 200 percent true, Joe Paterno’s own words, under oath, in grand jury testimony he gave last December 16, are damning enough.

Because here’s what Paterno, who died in January, told the grand jury former Penn State quarterback Mike McQueary had told him, after driving to his home in a swivet one Saturday morning in February of 2001: “Well, he had seen a person, an older — not an older, but a mature person who was fondling, whatever you might call it — I’m not sure what the term would be — a young boy.’’

Asked if he’d ever had a man named Jerry Sandusky in his employ, Paterno responded, “I did for a while, yes.’’ Which is true; Sandusky only worked for him for 30 years. So who was this ‘mature person’ fondling somone in the showers?

“Jerry Sandusky, who had been one of our coaches,” but had retired in 1999. That is, a year after an investigation of another report about Sandusky molesting two boys in the team shower went nowhere.

Of the ‘fondling’ incident in 2001, Paterno didn’t seem to think there was much doubt about Sandusky’s actions: “Obviously, he was doing something of a sexual nature. I’m not sure exactly what it was. I didn’t push Mike to describe exactly what it was because he was very upset. Obviously, I was in a little bit of a dilemma since Mr. Sandusky was not working for me anymore. So I told — I didn’t go any further than that except I knew Mike was upset and I knew some kind of inappropriate action was being taken by Jerry Sandusky with a youngster.”

He didn’t tell anyone right away, he said, because “it was a Saturday morning and I didn’t want to inferfere with their weekends.”

Which, unlike Sandusky’s victims, went on unmolested.

As he remembered it, he called Curley some time in the next week, and said, ”Hey, we got a problem.”

Could this possibly have been the first time he’d heard anything of the sort about Sandusky? “It may have been discussed in my presence, something else about somebody,’’ Paterno said. “I don’t know.”

He didn’t tell anyone besides Curley, he said, “because I figured that Tim would handle it appropriately.”

Which members of the military have sacrificed enough to count as heroes?  Is it enough that they leave their families for a year to deploy overseas?  How about a six-month deployment and missing the birth of a child?  Or watching dear friends die in combat or losing a limb? When does a member of the military start and stop being a hero worth honoring for his or her service?

It’s a question that should have only one answer — but Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) has a few ideas about which veterans are true heroes and which are not. In Walsh’s hero column: Republican senator and former POW John McCain (Ariz.), whom Walsh praised over the weekend for his acts of bravery in Vietnam and his apparent reluctance to talk about those years on the campaign trail.  (Walsh might have missed this video at the 2008 Republican convention, introducing McCain as a “soldier, naval aviator, and P.O.W.”)

British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline didn’t have much to cheer about this week with its guilty plea to criminal charges of illegally marketing drugs and withholding safety data from U.S. regulators.

Attoney General Eric Holder speaks during a news conference in New Orleans, June 28, 2012. (Bill Haber - Associated Press) The company agreed to pay a record $3 billion in what is now the largest health-care fraud settlement in U.S. history.

But Glaxo didn’t have to endure a lot of gloating from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department extracted the record settlement.

Just as his staff was settling the record-breaking fraud case, Holder became the first Attorney General in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress.

Holder was taken to task by a congressional committee for withholding documents relating to a botched gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.’’

(Courtesy of Capital Concerts ) On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a withering speech commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Douglass stated: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

This Independence Day, there are many African Americans, as well as other women and other people of color, who are unapologetically devoted to what many describe as “conservative values”: the notion of self-reliance and personal responsibility; individual liberty, freedom, and democracy; comprehensive education reform and parental choice in public education as the key to American prosperity; the moral obligation
Actor Fred Morsell, in character as Frederick Douglass, in front of Douglass’s historic home in Washington. (Bill O'Leary - WASHINGTON POST) that all Americans have to help those who cannot help themselves; and who believe we must do everything in our power to ensure that achievement of the American dream is possible for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, creed, ethnicity or sex.

Yet, these same Americans also understand that we do not live in a post-racial America, as so many of us had hoped after the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president in U.S. history. Many of these same Americans see that racism, sexism and religious bigotry remain omnipresent parts of the American experience and believe that our political parties cannot pretend that these problems no longer plague us.