‘Happy Gay Pride’ to Paris & Kathy Hilton


In the Calendar section of today’s Los Angeles Times, we find this item:

When asked to be co-grand marshal of the Los Angeles Gay Pride celebrations this Sunday in West Hollywood, celebutante Paris Hilton answered with her trademark, “That’s hot.”

But some gay activists are offended that the 24-year-old heiress and her mother, Kathy Hilton, have been chosen as figureheads for an event themed “How Do You Wear Your Pride?”

“The first thing that pops into my mind is, are there no gay people that could possibly grand marshal our own parade?” columnist Charles Karel Bouley II wrote on Advocate.com, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender news website.

Puh-leeze.

I’ve never liked the concept of “gay pride” and a “gay pride day” or week or month or whatever. Deconstruct the phrase “Happy Gay Pride!”and you have a very silly string of words. I’m all for taking pride in who we are, especially in a society as filled with self-esteem issues as America today. But all the emphasis on “gay” and “pride” is just a reminder of a time when those two words were oxymoronic. Gaydom needs new branding – something a little less 1972.

So I never attended the annual Los Angeles area gay pride parade parade until five years ago when we bought a condo in West Hollywood about 50 feet from the route. Last year, my mother and my sister went with Page and me. This year, our friends Kim and David are motoring in from Sherman Oaks.

None of us thinks the choice of the Hiltons as grand marshals is controversial. And if I have any objections, it’s not because they are hets, it’s because they’re, well, celebutantes.

Fact is, Paris lives in West Hollywood. She may even be our most famous resident. (Sorry Sally Kirkland!) And with what she spends on fashion, hair and makeup, she’s probably done as much for gay people as anyone else.

So I say, “Happy Gay Pride, Paris & Kathy!!” See you at the parade.

Cable News Excrescence Alert – MSNBC Sets Date for Tucker Carlson’s Show

In the steady drip, drip, drip of the Foxification of MSNBC, the channel has named the date for the premiere of “The Situation with Tucker Carlson.” Says channel exec Rick Kaplan:

“You’ve always seen Tucker as a contributor. You are about to see him as a host.”

And…

“This is going to be a really fun way for people to get a lot of information. This is going to be a very careful look at the news done in an hour. It’s not about getting somebody from the right and somebody from the left to beat each other up. You’re going to get to know the panelists on the show as rounded human beings.”

What? Tucker with no snark? What does he have left?

Like George Bush, Carlson grew up among the elite – his father was head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting whose second wife was a member of the Swanson’s food family. Like the president, Tucker has an innate sense of what appeals to and outrages the working man. But his populism is skin deep. He uses his sense of the common touch in a cynical way – as a propagandist. Watch him long enough and you begin to doubt he believes the words coming out of his mouth.

Just like Bush.

Maher Accused of Treason for Criticizing Military’s Abysmal Recruitment Record

The truth hurts. Rightwingers are such whiners. They always blame the messenger rather than dealing with the real problem:

Comedian Bill Maher’s mouth has landed him in hot water–again.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) says Maher’s comment on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” May 13, that the U.S. military has already recruited all the “low-lying fruit,” is possibly treasonous and at least grounds to cancel the show.

“More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club,” Maher said of the Army’s low recruitment numbers for April. “We’ve done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies.”

England was accused of abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“I think it borders on treason,” Bachus said. “In treason, one definition is to undermine the effort or national security of our country.”

In a statement released Monday, Maher defended his support for the U.S. armed forces.

I agree with the proposal that has been floating around that we should call on leaders like Rep. Bacchus – as well as the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle et al families – to “volunteer” their own children and grandchildren to fight in Iraq. They won’t, of course, because their patriotism and its attendant love for the Iraqi war stops at the point where they would have to make anything remotely resembling a sacrifice.

Study: Public Says Press Bad, Freedom Bad

A study released today by the University of Connecticut Department on Public Policy found (surprise!) a significant gap between the public and the press on details like freedom of speech and the government’s right to censor the press. Editor & Publisher offers an executive summary of the study, which found that 43% of the public says the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree (who are those guys?). Shockingly (or not), only 14% of the public respondents could name “freedom of the press” as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

While many of the other findings are as predictably depressing as those, the study did mine some interesting data on blogs, and since this is a blog, we’ll concentrate on those data. The widest gap between the 1,000 regular folks and the 300 journalists polled opened between the 8 in 10 journalists who said they read blogs and the less than 1 in 10 others who read blogs. A majority of the news pros polled do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists (editor’s note: because they fear the POWER). But, of course, the journos’ greatest fear is irrelevance — the study found that 61% of non-journalist average Americans get most of their news from television (Thanks, Bill O’Reilly!), while only 20% read newspapers (Thanks, Wall Street Journal!).

A full 83% of journalists reported using blogs, with four in 10 claiming to use them at least once a week. Fifty-five percent of blog-using journalists said they use blogs when gathering news. And while 85% of the Fourth Estaters believe bloggers should enjoy First Amendment protections, three-quarters say bloggers are not journalists because they don’t adhere to “commonly held ethical standards” (whatever those are).

Finally, in what can only be seen as the triumph of technology over truth, “61% of the news pros say that the emergence of the Internet has made journalism better.”

We here at Pensito Review, unburdened as we are by commonly held or uncommonly held ethical standards, and blessedly protected as we are by the First Amendment, will continue to do our part to make journalism better, or, more to the point — make better journalism.

Review: Season Finale of ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’

Submitted by Pensito Review contributor Amilee Brul, Red State and Blue

Bill Maher’s Real Time aired Friday, May 13, the season’s finale, with Al Franken as one of the panel. Mr. Franken admitted that he is seriously considering a run for the Senate chair now occupied by Norm Coleman of Minnesota.

Coleman, formerly from the Bronx, formerly a Democrat and still (?) Jewish, was selected over Fritz Mondale to the Senate. The tragic deaths of Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter, three staffers and two pilots during his 2002 re-election campaign against Coleman threw the election into turmoil, and Coleman came out a Senator.

Franken, who earns a living as a comedian and satirist, is liberal, smart and well-spoken. When he isn’t doing shtick, he is impressive as a thoughtful spokesman for the bleeding hearts. As a matter of fact, he is impressive when he is doing his shtick.

Mahr’s reaction to the possible Franken candidacy was that it opened up a new job possiblities for underemployed comedians. He seemed unsurprised by the announcement, but enthusiastic.

Jeff Gannon On HBO’s ‘Real Time’ with Bill Maher

I made a point of catching Jeff Gannon on Bill Maher’s HBO show last night. In fact, I’ve seen quite a few of the interviews this guy has done, and he is a piece of work.

In case you just woke up under a rock after many months and then tuned into Pensito Review to find out what’s going on in the world, “Jeff Gannon” is the nom de plume of a prostitute named James Guckert who worked out of the DC area using the nom de ho, “Bulldog.” Guckert invented his Jeff Gannon persona when he suddenly, with no prior journalism experience, started covering White House press briefings for a website called GOPUS.com, which subsequently changed its name to Talon News.

The story of how Gannon got access to the White House has yet to be revealed. The shameless libertines who run the White House and GOP Congress have no interest in getting to the root of this White House sex story. (So if Monica had been paid for sex with the president, there would have been no Starr investigation?) The powers that be are equally uninterested in knowing how a $200 per hour prostitute cleared a security check – or how he knew in advance when the bombing of Baghdad was going to start, or how he got inside information on the leaking of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

If you want to know just about everything there is to know about Bulldog, go to AmericaBlog. The site’s editor, John Aravosis, broke much of this story, and he has posted a list of links to his Gannon coverage in the left hand column of the homepage. (Scroll down.)

Gannon did have one funny line last night:

“Usually the way it works,” Gannon said, “is people prostitute themselves AFTER they become reporters.”

Gannon has been openly begging to be invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight but as of yesterday he’d received no offers. It’ll be interesting tonight to see if he shows up.

Hix Nix Science Flix at Imax

In this article in today’s New York Times, Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which operates the local Imax theatre, explains why she decided not to show the documentary film, “Volcanoes.”

“If it’s not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy,” Murray said, “from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation” to show it.

This is just flat wrong. Controversy sells movie tickets. If you want to put butts in the seats at local cineplex, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Just ask Mel Gibson or Michael Moore.

Amazingly, the Fort Worth science theatre is not the only Imax operator to self-censor this science film because it presents science. The Times says, “‘Volcanoes,’ released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen science centers, mostly in the South … because of its brief references to evolution, in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the undersea vents.”

Apparently, panic erupted in the museum’s marketing department after a test screening of “Volcanoes” for 134 local residents. Reading through the viewer comments, a whiff of controversy arose – and it seems to have set Murray’s hair on fire. She told the Times that “while some thought [the film] was well done, ‘some people said it was blasphemous.’ In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like ‘I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact,’ or ‘I don’t agree with their presentation of human existence.'”

That this happened in a museum dedicated to science is as scary as it is sad. I suppose you could argue that avoiding controversy is mission-critical in marketing departments at a public institutions. But when avoidance of controversy leads to censorship, a line has been crossed.