Our capacity for stupidity seems endless.

It’s 10:30 Tuesday morning. On the way to the kitchen, I looked out at semi-frozen Lake Erie from the living room picture window. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, maybe 200 yards out on the now thinly frozen Great Lake, was a cross-country skier and a dog.

The temperature was near 50 degrees.

At roughly 500 yards out – in clear view of the apparently clueless cross-country skier – was a burgeoning patch of blue, open lake. The ice covering Lake Erie was slowly, but clearly melting and breaking up.

Indeed, as the cross-country skier and dog moved across the lake, cracks on the ice covering Lake Erie were nearby and clearly visible.

“What in the hell are you doing,” I mumbled to myself.

Perhaps this cross-country skier simply wasn’t paying attention to the condition of the thinning Lake Erie ice.

Perhaps this cross-country skier didn’t realize it was 50 degrees with the sun blazing in rare, late winter glory.

But more likely, that crazy cross-country skier was out on dangerous Lake Erie ice simply because the temperature was so unseasonably warm and pleasant.

Now the fact remains most of us engage in some form of reckless behavior every day.

Some still drink and drive even though the consequences are obvious and the chances for calamity are real.

Some still smoke cigarettes even though anyone lighting up knows the potentially deadly ramifications involved in this unhealthy, disgusting habit.

What are we thinking?

Perhaps it’s something of a cliché to say life is all about choices, yours and mine. But trite or not, this simplistic cliché remains exasperatingly true.

It’s the reason I still occasionally drive and talk on my cell phone. I could – and obviously should – pull over on the roadside, or wait until I’m safely in a parking lot. What could possibly be so important to justify risking life and limbs? And it’s not just about my life or limbs. This behavior obviously endangers others. Many of us still decide to do it knowing the possible consequences.

I’m not alone. Today when you venture out on the roads,  count how many citizens are driving and talking on their cell phones. Take a look and see how many drivers you see fumbling with their Blackberries trying to answer a text message.

Who can honestly say this not dangerous?

Irresponsible, personal choices like these explain why even with decades-old seat-belt laws still on the books, many drivers and passengers still stubbornly refuse to buckle up to protect their lives.

For the sake of a little more comfort, many continue to place themselves needlessly at risk. No city or state laws are going change these terrible decisions. Frightening statistics proving the deadly folly in driving or riding in a vehicle without wearing a seat belt aren’t enough to stop such senseless behavior.

But a tragedy, an unfortunate, reckless tragedy, that hits so close to home, does have the emotional pop to alter behavior. And perhaps even retelling events surrounding such a life-altering tragedy can itself influence behavior change.

It’s worth a try.

I never used seat belts before March 1988. I was working as a sportswriter at the Peoria Journal Star covering the Missouri Valley Conference Basketball Tournament. Bradley University, led by a gifted All-American and future NBA star Hersey Hawkins, would capture the conference title and eventually play and lose to Auburn in an NCAA Tournament game in Atlanta.

All this seemed dramatically  important before March 4, 1988.

During that basketball tournament weekend in Peoria, Ill., the Journal Star’s award-winning daily metro columnist, Rick Baker, left the Hofbrau House tavern late on a Friday afternoon. Baker placed his 10-month-old son, Russell, in a child safety seat in the backseat, and headed for his Woodford County home across the Illinois River from Peoria.

Baker decided not to wear his seat belt. As Baker’s SUV crossed the bridge spanning the Illinois River, his vehicle became involved in a deadly three-car accident. Baker was ejected from his vehicle and killed instantly. Amid the wreckage sat his infant son, still secured safely in that child safety seat in the backseat.

There wasn’t a scratch on 10-month-old Russell Baker, who turns 22 this year.

I have used a seat belt every single day since that horrible March day. I buckle up in backseats, passenger seats and drivers seats.

I don’t think about Rick Baker’s tragic death very often. But I thought about him when I witnessed that knucklehead skiing on Lake Erie Tuesday as ice melted all around him. I thought about Baker later that day when I told 7-year-old daughter Nicole to please buckle up. Again!

I’m going to tell Nic about what happened to my newspaper colleague, Rick Baker, 22 years ago.

I’ll tell her about his wife and my former Journal Star colleague Terry Bibo-Baker, the mother of Baker’s fatherless son, who took over her husband’s newspaper column and continues to write it today.

I’ll tell her what a gifted columnist Baker was, and how tragic his death remains  all because he didn’t use a seat belt that March day.

I’ll tell Nic why I use a seat belt every time I get into a car. And whey her mother does the same. And why she must.

I’ll tell her about the story her mother wrote in the Peoria Journal Star the day after Rick Baker was killed because he didn’t use a seat belt. How her mother’s story detailed Baker’s rich life and what his award-winning column meant to the thousands of readers who read it three or four times a week.

So yes, we all do stupid things every single day.

But please – buckle up anyway.

‘Another Sack: Big Ben Courts Trouble And Finds It Once’

Speaking of bad choices:

That headline towered over an editorial in Tuesday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Ben Roethlisberger, who already owns two Super Bowl rings, apparently remains committed to making poor choices off the football field.

Whether the Steelers gifted quarterback escapes criminal charges this time hardly seems the point in an odd way.

The questions football fans are asking today focus on decision making:

What was a famous 28-year-old NFL quarterback doing hanging out in a college bar in Georgia?

What is a 28-year-old man doing messing with twentysomething college girls?

Roethlisberger is no stranger to trouble or bad choices. He is already involved in a messy civil suit in Reno, Nev., over an alleged sexual incident. Roethlisberger nearly killed himself several years ago in a nasty motorcycle accident because he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Here is that PPG editorial. Sums up what Steelers Nation is experiencing:

When Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger does something stupid in the off-season, which the latest news suggests is becoming a habit, that knife plunges straight into the heart of the region. Before Friday, the fans had already felt the tip of that blade too many times before.

In June 2006, the quarterback almost killed himself on Second Avenue near the 10th Street Bridge in a motorcycle accident while riding without a helmet.

Last year, a 31-year-old resort hostess employed by Harrah’s Lake Tahoe alleged in a civil suit that Ben Roethlisberger had raped her in his hotel room while he was attending a charity golf event in July 2008. The woman never went to police and her claim, still in the courts, may turn out to be frivolous. At the very least, though, it seems Ben Roethlisberger got himself into a situation that someone in his position should have known to avoid.

That lesson apparently was not learned. Now, less than a year after the Nevada trouble became public, a woman has come forward to say she was sexually assaulted by the Steelers’ quarterback – only this time the accuser, a 20-year-old college student, went to the police.

For the moment, he has not been arrested or charged but the police in Milledgeville, Ga., not far from the quarterback’s summer vacation home, have undertaken an investigation – and he has responded by hiring a high-powered team of Atlanta criminal defense attorneys.

Because mistaken identification seems unlikely in this case – whatever else he is, Big Ben is not easily confused with someone else – only two possible scenarios seem to present themselves. The quarterback did something bad or the woman made a false charge for whatever reason.

But even with the presumption of innocence, it is hard to be tolerant of the apparent fact that he put himself into another position where trouble was a potential member of his party. What is a 28-year-old superstar doing cruising the bars in a college town late at night? With no thought for himself or his fans, this sack is on him.

Is Anybody Really Listening To Liz Cheney? Anyone, Please?

Don’t want to waste much time on Liz Cheney, the former low-level Bush State Department official,  now focusing her professional life on the arduous task of rehabilitating her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, while defending fun stuff like torture.

After Liz Cheney all but accused nine Obama Justice Department lawyers of treason for representing alleged terrorism suspects, legions of high-level attorneys on the right and left have rushed to their defense. Lawyers including former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr!

Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson does yeoman work explaining democracy’s messy facts to Liz Cheney (Malign lies).

A taste:

A group that Liz Cheney co-chairs, called Keep America Safe, has spent the past two weeks scurrilously attacking the Justice Department officials because they “represented or advocated for terrorist detainees” before joining the administration. In other words, they did what lawyers are supposed to do in this country: ensure that even the most unpopular defendants have adequate legal representation and that the government obeys the law.

Liz Cheney is not ignorant, and neither are the other co-chairs of her group, advocate Debra Burlingame and pundit William Kristol, who writes a monthly column for The Post. Presumably they know that “the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’ representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre” – in other words, older than the nation itself.

That quote is from a letter by a group of conservative lawyers — including several former high-ranking officials of the Bush-Cheney administration, legal scholars who have supported draconian detention and interrogation policies, and even Kenneth W. Starr – that blasts the “shameful series of attacks” in which Liz Cheney has been the principal mouthpiece. Among the signers are Larry Thompson, who was deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft; Peter Keisler, who was acting attorney general for a time during George W. Bush’s second term; and Bradford Berenson, who was an associate White House counsel during Bush’s first term.

Rick Santorum’s Real, Laughable Presidential Illusions

I realize every U.S. Senator believes they have a God-given right to become a presidential candidate. If Ralph Nader can do it, why not one more esteemed United States senator?

So in this historic Senate context, does former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum’s recent trip to the presidential caucus state of Iowa, and his upcoming trek to the first presidential primary state of New Hampshire, really seem that preposterous?

Well, yeah.

For starters, the vast majority of Americans have no idea who Rick Santorum is: No clue. And note again that the Americans who know Santorum best – that is, Pennsylvanians who elected him to the Senate in 1994 and 2000  – unequivocally, and with a certain amount of glee, showed Santorum the door in 2006 while rewarding Bob Casey with an 18-point landslide Senate victory.

Go ahead – find me a credible presidential candidate with that kind of humiliating voter rejection on it.

But for more kicks, take a look at a story detailing how some Republicans are apparently questioning Santorum’s commitment to the GOP’s rigid anti-abortion litmus test (Santorum fights back in Iowa)

Postscript

I lead a tense debate during an Erie Times-News Editorial Board endorsement meeting in early October 2006. The question on the table: Should the Erie Times-News endorse Santorum or Casey.

After going around the room among the eight members, the board quickly became locked in a four-member tie.

I desperately tried to point out that in Santorum’s 12 years in office, our editorial pages remained a ruthless critic of the senator’s policies and undisciplined behavior. I explained that if we did endorse Santorum, the Erie Times-News risked becoming a laughingstock as one of the few Pennsylvania newspapers endorsing Santorum.

One board member actually argued that we should endorse Santorum because he was going to win (suppressed laughter in room), and because Santorum was a better candidate than Casey (more suppressed laughter), who would help keep America safer (even more suppressed laughter) than Casey.

This Editorial Board member, while urging the rest of us to come to our senses and vote for Santorum (much headshaking), concluded his pitch by saying keep this in mind:

Santorum makes regular morning appearances on the Imus show (audible groans here). This board member wasn’t joking.

So the Erie Times-News stumbled forward and endorsed Santorum. Casey won the election (59 percent to 41 percent), out-polling Santorum 2,392,984 to 1,684,778 votes.

I’m sure Don Imus remains very proud.