Jerry Sandusky: "I shouldn't have showered with those kids."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(So he told Bob Costas on NBC's Rock Center.)

Yes, that would have been a start.

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I know, I know. Innocent until proven guilty. Despite all the signs pointing to some serious wrongdoing (to put it mildly).

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Sandusky professed his innocence:

"I say that I am innocent of those charges," said Sandusky in a phone interview with Costas.

When asked by Costas, "Are you a pedophile," Sandusky responded, "No."

Joe Paterno's one-time defensive coordinator was charged earlier this month with 40 counts of sexually abusing eight boys. He is currently free on a $100,000 bond and has denied any wrongdoing. The allegations date back to 1994, according to a grand jury report. A grand jury report detailed claims of alleged sexual encounters with young boys in Sandusky's home, hotels and Penn State locker rooms.

"I could say that I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids I have showered after workouts. I have hugged them and I have touched their legs without intent of sexual contact," said Sandusky.

Hugged them? Touched their legs?

I don't want to spend much time on this. It's obviously a horrible story, and hopefully the truth will come out. I was disgusted by the response from students at Penn State last week, as if the everlasting glory and triumph of their beloved coach, Joe Paterno, was more important than the sexual abuse of children, as if anything that shattered the mythology of Paterno and the Penn State football program was bad and worthy of riotous protest.

Get your fucking heads out of your fucking asses, people.

What appears to have happened at Penn State -- the abuse, the cover up, the refusal to deal with reality, to risk bad publicity and the millions that the football program brings in for the university -- isn't just a Penn State problem, though obviously the focus will be on Sandusky, Paterno, the university administration, and who know what and when.

The larger problem, beyond the individual cases of criminality, is what goes on in American college sports, with iconic coaches who are bigger than their schools, who are basically beyond criticism, let alone investigation, with athletic programs, particularly football and men's basketball (and women's basketball at places like UConn and Vanderbilt), that make enormous amounts of money and give colleges enormous profile. (Do you know anything about Penn State academically? No? Well, you surely know that it's a football giant, right? Can you name a professor there? No? Well, you heard of Paterno before this, right?)

The problem is the culture in which all this took place. This is not to say that Sandusky was necessarily a product of that culture and that what he allegedly did can therefore be excused. Needless to say, it cannot. And must not. And, obviously, organizations often protect themselves by covering up criminality, whether it's sexual abuse or something else. But as Sandusky faces criminal charges, Penn State needs to account for itself as well -- and we cannot stop there. As Charles Pierce writes at Grantland:

It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to "the company," and protection of "the brand" — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect "the brand" than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.

And this is certainly true not just in corporation but in big-time college athletics, where so much is at stake:

[T]he institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. The "student-athlete," just to name one. "Amateurism," just to name another. Of course, people involved in Penn State football allegedly deceived people when it became plain that children had been raped within the program's facilities by one of the program's employees. It was simply one more lie to maintain the preposterously lucrative unreality of college athletics.

It's time, long past time, to put an end to the lies. Not every college with a big-time football program has a Jerry Sandusky, to be sure, but the culture of deception is rampant, and abuse of some kind is everywhere. At Penn State, it was just worse.

"Human Sexuality" class at Northwestern includes after-class session on BDSM, complete with dildo penetration and orgasm

By Michael J.W. Stickings

No, I'm not kidding:

More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school's popular "Human Sexuality" class.

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The optional, non-credit demo followed psychology Prof. John Michael Bailey's sexuality class. Nearly 600 students are in Bailey's class this quarter, and most didn't stick around for the after-class show, which featured four members of Chicago's fetish community describing "BDSM," or bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.

Conservatives like Michelle Malkin are jumping up and down in disgust, but then they're generally opposed to both education and sexuality, so this, to them, was doubly bad. And it was indeed educational:

"I didn't expect to see a live sex show," said Justin Smith, 21, a senior economics and political science major who was in the after-class session. "We were told we were going to have some people talk to us about the fetish world and kink."

Smith said it took him awhile to process what happened, but he doesn't object to the way the material was presented.

"It was for me academic like everything else," he said.

Professor Bailey was hesitant to agree to it but couldn't really "come up with a legitimate reason why students should not be able to watch such a demonstration. Was it obscene? Only if you think such normal aspects of human sexuality are obscene -- and, yes, I mean normal, which fetishes (and female orgasm) very much are, and exhibitionism is hardly a "weird" one. Besides, everyone present was an adult and the whole situation was fully consensual. The woman, Faith Kroll, "said she was not coerced in any way and students were repeatedly warned it was going to get graphic."

I applaud the university for supporting Bailey, the course, liberal education, and academic freedom:

"Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines," said Alan K. Cubbage, vice president for University Relations. "The University supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge."

I realize that conservatives don't get that -- the advancement of knowledge, that is -- but there is so much more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in their repressive right-wing ideology.

As for me, I just wonder why I missed out. I don't remember anything like that ever occurring at Tufts. At least not in a classroom.

Fox News viewers completely misinformed: study

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As the Times reports, a new study "conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project that is managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, shows that Fox News viewers are a deeply misinformed bunch:

According to the study, which can be reviewed online, in most cases, the more a person watched and read the news, the less likely they were to have been misled about the facts. But "there were however a number of cases where greater exposure to a news source increased misinformation on a specific issue," the study's authors wrote. In particular, they found that regular viewers of the Fox News Channel, which tilts to the right in prime time, were significantly more likely to believe untruths about the Democratic health care overhaul, climate change and other subjects.

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The study's authors continued, "These effects increased incrementally with increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it — though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican."

Other media outlets, including MSNBC, produce varying degrees of misinformation, of course, on different subjects, but Fox News is by far the worst offender.

In response to the study, a Fox News executive predictably ripped into the University of Maryland, instead of actually addressing the study and its findings, citing the Princeton Review to dismiss it as a major party school with lazy students who don't study much, as if the study had been conducted not by serious researchers but by some drunk dudes during frosh week. As the Times notes, though, the Princeton Review ranks Maryland quite highly. Moreover, "[t]he study was backed by two parts of the University of Maryland, the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies," the latter of which in particular cannot easily be dismissed.

Anyway, does the study actually tell us anything we didn't already know? No, of course not, it just quantifies the obvious. Which certainly makes it somewhat useful insofar as it bolsters the case many of us continue to make on a frequent basis.

I would just note, contra the Times, that Fox News doesn't just "[tilt] to the right in prime time. It tilts far to the right all the time -- ever see Fox & Friends?

And I would just ask this: While there is no doubt that Fox News, as an organ of Republican propaganda, is in the business of partisan misinformation, does watching it produce so much misinformation or were the people who watch it frequently, mostly conservatives with mouths agape, swallowing whole everything that is fed to them, deeply misinformed to begin with?

It's a chicken-and-egg thing, and it's no doubt some combination of the two: misinformation feeding upon and feeding misinformation in an endlessly manipulative cycle of ever-deepening ignorance and idiocy.

Yes, that pretty much describes how it works at Fox News.

A further update on Christine O'Donnell's self-aggrandizing dishonesty

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(Updating posts from the past two days -- here and here.)

So did O'Donnell lie about her education? Is she responsible for the information in her LinkedIin profile? Her campaign has said no, but she has a long record of dishonesty, including with respect to her education -- as I document in the two posts linked above.

And now there's more, evidence that she has in fact lied repeatedly:

1) Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, WaPo

By now you may have heard that the claim that Christine O'Donnell studied at Oxford has now turned up on a second O'Donnell online resume, this one from ZoomInfo.

I've got some more information on what happened from ZoomInfo, and it seems to strongly undercut O'Donnell's claim that her LinkedIn bio making the same Oxford fib was unauthorized or unknown to her.

To back up: This morning, the Democratic National Committee pointed out that O'Donnell is also described in a ZoomInfo entry as having achieved a "certificate" in "Post Modernism in the New Millennium" from the "University of Oxford." The Zoom Info entry was labled, "user verified."

ZoomInfo, which has spent the day looking into this, has sent over a statement detailing what happened with this profile. According to the company, O'Donnell's profile was claimed in 2008 through something called a "double opt-in process."

The company says this process cannot function without "response to a verification e-mail message." ZoomInfo is not releasing that email address, citing privacy. But here's the rub: The company is confirming that they have identified the emailer...

ZoomInfo knows who claimed this profile and verified the information. And in response to my questions, it's not disputing the idea that it was claimed by O'Donnell or someone apparently authorized by her to do so.

(For more, see Sam Stein, HuffPo.) 

2) Christina Bellantoni, TPMDC

One thing we know is true: Christine O'Donnell was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute in 2002. The rest, as we've closely chronicled, is all a bit fuzzy.

But TPM just spoke with a Claremont official who reviewed O'Donnell's 2002 application file. Ryan Williams, who oversees the Lincoln Fellowship program, told us that O'Donnell lists a certificate from Oxford University on her resume. "She did have a line about Oxford," he said as he looked at her file, which also included an essay and letters of recommendation.

Williams told us the item on O'Donnell's resume reads:

Oxford University, Oxford, UK Certificate awarded Summer 2001

But O'Donnell did not attend Oxford. She received a certificate from a summer seminar program called the Phoenix Institute, which rented space at Oxford.

In other words, she lied about studying at Oxford, just as she's lied about so much else, including studying at Claremont Graduate University. (She studied at neither.)

She's also lied about doing graduate work at Princeton and when she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson. (She never took a grad course at the former and claimed she graduated from the latter years before she actually did.)

Steve Benen adds: "TPM found instances in which O'Donnell told similar lies on her MySpace page, 2008 campaign website, and 2006 campaign website. She included deceptive information about her education in court filings, and repeated related false claims during recent media interviews."

"In other words," Steve concludes, putting the pieces together, "Christine O'Donnell lied, and then lied about lying. This, coupled with her suspected campaign embezzlement, suspected tax fraud, background in witchcraft, rejection of modern science, hatred of gays, anti-masturbation efforts, and hysterically extreme political worldview, makes her a U.S. Senate candidate who's literally hard to believe."

Except in the current political climate, with the Republican Party and much of American conservatism descending rapidly into madness.

In that respect, she makes a lot of "sense" and is not at all hard to believe.

No cross-dressing allowed! (at Morehouse College)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm all for freedom of expression, and I generally oppose efforts to stifle it (including most dress codes at work), but I can't find any good reason to object to Morehouse College's "Appropriate Attire Policy":

The policy also bans wearing hats in buildings, pajamas in public, do-rags, sagging pants, sunglasses in class and walking barefoot on campus.

However, it is the ban on cross-dressing that has brought national attention to the small historically African-American [and all-male] college.

The restrictions aren't especially harsh, it seems to me, and, even allowing for freedom of expression, there ought to be at least minimal standards regarding public attire. Now, these standards can differ from place to place. What is allowed on a beach, for example, ought to differ from what is allowed, say, in a government building. Even then, though, beaches may allow nudity or not. The basic point is not that there ought to be a uniform standard but that, depending on place, we ought to expect that people meet at least some minimum standards of dress while in public. Our standards in Canada and the U.S., as well as throughout Europe, are fairly low, or loose, and that's fine with me. But at least there are standards.

The issue here concerns what a private institution may do, and, again, such institutions, or establishments, can and do impose their own standards, whether it's a church or a mall or an office building or a college. What is, in this case, questionable, is the crackdown on cross-dressing, given that the code could be perceived to be a crackdown on homosexuality. But cross-dressing is not the same as homosexuality, and, indeed, Morehouse consulted with the college's gay student organization, Safe Space, before instituting the policy -- its members voted overwhelmingly to support the code.

Does the code amount to a restriction of freedom of expression? Yes, of course, but it doesn't seem to me to be a burdensome one. Having spent many years on college campuses -- Tufts and then Toronto -- as well as having taught in university, I do see the need for such minimal standards. Now, there could very well be some college out there that allows nudity or, say, sexual attire, but, for the most part, it seems to me, the cultivation of a serious teaching, learning, and research environment requires otherwise. Morehouse's code may be a bit stricter than others, and I may not care for it myself, but, then, that's Morehouse's decision. If you don't like it, don't go there. Though, of course, it still allows for a great deal of self-expression. It's not like the college has imposed a mandatory uniform or anything.

"The policy is just saying that you have to show more respect in how you dress and there are things that are just not acceptable at Morehouse," said one student. "We have a legacy that we are trying to uphold."

Exactly.

Breaking News! Bush reaching out to Columbia University's Bollinger with plum position

Believes school president can be asset in sliming war critics, up-front, face-to-face; Cheney wants him for more Iran bashing

By J. Thomas Duffy

It appears that Columbia University Lee Bollinger's 15-minutes in the spotlight yesterday may land him in the White House.

Sources have told The Garlic that the Bush Grindhouse flocked to televisions, as Bollinger, face-to-face, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sitting a few feet away, and exorcised his school's invited guest, with blistering, double-barreled shots, including "Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator."

So impressed was the Grindhouse staff, that Vice President Dick Cheney, furiously scribbling in the margin of a newspaper, quickly whipped out his cellphone, calling former White House Smearmeister Karl Rove, ordering him to turn on his television and watch Bollinger.

Cheney, according to some of the staffers interviewed, was already making moves to bring Bollinger into his Iran Study Group.

"The President," offered one West Wing staffer who was present, "had tears in his eyes."

A spontaneous burst of applause and shouts erupted when Bollinger hit Ahmadinejad again with;

"For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

Our sources tell us that Chief of Staff Josh Bolten was the first to suggest bringing in Bollinger for a White House position.

Bolten was overheard saying to The Commander Guy that "he can slime our war critics, face-to-face ... Walk right up the hill and lay into them ... He's got a brass set balls on him ..."

"Boy, does he ...," The Decider Guy was said to respond to Bolten, adding that "he might just take the shine off of Turd Blossom's mantle ..."

And, according to our sources, when Bollinger ended his attack on Ahmadinejad with "I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better," Bolten was already on the telephone to Columbia University, making arrangements for Bollinger to come down to Washington.

Reportedly, late into the evening, extra speech writers were ushered into the White House, to begin writing custom, individualized attacks on members of Congress, in preparation of Bollinger coming in and doing a read-through for The Commander Guy.

The White House officially refused comment on the report, and, when asked as she rushed into the White House, Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend offered "I didn't know there was a Columbia University."

More as this story develops

















(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Fear of Mahmoud

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Allow me to comment briefly on the Ahmadinejad in New York controversy:

So what?

Which is to say, so what that he's in New York? So what that he spoke at Columbia? So what that he's addressing the U.N.? So what that he wanted to visit Ground Zero?

Ahmadinejad is an appalling and reprehensible man. Columbia President Lee Bollinger got it mostly right: He's "a petty and cruel dictator" -- I say mostly because while he is both petty and cruel he is not entirely a dictator, not with a "supreme leader" above him, not with the Assembly of Experts, not with relatively powerful legislative and judicial branches in Iran. Ahmadinejad is a thug, and a tyrant, but not an autocrat.

Which, again, is not defend him in any way. Consider his denial of the Holocaust, his hatred of Israel, his position on women and gays. He said this, presumably with a straight face, at Columbia: "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom." -- and -- "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country." To which one must reply: No, they don't. You oppress them. -- Yes, you do. You execute them. And there was so much more, so much ludicrousness, but Bollinger was impressive, attacking Ahmadinejad's views with blistering sobriety, defending the event, the decision to invite Ahmadinejad to speak, the primacy of free speech.

Much has already been written on the controversy (see Memeorandum), but I want to single out Ezra Klein:

I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?

To be fair, maybe Ahmadinejad isn't serious about "dialogue," at not of the constructive kind. Still, why not at least listen to what he has to say? Why not do what Bollinger did? Isn't that far more effective than calling him evil and calling it a day -- or planning for war?

Why not engage him -- and rip him to pieces?

Enough already

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We've been highly critical of the excessive media coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings -- see here and here, for example -- and now it looks like Virginia Tech has had enough of the media orgy, too. As a local ABC affiliate is reporting, Virginia Tech's student government is "calling on hundreds of reporters to leave campus by Monday morning, when students are supposed to return to classes".

Will the media go along with this sensible request? Hopefully so, but don't expect the orgy to come to an end. Doing what they always do, the media will continue to milk this story until there's nothing left to milk, and then some.

For as I have said before, there are some stories that, by virtue of their magnitude (or more precisely their sensationalism), turn into media events. And this is one of them. Regardless of what the students of Virginia Tech want, regardless of the distasteful nature of the coverage, this event will go on for as long as the media choose to continue to exploit it to serve their own ends -- which is to say, until they decide that they've had enough, or until the ratings tell them to move on to the next story, or event, or until whatever integrity they have left, and there may not be much, gets the better of them.

(h/t: Joe Gandelman)

Mormons in arms

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's nice to see that the dipshit known as Dick Cheney isn't getting a free pass even in the hardest of the GOP's hardcore heartland:

The invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.

Some of the faculty and the 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, who are overwhelmingly Republican, have expressed concern about the Bush administration’s support for the war in Iraq and other policies, but most of the current protest has focused on Mr. Cheney’s integrity, character and behavior.

He's "a morally dubious man," said one student. If that's code for amoral bastard, I concur.

Of course, this is but a minority of BYU's student body and faculty. (The overwhelming number of students are not protesting, whatever their private thoughts.) And one wishes the protests were rather less polite -- and certainly far less moralistic. It's like Cheney isn't nearly conservative enough for them. "I just don’t feel that Cheney represents what we want B.Y.U. to represent," said one Democratic student (a lonesome political soul, one imagines). I suspect he doesn't. There's all that "sleaze" after all, as one professor put it. "We espouse honesty, chastity, integrity, ethics, virtue and morality, and he does not epitomize those values." Okay, I can agree with that.

The best line comes from a Cheney supporter, the chairman of the College Republicans: "No matter what you think of Cheney, he’s easily the most powerful man in the world."

Take that, Dubya! The Big Dick's running the asylum.