"So a big UK liberal newspaper, mainstream... with a huge, long story on how pedophilia is normal and should be considered normal, and quoting academics...."

"And all of a sudden CNN discusses it as though I'm making the assertion...."

The erosion of the Elmo brand.

The Daily News has a story about Charla Nash, the woman whose face and hands were ripped off by a chimpanzee back in 2009. She just settled her lawsuit against the estate of the chimp's owner. She's getting a mere $4 million from the estate, but wants $150 from the state. The state, her claim says, ought to have seized the dangerous animal, which according to the Daily News "could eat at the table, drink wine from a stemmed glass, use the toilet and bathe and dress itself."

Yes, horrible and bizarre, but what's that got to do with Elmo? I wouldn't have thought about Elmo if it hadn't been for this Elmo story in the sidebar next to the picture of the chimp:



"Hairstylist claims he had sex with Elmo puppeteer, too" links to "Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash was a 'gentleman,' says former Long Island lover amidst 'Sesame Street' star's underage sex scandal."

He said he saw Clash about 30 times over a two-year period and that the puppeteer wined him and dined him, and even once sent a car to Long Island to pick him up for a date.

“I feel someone who is a liar and a molester will just keep on the pattern. That’s not the type of guy I met... He was straightforward and if I wanted to have sex and have a hookup then that was my choice....”

That's an interesting example of someone trying to provide helpful evidence and not seeing the way the other side will use it. How to successfully woo a very young guy? Send a nice car over to fetch him. Let him sit at the dinner table and drink wine from a stemmed glass.

Suddenly, I remember Elmo's role in the Charla Nash story. Nash had come over to help the owner, Sandy Herold, get the 200-pound animal into the house, and here's how The Daily News describes it:

Herold has said Travis attacked because he was being protective of her and didn't recognize Nash, who had recently changed her hairstyle, was driving a different car and waved a red Elmo doll at him.

Oddly, the long Wikipedia article on Travis the chimp doesn't mention Elmo.  In fact, the Elmo detail is missing from old articles where I would expect to see it. (For example, this Time piece focusing on the owner's explanation: "Nash arrived in an unfamiliar car and emerged with her hair done in a radically different style from what Travis was familiar with. Herold speculates that perhaps the chimp didn’t recognize Nash and viewed her as a threat.") Maybe PBS got the bad Elmo publicity scrubbed from various websites. The Elmo mention I found was in The Daily News, the news site that put the new Elmo story in the sidebar right next to the picture of the chimp that was crazed (perhaps) by Elmo.

But Elmo himself did nothing wrong. He's only a puppet/doll. A brand.

Elizabeth Smart's book will be "frank" but "appropriate" and not "salacious."

Says Chris Stewart, who's writing the book and who will be a member of the new Congress.

"She has taken a professional outlook on this and is able to talk in an impressive way about these things frankly... She’s not shying away from this story."

The story is of a 14-year-old, kidnapped, held captive, and raped for 9 months. Tricky to tell that story frankly yet appropriately. How do you ensure that the reader is not titillated? You can't.

If a man dares to horse around with children he doesn't know... he could get into trouble.

Look what happened to Madison's Brett Hulsey, who just pled "no contest" to a disorderly conduct charge for —as the police put it — "the totality of the events that happened," mostly "engaging in horseplay with a child who is a stranger to him -- in the water, no less."

According to Hulsey, he chided a boy about splashing some girls and then, as he walked past him, shouted "boo" — causing the boy to roll off his inner tube into shallow water.

Supposedly, this creeped out the parents and grandparents. The mother, according to the police reports "worried if this individual may have done this before or may do more in the future."

Why not fight the charge? Hulsey says he wants to "move on." Does that work in a political career?

There are many old posts on this blog about Brett Hulsey, who represents my district in the state legislature and was a prominent figure in the 2011 Wisconsin protests. Here he is saying "boo" to Meade:



ADDED: Part of "the totality of the events" was photographing the children. Is that wrong? Here's some discussion of that topic:

1. "A pair of photographers began taking pictures of a large group of kids swimming in the Frog Pond at Boston Common when they were told they were not allowed." ("If I am on assignment covering a parade or some type of event, I photograph kids if I see a cool picture, but then I try to talk to the parents and hand them my card and even show them the photo, not that I have to, but I really don’t want to be labeled a pedophile.")

2. "Parents Forbidden From Photographing Own Kids At Public Pool."

3. "Is it ok to post pictures of other people's kids on the internet?" ("Yesterday I ended up in a conversation with a stranger on Facebook in which she said that she took pictures of her kids and their friends at events like her kids' birthday parties and posted them on Facebook for her friends to see. I was gobsmacked...")

4. "Posting Photos of Other People’s Children." ("We all take photos at school plays, sporting events, graduations, whatever our children are involved with.... But do we have the right to impose our decisions about what is public and private on other people’s children?")

Let's talk about the "Are You Mom Enough?" Time magazine cover.

Alexandra Petra has a WaPo column titled "Time magazine and our mommy porn fixation", and I'm going to make you click through to it if you want to look at the cover, because if you're going to call that cover "mommy porn," why isn't it also child porn? I'm not going to display the picture here.

(It's a 5 or 6 year old boy sucking on the naked breast of an adult woman.)

ADDED: How old is that child actually? This article says it's "26-year-old mother Jamie Lynne Grumet" with "her near-four-year-old son." Sorry, he looked older to me. I guess the breast milk is promoting growth... or maybe she's tiny.

Ms Grumet told Time she also breastfeeds Aram's five-year-old adopted brother, Samuel, and recalls how she was breastfed by her own mother until the age of six.

So there you have it. Breastfeeding not just for infants and toddlers, but for children who have surpassed toddlerhood. As for the child porn/pedophilia issue I've raised (in response to Petra's rhetoric):

"There are people who tell me they're going to call social services on me or that it's child molestation," Ms Grumet tells Time. "People have to realise this is biologically normal. It's not socially normal. The more people see it, the more it'll become normal in our culture."

Did you see the story about the architecture professor whose extravagantly architectonic house caught on fire?

It's in the Daily News:

Shortly before noon on Tuesday, firefighters received a report that the waterfront home of 76-year-old Gamal El-Zoghby was ablaze. They doused the flames, and were checking for hidden pockets of flame behind the walls by pulling down panels of sheet rock, when [a 'magazine from the 1970s with pornographic images of pre-pubescent girls'] fell from behind one of the panels....

El-Zoghby, who teaches "Judgment and Criticism of Architectural Expressions" at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, has been charged with child endangerment and put on leave of absence from his work. One magazine, stuck behind the wall, of the house that he built following the "principles of astronomy, mathematics, philosophy" with windows "positioned to capture the sunrise and sunset at the spring and autumn equinoxes...."

He named the house "The Parousium" from the Greek word "parousia," meaning "presence or appearance."

Appearances matter. The story, as presented in the Daily News, looks awful for the aging professor. Perhaps the "magazine from the 1970s" was some kind of art journal. Were the "images" even photographs? Perhaps they were drawings or paintings.

***

Parousia is a term used importantly in the New Testament:

The word is used 24 times in the New Testament. Of these, 6 uses refer to the coming of individuals... The other 17 times refer 16 times to the Second Coming of Christ, and in one case to the coming of the "Day of God" (2Pe.3:12, see also The Day of the Lord).

Matthew 24:27:

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

And so you orient your house toward the sunlight... and the light that catches you unawares is a fire.

Unawares means "without design."  Without design, in the overdesigned house of the design professor.

"President Obama, who took office pledging to put science ahead of politics, averted a skirmish with conservatives in the nation’s culture wars..."

"... by endorsing his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of an after-sex contraceptive pill to girls under age 17."

So begins the New York Times report, and it's hard not to read this as criticizing Obama, who phrased his support Sebelius in terms of his role "as the father of two daughters."

“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”...

Odd that all the attention is on the child's health. Who is impregnating 10- and 11-year olds? We're talking about serious crimes! One reason very young girls shouldn't be able to purchase this drug on their own is that it prevents criminal behavior from coming to light. The Times quotes James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University saying “Where is an 11-year-old going to get the $50 to buy this product?” What willful blindness! There is a male in the picture somewhere, a male facing a severe criminal penalty.

The NYT refers to "[s]ome Democrats" offering reasons for "avoiding a divisive debate over teenagers’ sexuality." Teenagers' sexuality? When we talk about the Penn State scandal, there's no discussion of the "teenagers' sexuality." What "divisive debate" are these Democrats talking about?

Sandusky gives the NYT a 4-hour interview.

Here. Excerpt:

"They’ve taken everything that I ever did for any young person and twisted it to say that my motives were sexual or whatever... I had kid after kid after kid who might say I was a father figure. And they just twisted that all."...

He... characterized his close experiences with children he took under his wing as “precious times,” and said that the physical aspect of the relationships “just happened that way.”

"The question is not whether but how will the student section at Camp Randall Stadium humiliate their Penn State foes?"

"I'm guessing they make a show of wearing shower caps and bath towels. Just a guess. I know that's gross and insensitive but so are those college kids, as were we at that age."

Penn State defense strategy: McQueary's credibility.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The lawyers point out that they believe Mr. Paterno's testimony matches that of their clients. "All of them testified that Mr. McQueary did not tell any of them that he witnessed anal sodomy on March 1, 2002."...

The shower story "is a graphic image provided by a third-party witness," says Wesley Oliver, a professor of criminal law at Widener School of Law in Harrisburg, Pa. "Other stories [in the grand jury presentment] about touching are more ambiguous."

St. Petersburg, Russia, may fine those who are openly gay.

The Moscow Times reports:

The bill proposes fines of 3,000 to 5,000 rubles ($100 to $160) for individuals and up to 50,000 rubles for organizations engaged in "public activities to promote sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transsexuality" that might be observed by children...

"The rising popularity of sexual deviations influences our children in a negative way," said the bill's author, Vitaly Milonov, a United Russia deputy, Fontanka.ru reported.

Another deputy, Yelena Babich of the Liberal Democrat Party, denounced even the rainbow-colored decorations that covered St. Petersburg during its City Day celebrations in May as gay propaganda....

"The bill is passed before elections to boost the popularity of United Russia, which is flagging in St. Petersburg," [said Igor Kochetkov, head of LGBT group Vykhod.] "This bill smacks of the Middle Ages."...

The Constitution allows for the balance of interests in society, limiting rights of a social group if it infringes on the rights of another social group, [said Dmitry Shubin, of the law firm Yustina]. This means that rights of the LGBT community can be limited in favor of those who are not gay, who are in the majority....

Still, the bill is "cleverly worded" because it only bans propaganda of LGBT behavior, not the behavior itself, and because it includes both gay relationships and pedophilia, putting them on the same level in the eyes of the public, Shubin said.

Why did Jerry Sandusky do that interview with Bob Costas?

It starts off very badly. I hear a man who is not committed to confident lying or confident truth-telling. He sounds like he's accessing his memories and filtering what we receive.

"Well, I could say that, you know, I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids, I... I have showered after workouts. I... I have hugged them and I have touched their leg... without intent of sexual contact, but, um... uh... so if you look at it that way... uh... there are things that... uh... wouldn't... uh... would be accurate."

After hearing that, I wondered why exposed himself to an interview, why his lawyer let him do that. But as the interview continues, including contributions from the lawyer, I think he does in fact get himself into a better position that where he was before we heard that... assuming we listen to the entire 8+ minutes. He ends:

I don’t know what I can say or what I could say that would make anybody feel any different now. I would just say that if somehow people could hang on until my attorney has a chance to fight, you know, for my innocence, that’s about all I could ask right now. You know, obviously it’s a huge challenge.

"Everybody needs people to care for them. Sometimes they don't want it."

"Sometimes they don't understand what you're trying to do, but they want to be disciplined. Kids are growing up awfully fast today."

Old Jerry Sandusky interviews.

Gov. Corbett suggests that Second Mile groomed children for Jerry Sandusky.

Chris Wallace, on Fox News Sunday, did an excellent job of drawing out Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who, bound by ethical restraints, was trying to be circumspect. Here's a key moment in the colloquy. Wallace has just asked Corbett about the Second Mile charity "that Jerry Sandusky helped form for disadvantaged kids that quite frankly gave him access to these young boys."

WALLACE: Should actions be taken against the charity or the CEO who allegedly was told about some of these abuses as far back 2002?

CORBETT: ... I'm going to be very careful here....  If you talk to people who have worked with Second Mile, it has done great work.... But in this case, as the allegations indicate, some of it was used to pick on some children and the term was used, grooming, groom those children for Mr. Sandusky's purposes.

Did Corbett just reveal that there were other individuals within Second Mile who functioned in grooming children for Sandusky?

Corbett also appeared on "Meet the Press" this morning, and I thought David Gregory was much less successful in breaking through Corbett's controlled facade. It was interesting to compare these 2 interviews. Gregory expressed outrage on behalf of the children. ("You have to understand people, those of us who are parents, including myself, I have a nine-year-old boy at home....") Wallace, by contrast, came off at first — to my ear — as a Paterno fanboy. ("But, Governor, let me point out -- these are just allegations. Joe Paterno, who had spent half a century at Penn State, did not have an opportunity to offer a full defense. Why not let him finish his season and retire as he offered to do?")

I don't know whether Gregory and Wallace were showing how they really felt or using a strategy to lure Corbett into making revelations, but the Wallace interview was more revealing.

ADDED: Wallace also interviewed Franco Harris, a football star who came out of Penn State, and he seemed very much in service of the pro-Paterno attitude that I thought I detected in Wallace. It got a little odd when Wallace grilled Harris about the distinction — a vitally important distinction — between criminal law and morality.

WALLACE: Franco, Joe Paterno may have followed the letter of the law, or complied with it by informing his superior. But on a moral basis in the end, he was fired because of his failure not any kind of legal breach. Shouldn't he have called the cops when he heard about this abuse, or at least followed up with the person he tell the athletic director to find out where this investigation stood?

FRANCO HARRIS...: Hey, Chris, let me go back for a minute. As you know there was a grand jury investigation, and at the end of that investigation, they found that Joe Paterno cooperated fully with them and had good testimony and there was no charges against Joe Paterno.

And then, all of the sudden, something came out about a moral obligation, and everybody jumped on that. And everybody said it should be a moral procedure. It should be a moral procedure. And like that is subject to people's own train of thought with that.

So, I thought that was unfair and I think it is unfair how people were treating Joe with this issue, because Joe is highly moral person and great moral character. And so, it's very disturbing to me when somebody said this, everybody else jumped on this.

Harris's perspective, which looks benighted today, is exactly the way the NYT presented it in one its earliest reports, as I discussed here ("NYT says Joe Paterno "not implicated of wrongdoing in a grand jury report.") Later, Maureen Dowd — in the NYT — focused on the moral requirements that transcend law.

On "Meet the Press," David Gregory, talking to E.J. Dionne and David Brooks, brought up the Maureen Dowd piece, which, he said "helped to really sort of bring it home to me." Brooks took the opportunity to generalize:

I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK."... If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense.  You have a script to follow.  And this is necessary because people do not intervene. 

We don't know what sin is anymore. That's vaguely crazy when we're talking about raping a 10-year-old child, but Brooks seems to be working on some larger, brooding meditation about what's wrong with all of us these days.

Paterno and Spanier are out now at Penn State.

That was necessary.

"It would appear to be the rare case of a pedophile caught in the act, and you’d think a graduate student would know enough to stop the rape and call the police."

"But [Mike] McQueary, who was 28 years old at the time, was a serf in the powerfully paternal Paternoland. According to the report, he called his dad, went home and then the next day went to the coach’s house to tell him."

Writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

Paterno, who has cast himself for 46 years as a moral compass teaching his “kids” values, testified that he did not call the police at the time either. The family man who had faced difficult moments at Brown University as a poor Italian with a Brooklyn accent must have decided that his reputation was more important than justice.

In case you've forgotten, the story Paterno heard — according to the grand jury report — was that McQueary, a graduate assistant coach, saw "a naked boy about 10 years old 'with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.'"

Now, let's remember how the New York Times reported on the Penn State story a couple days ago. I wrote:

NYT says Joe Paterno "not implicated of wrongdoing in a grand jury report."

That's buried in the last paragraph of today's article — by Mark Viera — on the Penn State scandal, followed by this paean to Paterno:

Paterno helped propel Penn State to the top tiers of college football, and the university had one of the most pristine images in the sport, largely thanks to Paterno and his success in 46 seasons as head coach.

But the indictment did allege facts that implicated Paterno!

The NYT had trouble facing up to the reality that Paterno was implicated in terrible moral wrongs. It's good to see Dowd's column attacking the entire power structure at Penn State. All are to blame. A man who was seen raping children was harbored and protected and empowered for over a decade. Read the entire timeline summarized by Dowd. There's no way Paterno could cut himself off from responsibility once he had knowledge.

UPDATE, 9:56 a.m.: Paterno retirement announced.

"Paterno wasn’t charged, but if Sandusky is guilty, Paterno would be guilty..."

"... just as Penn State’s athletic director and a university vice president, who were charged with perjury and failure to report suspected child abuse on Saturday, would be guilty."

Mike Wise on the Penn State scandal.

You can’t read the 23-page grand jury report and come to any other conclusion; Penn State football and its pristine reputation apparently superseded the alleged sexual assault of a young boy — perhaps as many as eight young boys — over 15 years by Sandusky....

In Warped Sports World, the don’t-ask, don’t-tell, sweep-it-clean behavior is rationalized as loyalty, having your coach’s or teammate’s back, moving on from the problem. It’s seen as a noble quality, putting the team’s needs — the university’s needs — before your own.

"[I]f every naked picture of a baby looks like porn to you..."

"... then you’re the one who’s thinking like a pedophile."

"Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs has been sentenced to life in prison..."

"... for sexually assaulting two underage followers he took as brides in what his church deemed 'spiritual marriages.'"

"SwiftVets revenge."

Ben Smith reports:

The Navy Times (no link) reported last week that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus stripped the Silver Star from a Vietnam swift boat veteran, Capt. Wade Sanders:

"Had the subsequently determined facts and evidence surrounding both the incident for which the award was made and the processing of the award itself been known to the Secretary of the Navy in 1992, those facts would have prevented the award of the Silver Star," [Mabus spokeswoman Pamela] Kunze said.

Sanders is now in jail on child pornography charges. But he's best known as the man who introduced John Kerry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and, ironically, vouched for the authenticity of Kerry's service.