The Washington Star, David Israel says, is “an insular world that protects its own, and operates outside of societal norms as long as victories and cash continue to flow bountifully.” Penn State rakes in $70 million a year from its football program. This is what Israel calls “the delusion that the ability to win football games indicates anything at all about your character or intelligence other than that you can win football games.”
...I’ve got to wonder how the 84-year-old coach feels when he thinks about all the children who look up to him; innocent, football-crazy boys like the one he was told about in March 2002, a child then Anthony’s age who was sexually assaulted in a shower in the football building by Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s former defensive guru, according to charges leveled by the Pennsylvania attorney general.
Paterno was told about it the day after it happened by Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant coach who testified that he went into the locker room one Friday night and heard rhythmic slapping noises. He looked into the showers and saw a naked boy about 10 years old “with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky,” according to the grand jury report.
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 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.
“I don’t even have words to talk about the betrayal that I feel,” the mother of one of Sandusky’s alleged victims told The Harrisburg Patriot-News, adding about McQueary: “He ran and called his daddy?”
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.
The iconic coach waited another day, according to the report, and summoned Tim Curley, the Penn State athletic director who had been a quarterback for Paterno in the ’70s.
Curley did not call the university police, who had investigated an episode in 1998 in which Sandusky admitted he was wrong to shower with an 11-year-old boy and promised not to do it again. (Two years later, according to the grand jury report, a janitor saw Sandusky performing oral sex on a boy in the showers and told his supervisor, who did not report it.)
Curley waited another week and a half to see McQueary, who told the grand jury that he repeated his sodomy story for Curley and Gary Schultz, a university vice president who oversaw campus police.
Two more weeks passed before Curley contacted McQueary to let him know that Sandusky’s keys to the locker room had been taken away and the incident had been reported to The Second Mile, the charity Sandusky started in 1977.
Prosecutors suggest that the former coach, whose memoir is ironically titled “Touched,” founded the charity as a way to ensnare boys. They have charged Sandusky, now 67, with sexually assaulting eight boys he met there.
Despite knowing of the two similar rapes, The Second Mile did not do anything to keep Sandusky away from vulnerable children until 2008.
Curley said he told Sandusky he could no longer bring children onto the Penn State campus. In other words, Jer, if you want to violate kids who live in cow town where everything revolves around the idolatry of Penn State and Paterno, kindly take them off campus. The predator was still welcome on his own, though; he was spotted at the football team’s weight room working out last week.
Curley told the university president, Graham Spanier, about the matter, and it got buried. Paterno, Curley and Schultz disingenuously claim they were left with the impression that the contact might have been mere “horsing around,” as Curley put it. That’s grotesque.
Like the Roman Catholic Church, Penn State is an arrogant institution hiding behind its mystique. And sports, as my former fellow sports columnist at The Washington Star, David Israel says, is “an insular world that protects its own, and operates outside of societal norms as long as victories and cash continue to flow bountifully.” Penn State rakes in $70 million a year from its football program.
Paterno was still practicing for the game against Nebraska on Saturday, and supportive students were rallying at his house. This is what Israel calls “the delusion that the ability to win football games indicates anything at all about your character or intelligence other than that you can win football games.”
I can only hope that by the time Anthony’s parents work up their nerve to have what they call “the conversation” with him about his fallen idol, St. Joe and the other Penn scoundrels will have been ignominiously cast out of what turns out to be a not-so-Happy Valley.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/opinion/dowd-personal-foul-at-penn.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
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EFF Urges Court to Block Dragnet Subpoenas Targeting Online Commenters
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UK Guardian:
"European debt crisis spiralling out of control
Reports that Germany and France have begun talks to break up the eurozone amid fears that Italy will be too big to rescue
9 November 2011
Debt crisis sets markets in turmoil amid reports of talks about the break up of the eurozone.
Fears that Europe's sovereign debt crisis was spiralling out of control have intensified as political chaos in Athens and Rome, and looming recession, created panic on world markets.
Reports emerging from Brussels said that Germany and France had begun preliminary talks on a break-up of the eurozone, amid fears that Italy would be too big to rescue.
Despite Silvio Berlusconi's announcement that he would step down as prime minister once austerity measures were pushed through parliament, a collapse of investor confidence in the eurozone's third-biggest economy sent interest rates in Italy to the levels that triggered bailouts in Portugal, Greece and Ireland...
In Athens talks to appoint a prime minister to succeed George Papandreou were in deadlock, and will resume on Thursday morning. The Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, sought to reassure the markets by promising that Berlusconi would be leaving office soon.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the situation had become "unpleasant", and called for eurozone members to accelerate plans for closer political integration...
The president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, issued a new call for the EU to "unite or face irrelevance" in the face of the mounting economic crisis in Italy. "We are witnessing fundamental changes to the economic and geopolitical order that have convinced me that Europe needs to advance now together or risk fragmentation. Europe must either transform itself or it will decline. We are in a defining moment where we either unite or face irrelevance," he said.
Senior policymakers in Paris, Berlin and Brussels are reported to have discussed the possibility of one or more countries leaving the eurozone, while the remaining core pushes on toward deeper economic integration, including on tax and fiscal policy. "France and Germany have had intense consultations on this issue over the last months, at all levels," a senior EU official in Brussels told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
Financial regulators across Europe were last night carefully monitoring the health of their heavily exposed banks, amid concern that the turmoil could lead to a debt default, or even the break-up of the euro.
George Osborne, just three weeks away from delivering his autumn statement on the health of the economy, believes Europe's problems are blighting the UK's growth prospects, but he will use the sell-off of Italian bonds to insist there is no alternative to his austerity plans...
Shares fell heavily on both sides of the Atlantic. The Italian stock market lost 4% of its value. The FTSE100 index of leading shares closed 106.96 points down, at 5460.38. The Dow Jones closed 389 points down at 11,780.94.
Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, told a financial forum in Beijing that Europe's debt crisis risked plunging the global economy into a Japan-style "lost decade" of weak growth and deflation...
Officials in Brussels insisted on Wednesday there would be no rescue package for Rome, saying, "financial assistance is not on the cards". A key test will come on Thursday morning when Italy has to raise €5bn from investors on the bond market..."
The New York Times:
"Europe
Euro Fears Spread to Italy as the Debt Crisis Deepens
November 9, 2011
PARIS — Since the start of the euro crisis two years ago, the big fear has been contagion, that market unease about the high debt and slow growth in Europe’s southern rim would infect the core. On Wednesday, contagion arrived with brute force.
Italy, a central member of the euro zone and its third-largest economy, struggled to find a new government as anxious investors drove Italian bond rates well above 7 percent and the markets tumbled worldwide. And although critics have warned of just such an escalation for months, European leaders again were caught without a convincing response.
Unappeased by the imminent resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, investors appeared to have focused on the political gridlock in Italy that seemed likely to follow his departure from office, and the unenviable task awaiting a successor: restoring growth in a country that has seen almost none in a decade, and financing $2.57 trillion in debt. Italy, unlike Greece, is seen as too big to default and too big for Europe to bail out.
Only days after the Group of 20 meeting in Cannes, France, where President Obama and other world leaders urged European officials to take bolder action, they appeared frozen in past positions. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met with her kitchen cabinet of economic “wise ones.” They proposed the creation of a 2.3 trillion euro debt repayment fund that would pool and jointly finance debts of all 17 members of the euro zone in return for some conditions like legal debt limits and collateral.
But Mrs. Merkel effectively dismissed the idea...
But the German prescription of austerity is not popular. It is Berlin, citing the very treaties that it now wants to adjust, that has resisted the boldest answer to the euro crisis — using the European Central Bank as the euro zone’s lender of last resort. Berlin does not even want to sanction American-style quantitative easing to promote economic growth, one recipe to stoking growth and reducing the debt burden...
Europe has set up a special bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, but it has taken months to work out the details of how it would be financed and what its role would be, and at any rate it is far too small to cover the debts of a major country like Italy.
European promises to leverage the fund even up to one trillion euros have not been fulfilled. Efforts to get other nations to invest in it or in a proposed parallel fund were flatly rejected in Cannes. At most, surplus nations like China and Russia said that they would prefer to deal with an enlarged International Monetary Fund, where at least the rules are clear and there are firmer guarantees that money would be deployed effectively...
It was another example of the way that the euro, which was meant to unite the Continent after the Soviet collapse and promote more federalism, is now pulling the European Union apart, both within the euro zone and between the euro zone and the others...
The confusing Greek government drama — the country has yet to select a new interim prime minister — has already become a sideshow, given the small size of Greece. Investors, perhaps spooked by the 50 percent haircut in the face value of privately held Greek debt, want to hear that Italy is being fully backed and supported by its colleagues and partners. So far, that is a message that Germany, let alone France, is unwilling or unable to deliver.
And of course the fear in Paris is that France will be next..."
KJCT8.com:
"Cain Accusers May Hold Group News Conference
Cain Denies Sexual Harassment Allegations
From Brian Todd and Kevin Bohn CNN
November 9, 2011
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- At least two of the four women who have accused GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain of sexual harassment are considering holding a news conference to detail their accusations, their lawyers said Wednesday night.
Cain accuser Karen Kraushaar and her attorney Joel Bennett tried to organize a news conference with all four of the women, but Bennett said he had not made contact with the two women who have not publicly revealed their identities.
Bennett said attorney Gloria Allred indicated her client, Sharon Bialek, had expressed interest in participating. He told reporters Wednesday evening the news conference would likely proceed even if Kraushaar and Bialek were the only participants.
"We are still hopeful that they will have the courage to come forward, but we completely understand if they choose not to," Kraushaar said Wednesday in a statement. "Anyone should be able to report allegations of sexual harassment without fear that their lives and careers will be put on public display and laid open to public scrutiny."
"In October 2005, ACSS, Americare, Martin Kleinman, and their employee Diane Ahearn entered into a $1.2 million settlement agreement resolving allegations against them for their role in subjecting 17 mentally-disabled residents of the Leben Home for Adults to unnecessary prostate surgeries [5].
Leben Home had contracted with ACSS and Americare to perform home health and nursing care services at the facility[6]. Diane Ahearn, an ACSS employee and "medical director" at Leben Home, took responsibility for
scheduling home health aides, acting as a liaison between LebenHome and home health aides, and acting as a liaison between nurses and doctors providing care to residents[7]. Ahearn scheduled appointments for residents with the doctor performing the unnecessary surgeries, and signed transfer forms for residents sent "to other facilities, including Parkway Hospital, where the unnecessary surgeries were performed." [8]:
As reported in The New York Times:
"Inquiry Finds Mentally Ill Patients Endured 'Assembly Line' Surgery
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and SARAH KERSHAW
Published: March 18, 2001
One by one, they were called down from their rooms at the home for the mentally ill in Queens and ushered into an ambulette. Over five days in January 1998, they were taken to a small hospital nearby, 24 men in all.
Once there, they were shepherded into the emergency room, many listless and disheveled, some so bewildered that they began to wander off before being stopped by nurses or guards.
There was a 72-year-old schizophrenic who had been in institutions nearly all his life and could barely dress himself. Another was a man who spent most of his time at the home staring off, a grimace etching his face. And there was one man who was more alert but who had long been terrified of hospitals.
Each man had been persuaded back at the home to sign forms consenting to surgery for an enlarged prostate, even though the condition had not been conclusively diagnosed, few seemed to understand what they had signed and none had received proper urological examinations, a state health inquiry concluded later.
Eventually, the residents of the Leben Home for Adults in Elmhurst -- some barely middle-aged, one nearly 80 -- were put under general anesthesia for an hourlong operation to shave tissue from their prostates. In most cases, they were operated on at Parkway Hospital in Forest Hills by a urologist who had never met them and did not adequately review their medical records, the inquiry showed."
"The New York Times March 18, 2001:
It was, health officials charged, the use of ''assembly-line techniques to mass-produce surgery,'' a series of procedures that generated tens of thousands of dollars in Medicaid and Medicare fees for the hospital and at least one doctor.
The account of the operations is emerging only now in the wake of a lawsuit brought against the home this month on behalf of the 24 residents and the state's recent decision to revoke the medical license of one urologist who arranged the surgeries and to suspend the license of another who performed them.
Both doctors have defended their conduct, as has Leben Home, which was fined $5,000 for not properly supervising the 24 men and for other violations.
Leben Home, a for-profit facility with about 360 mentally ill residents, remains open, despite a decades-old history of unsanitary conditions, state sanctions and even macabre incidents. In 1993, for example, a decomposed body was found to have been wedged behind a basement freezer for a year.
Even amid the longstanding troubles at the home, though, the surgeries stand out, according to a review of case records and interviews with state officials and residents' relatives.
Four men were never examined by a urologist before undergoing the operations, including the 72-year-old schizophrenic, identified in the case as Patient 10, according to testimony. Before the surgeries, Leben Home did not contact relatives or guardians of the men, or their primary care doctors, even though it had previously done so for matters as minor as a dental visit, officials said.
Six of the men suffered complications from the surgery, including severe incontinence. To this day, most have no idea what happened to them.
A sister of Patient 10 said he could not even comprehend what a prostate gland was, let alone consent to the surgery.
''He's used to being in institutions,'' she said in an interview, speaking on condition that she and her brother not be identified. ''He's been in them all his life. He does what he is told. He'll just follow you.''
She said that whenever her brother had been hospitalized for treatment of cellulitis, an inflammation of the connective tissue of the skin, the home had contacted her or another brother. No one notified them about the prostate surgery, she said.
To say that Patient 10 ''would be capable of signing his own permission on a form for surgery is absurd,'' she said.
The State Health Department inquiry into the two doctors' conduct began after an anonymous call. The department is also examining the role of Parkway Hospital in the surgeries. The state attorney general's office is investigating whether the doctors or the hospital committed Medicaid fraud."
And now I have read it all. There are no words.
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