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The new cat, Chapman.

The new Cat’s name is CHAPMAN, named after Chapman University where the kid that lives at our house is a Freshman.

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BOY, did I catch holy hell for last week’s column. I wrote about our perverse proclivity to reward bad behavior. It was mostly about David Letterman, but I made a reference to Cardinal Roger Mahony and his six years of stonewalling the investigation into the sexual abuse of children by pedophile priests, specifically Father Michael Baker. However, I spelled the cardinal’s name wrong. An error of this magnitude must be set right.

“It doesn’t matter what they say as long as they spell your name right,” goes the old showbiz clich . That must also be true in the religion biz, because I got an inbox-full from Tod Tamberg, director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“Perhaps you could nuzzle up to a copy editor next time you take a whack at Cardinal Mahony. Then maybe at least you’ll spell his name correctly,” wrote Tamberg from his official Archdiocese e-mail account.

Apparently, last week I inserted an “e” where it didn’t belong, spelling “Mahony” as “Mahoney.” Tamberg called my spelling error “bush league,” which makes me wonder what adjective describes his profession? “Apologist?” “Enabler?” “Un-indicted co-conspirator?”

But wrong is wrong, so allow me to clean up this mess: It was Cardinal Roger “no e” Mahony who spent more than half-a-billion dollars papering over the sexual abuse of children. Clearly Tamberg wants the cardinal to get full credit for this achievement. If my interloping “e” caused Mahony any discomfort,

I pray for his forgiveness.

And how about a tip of the cap to Tamberg? Say what you will, the guy has his boss’s back. Six years of spinning and smearing the victims and he still has time to check my spelling.

But “e” or “no e,” Mahony’s house of lies is crumbling. We now know Monsignor Richard Loomis, former vicar of clergy, part of Mahony’s inner circle, in a sworn deposition claims he sent the cardinal a memo warning of Baker’s continued sexual assaults against children and testified that Mahony barred him from calling the cops. These aren’t the words of a bush league newspaper pundit. Loomis is a priest, one of Mahony’s own. The stonewall has cracked.

For six years the cardinal has successfully avoided putting his hand on a Bible in open court. So what if Daniel Murphy High School had to close and be auctioned off along with hundreds of millions in other church property? The important thing was to preserve Mahony’s bully pulpit – accent on the “bully.”

Lawyered up, with P.R. firms and a code of silence the CIA would envy, Roger “no e” Mahony continues to lead the largest congregation of Catholics in America – long after Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law fled the country in shame. But Mahony has no shame; he has Tod Tamberg, his own personal spellcheck.

Fortunately, none of this has anything to do with Catholicism itself. The Catholic faith is an agent for goodness and personal grace. I was an altar boy and a graduate of Catholic schools, kindergarten through college.

I’ve seen great works by thousands of good people in parishes from coast to coast. Sadly, Catholic bashers seize upon the Mahonys and Tambergs of the world and use their mendacity as an excuse to belittle a great faith. Catholicism is not suffering a crisis of faith, rather a crisis of fallible flesh-and-blood humans who hide behind canon law to escape the penalties of civil law.

In prison pedophiles are shunned, yet in L.A. politicians still queue up to have their photo taken with Mahony. I’ve often wondered who are those dopes who mugged for the camera with O.J. Simpson on the golf course? I also wonder how craven or cynical are politicians and parishioners who seek Mahony’s blessing rather than his resignation.

We claim to take crimes against children seriously. At best, we’re erratic. Roman Polanski may finally be dragged back to L.A. after 30 years in exile to face the same prosecutor Mahony has dodged for more than half a decade. Polanski has his defenders; the cardinal has Tod Tamberg, a man who is paid to defend the indefensible.

For my part, I have a dream: When the arrest warrant is finally served on the cardinal, his name will be spelled correctly.

THE saga of Balloon Boy had it all: a horrific parent nightmare turned feel good story turned fraud saga.

It became obvious to everyone except CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the whole thing was a hoax and just a desperate cry for attention by a fame-obsessed father who eagerly pimped his kids for 15 seconds of TV face time.

Now Richard Heene faces jail time as the same media he courted sifts through his life with a lice comb until enough dirt surfaces to have child protective services remove his children while the cops haul Balloon Dad to jail. My guess is the prison edition of “Wife Swap” will prove to be more reality show than Heene ever bargained for.

But Richard Heene isn’t the only dreamer whose balloon has burst. In Los Angeles, our own shiny flying gasbag has deflated and crashed to earth. The long media love affair with Antonio “Balloon Mayor” Villaraigosa has deflated, and lonely Tony now finds himself untethered, adrift in a sea of broken pipes and red ink. Even mayoral appendage Police Chief Bill Bratton has chosen to grab the first blimp out of town, but not before pulling the pin in one more rhetorical hand grenade.

“L.A. is a city that almost doesn’t work,” the chief told KPCC Radio’s Frank Stoltze.

Phsssssst! There goes more gas out of the mayor’s balloon.

Villaraigosa’s media machine may be the world’s greatest global warming threat when you consider how much hot air has been generated over the past five years: press

eleases by the score, photo-ops on top of photo-ops, quick trips to Washington for this, a dash to New York for that, an international gathering followed by a box seat at a Dodger game. L.A.’s mayor has been everywhere and sadly, he now finds himself nowhere.

The man who craved the media as no other L.A. mayor ever has is left holding a string long after the balloon of his ambition floated away. He’s running a $400 million deficit that increases by a million bucks a day and his greatest political asset has announced to the world the city doesn’t work. Well? Whose fault is that? Who runs Los Angeles, Chief Bratton?

Clearly, it’s not Villaraigosa. The Balloon Mayor was just that – a shiny gasbag whose string is pulled by the real powerbrokers: Brian D’Arcy and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Maria Elena Durazo and the L.A. County Federation of Labor, Phil Anschutz and the AEG Corp., the billboard companies and, until recently, United Teachers Los Angeles and every other public employee union. The mayor had the suit and the smile but it was all tinsel, a Mylar envelope kept aloft by hot air and buckets of your money.

When the pinprick of fiscal irresponsibility finally punctured the mayor’s media bubble, his benefactors let the string go and Tony V’s career came crashing to Earth. The long-running unreality show that has constituted L.A.’s political culture has finally run into the reality of fiscal gravity.

The Balloon Mayor spent more than he had. The Balloon Mayor overpromised and underdelivered. The Balloon Mayor spun when he should have leveled with us. The Balloon Mayor was so busy polishing his image he all but ignored actual public service. With the Balloon Mayor, everything is self-service.

The Balloon Mayor dreamed of flying off to Sacramento. Instead he finds himself stranded in a job he doesn’t want and has yet to demonstrate either an interest in or ability to perform.

Villaraigosa’s gift was self-promotion. In his quest for the next big political office he put Los Angeles at risk. At least Richard Heene only gambled with his own kids’ future. A generation of L.A.’s children will pay for the bungling and backroom deal making of this mayor. I use the past tense when referring to the mayor’s hype machine because the veil has been lifted. A mayor who started on the cover of Newsweek is now “the 11 percent Mayor,” a “failure,” according to Los Angeles Magazine.

He’s become a punch line on Leno and Conan O’Brien, but nobody’s laughing at the unemployment office. Nobody’s laughing as they pack the U-Haul for the move out of L.A. Nobody’s laughing as the gears of city government grind to a halt, gummed up by corruption, cowardice and incompetence.

Balloon Boy was a simple hoax exposed by 6-year-old Falcon Heene himself when he told CNN’s Blitzer “We did it for the show.” Everything the Balloon Mayor has done has also been for show. Now the hoax is out in the open, exposed by none other than Bratton himself.

Up and away! It’s so L.A.!