Thanks to Citizens United, we are all the beneficiaries of unlimited corporate money in our elections — witness the onslaught of TV ads interrupting our ballgames and the fall lineup of TV shows.

In a new twist, the very groups that agitated to spend unlimited funds to promote their point of view are now critical of others who challenge them. What brings this to mind is an Associated Press story this morning that the Marcellus Shale Coalition is not happy about the funding priorities of the Heinz Endowments and William Penn Foundation.

For fourteen years, the university put its prestigious football program ahead of doing anything for the children, who were victimized. This is appalling and despicable. And, now, today the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has levied incredibly severe penalties against the institution for covering up crimes that were committed against children. What does this case tell us about holding other institutions and officials, including government, accountable for their actions?

The NCAA has banned Penn State from college football bowl participation for four years, fined the university $60 million, vacated 110 victories from 1998 to 2011, and enabled all football scholarship athletes at the school to transfer without having to sit out a year. Except for banning, this is perhaps the most that could otherwise be done in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal.

Dissenters’ Digest takes a look back at news stories covering whistleblowers, watchdogs, and government accountability.

Since last November, when the Jerry Sandusky saga propelled Penn State into the headlines, I’ve wondered about Penn State’s former president, Graham Spanier. After reading the Freeh Report in its nauseating detail, I did more than wonder — I started digging for Spanier’s own words on what it means to be a university president.

What I found does not make for a pretty picture.

Louis Freeh’s long-awaited report is out on the institutional handling of the Jerry Sandusky affair at Penn State, and it is brutal. More than anything, it comes down hard on the climate of Penn State that denied the need for accountability and oversight.

Dissenters’ Digest takes a look back at the week’s stories covering whistleblowers, watchdogs, and government accountability.

The horrors of the Penn State rape scandal should remind us of a truth too easily lost in this era of corporate personhood: institutions of all kinds and sizes are by their nature morally empty.

I suppose our culture’s general sexual ineptitude is one reason this fact is easier to see in instances of violent brutality involving organs of sex. But ugly institutional moral failures of many kinds happen all around us every hour, every day.

This is not right. You are not alone. This must change. With these three phrases, the mighty are brought down and the lowly lifted up.

On this Thanksgiving Weekend, I am thankful for all who stand up to bullies.

The fallout from the worst idea ever for an exclusive interview while under indictment continues. Just what Jerry Sandusky admitted to Bob Costas on national television, all of which is admissible as evidence, is enough to put him in jail for up to five years