It's easy to look good when everything is humming along on an even keel.

Sooner or later, though, you're going to make an error...particularly if you're turning out millions of complex examples of your craftsmanship every year.

What is true of people is also true of corporations: It's how you own up to your mistakes that reveals your true character.

Toyota is new to this business of acknowledging its faults and making good on them--something American automakers have gotten accustomed to, if not exactly comfortable with.

Because they're newcomers, Toyota fell into the trap of trying to stonewall, rather than preserve customer goodwill by immediately taking responsibility. Now they've annoyed people and hurt the reputation of their brand.

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Lost amid the weekend hoopla of the Super Bowl was Sarah Palin’s $100,000 speech to the Tea Party convention, which The Lowe-Down happened to watch in its entirety.

Assuming you missed it, she opened with a paean to the principles of the U.S. Constitution, yet later accused the Obama Administration of coddling the Christmas Day bomber by affording him his constitutional rights before enough information could be squeezed out of him. “We need a commander-in chief, not a professor of constitutional law,” she huffed.

She also sneeringly alluded to Obama as being someone who could read well from a TelePrompTer. Evidently, this is the mark of a phony, while writing crib notes (as Sarah did) on the palm of one’s hand is much more genuine and American.

But to fault Palin based on logic and consistency is to do the lady a disservice. She does not pretend to fall back on these rhetorical crutches, which are the contrivances of “elites” who would happily sell this great nation of ours out from under us if they could stop saluting the hammer and sickle long enough.

No, the coin of Palin’s realm is raw emotion, and those who paid $350 apiece to hear her speak got plenty of that, incoherent as the delivery may have been.

Ultimately, whether she plans to run for president or not isn’t really relevant, nor are her questionable qualifications to hold such an office. She only needs to know how to do one thing (and she does it quite well, thank you very much)--which is to endorse the backside of a check.

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There is no small amount of controversy here in the Super Bowl Host Area about whether the whole mess is worth it to our economy.

Some will argue that the lion’s share of the money ends up out of the area, at hotel and restaurant chain headquarters, for example.

Tourism boosters maintain that there is no substitute for the nonstop sunny skies and balmy weather that our northern friends will feast upon as they huddle in their Snuggies with three feet of snow outside.

Whatever. One segment that will certainly benefit, as we related in our news pages, is the strip club industry and…um…related adult-oriented businesses, not to mention some criminal enterprises that I won’t even go into.

In that regard, my original sketch for this cartoon showed just the pair of legs with no miniskirt or microphone. My editor felt we should broaden the comment to include all of the performing, partying and ancillary activities, so I cleaned it up a little.

Perceptive readers will be able to discern a few familiar faces among the merrymakers I have depicted.

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The lobbying armies of the status quo did a great job of scaring the hell out of people last year ("Are you going to let a bureaucrat get between you and your doctor?"), and the pro-health reform forces have been afraid of their own shadows ever since Scott Brown's victory.

That means the whole mess will either get shoved on a high shelf in hopes we'll forget about it and move on, or the Democrats will pass some window dressing so empty as to be effectively meaningless.

It will be years before anybody even dares to think of reforming the system again, maybe after health care claims one out of every two dollars spent in the economy, rather than the current one out of six. Meanwhile, the Europeans will continue enjoying better and cheaper health care than we have.

But eventually, in a desperate effort to remain globally competitive, American companies will begin to drop or severely curtail health care insurance for their employees, and many of us will discover to our dismay that coverage is not a God-given right of employment.

Only when the have-nots finally outnumber the I've-got-mine-so-screw-yous will congressional town-hall meetings begin calling for the head of anyone who doesn't promise to deliver on national health care, pronto.

Sadly, it will already be too late for a lot of people.

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One can easily understand why Washington gridlock has spawned a grassroots movement of angry citizens.

When neither party appears to be acting in the best interests of the country it represents, and resolutely refuses to work with the other for the betterment of the nation, our first reflex is to throw the whole mess out--baby, bathwater and all.

It might behoove some of us to remember that there are a few things big government provides that we probably wouldn't want to do without: Social Security, Medicare and child welfare are just a few examples.

Somebody does have to pay for these programs. Since we can't depend on each other to voluntarily pay our fair share of what we owe to keep the social fabric together, we empower government to tax us, the people, on our own behalf.

When that power is misused, we lose confidence in the whole system. Let's just remember that it isn't so much the structure or the size of government that enrages us, it's the way that structure is twisted and warped to serve the interests of a powerful few that leaves us feeling helpless.

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It has taken Barack Obama a long time from campaign promise to implementation on this one, and you have to wonder what he's still afraid of.

Today, Defense Secretary Bob Gates indicated that there will be a year of study before this woefully anachronistic policy can be sent to the oblivion it deserves.

We've had fifteen years to study it, so what's left to find out?

There are two clear arguments against delaying matters any further: First, if Obama is worried about political fallout from declaring the policy dead as of now (You're the Commander in Chief, for crying out loud--act like one), the so-called damage has already been done by simply declaring he will end it.

Second, if he's trying to ease the "traditionalists" (to use a kind word) into accepting gays in their midst, there's no better way to get them to work together than to just rip off the band-aid. Gradually introducing them to each other isn't going to make any difference. After all, the sky didn't fall when Truman integrated the services.

The biggest sea-change in our culture on this issue has occurred because so many families have a member who has "come out" within the last couple of decades. That's when people began to realize that gays are just human beings who happen to be gay.

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In a court action sure to lift the hearts of crooked public servants everywhere, there is a Supreme Court challenge pending on the constitutionality of a law that has been a phenomenally useful tool for federal prosecutors.

"Theft of Honest Services" is a catchall statute that has been used to put several of our own local pols behind bars for corruption, and untold numbers nationwide.

The perps argue that it's too vague, that they never know when they're breaking the law.

It's pretty simple, folks, and you don't need a degree in civics to figure it out: If you're being offered money that you know wouldn't be offered if you weren't in public office, then it's probably illegal to take it. If something you're doing, like paying rent to yourself out of your own campaign funds, makes you ask the question, "I wonder if this is legal?", then it probably isn't.

Even if it is legal, the fact that you're wondering about it means it's probably unethical, and you shouldn't do it anyway. Legality should not be the threshold of permissibility.

Is it an undue burden to have to ask a prosecutor for an interpretation of the law every time you want to do a business deal? No, it isn't. It's an unwritten part of your job description. Nobody forced you to run for office.

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