It's ridiculous that Melanie would be fired for a 30-second clip that no preschooler in her audience would ever see or be aware of. I doubt more than a few adults would have ever seen this thing again if she hadn't been fired over it. My 10-month-old son loves Melanie, and lights up when she comes on screen, but I somehow doubt he's going to IMDB her and see if she's ever worked blue.

And as far as working blue goes, didn't George Carlin host Thomas the Tank Engine for a few years, without corrupting the preschoolers of America? Hasn't Frank Oz worked on a few R-rated films? Should PBS have fired him, and deprived us of Bert, Grover and Cookie Monster?

And, yes, that star puppet was disturbing. Besides looking freakish, he also sounded like the little kid from The Shining. Every time he came on, I kept expecting...

Melanie: I love doing crafts! What about you, Star?

Star: Redrum! Redrum!!!

The Child Custody Protection Act protects child custory the same way the Clear Skies Act clears the skies. It's a moral-sounding name (who wouldn't want to protect child custody?) that whitewashes an immoral law that further assaults our rights.

This is just another salvo in conservatives' larger effort to criminalize female sexuality. Like that letter writer who said we should "teach children to spend less time fucking," or whatever it was, social conservatives act out of the insanely misguided and immoral belief that sex is dirty and wrong and no one should do it ever. Except it's only the women that get punished. Take the scenario this law would most likely applied to - a girl raped by her father, who can't turn to her parents for help. This law would protect the incestuous rapist, and punish the daughter and anyone who tried to help her. Let's hear it for family values, everybody!

As for protecting "children", how come to conservatives, when it comes to sex, a 17-year-old is a mere infant, but when it comes to Iraq, the same 17-year-old is next year's cannon fodder?

Do we need any more evidence that Ann Coulter belongs in nice padded room in Bellvue and not in Fox News' studios?

It also amazes me that the right would try and tar Clinton - Clinton! - of all people as gay, despite rivaling JFK as the most enthusiastically hetero president in memory. Maybe it has something to do with overcompensating, on behalf of the masculinity of the former male cheerleader (high school and college!) who sits in the White House at the moment.

PBS/Sprout's website, spoutletsgrow.com, has an email address in the "About Us" page where you can contact them. I sent them an email saying what a big fan of Melanie my 10-month-old is (he has little to no interest in the cartoons she hosts, but we still watch the show just because he lights up when she comes on), and how unfair it is to fire her over 60 seconds of material that no preschooler would ever have the opportunity to see.

And on that note, I just want to address another letter-writer:

> The web page is still out there, anyone can go there and listen to her support anal sex, and yes, kids DO go on the internet for sex, duh.

What an absolute load of bullshit. First of all, she wasn't "supporting anal sex," she was making a joke. Although, personally, she could host an anal sex workshop at Toys in Babeland for all I care - my kid would never be aware of that in a million years. He's a freakin' baby, as is everyone else in Melanie Martinez's audience. He isn't surfing YouTube for dirty jokes in his spare time.

And there's nothing I hate more than when someone talks about protecting "kids" and lumps in toddlers and teenagers as if they're exactly the same group of people. Yes, "kids" DO go on the internet, but not ones who watch Bob the Builder and Make Way for Noddy, and pretending that those two groups overlap is as disingenuous as calling someone who did a joke about anal sex a "porn star."

If you want to make the argument that the joke was in bad taste and it's not an association PBS should cultivate, fine - I disagree, but I'll respect your argument. But if you call someone who did a gag PSA a "porn star", and pretend preschoolers are trolling the internet for sex, well, you're just full of shit.

Oh no - I said "shit" - I guess that makes me a porn star.

I seem to remember Frank Oz doing a cameo in The Blues Brothers in which he hands Belushi a used condom. Should he have been kicked off PBS, depriving us of years of Grover, Cookie Monster and Bert? Or can we allow someone in children's entertainment to occasionally act like an adult when they're not in front of the kids?

Both ideas are pretty ridiculous. If MLB owns the rights to reprint players names, are they going to sue the Yellow Pages next? And the stats aren't any sort of intellectual property - they're easily observable events of things that happened publicly. Anyone in the stands with a scorecard can compile the stats - is MLB going to sue them too? What if you happen to remember that Bonds hit two dingers last night? Does MLB own your thoughts? I'm sure Selig would argue that they do.