Month: June 2005

Turns out there is a cure for being gay – death. Washington Blade has a great story on how the late Ismail Merchant’s gayness was deleted in his obituaries:

Merchant Ivory Productions is synonymous with films that are rooted in ornate and authentic history. With the death of film producer Ismail Merchant on Wednesday, May 25, however, some major news organizations are rewriting history, or at least omitting some of it.

It is well known that the 44-year relationship between Merchant and James Ivory — who was the director of the duo’s films like Oscar-nominated “Howard’s End,” “Room with a View,” and “Remains of the Day” — was romantic as well as creative.

Of the mainstream news accounts reviewed for this article, only the Los Angeles Times explicitly states that the two were a gay couple.

“In a business where professional marriages last hardly any longer than personal ones,” the L.A. Times writes, “Merchant’s association with the German-born [screenwriter Rita Rawer] Jhabvala and the American Ivory, who was also Merchant’s life partner, spanned more than 40 years and yielded as many movies.”

The New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters and the Washington Post all omitted the fact that Merchant and Ivory were life partners.

The Post obit writer, who included a very old quote in which Merchant said he had a “crush” on an actress, defended omitting Merchant’s relationship with Ivory because he said he could not find definitive proof that they were a couple.

“I feel uncomfortable writing about someone’s personal life unless it’s something they talked about extensively in print,” the Post’s obit writer Adam Bernstein told The Blade. Bernstein pointed out that the Post routinely lists gay partners as survivors in obituaries if the relationship can be proved.

The Blade’s Brian Moylan also points out that a similar “de-gaying” happened recently when Susan Sontag died. Many obituaries glossed over her relationships with women, including famed photographer Annie Liebowitz.

Excellent coverage of Jeb’s delusions of grandeur and delusions in general at Florida Politics. Now that we’ve all had some time to look into the hysterical claims made during the Schiavo fiasco, it appears just barely possible Jeb was…bluffing? Exaggerating? Um…lying? Yes, that’s it — Jeb was lying.

Will the media ask “Jeb!” to explain whether he was lying about “new and compelling allegations of abuse” in advance of the aborted Schiavo snatch and grab mission? After all, “Jeb!” specifically,

“claimed there were new and compelling allegations of abuse or neglect that the state Department of Children and Families had to investigate.”

“…the only allegation in the batch not heard before: A March 7 complaint that accused a nursing assistant at Schiavo’s Pinellas Park hospice of using an “air freshener substance” in her bath water in July, which caused a rash. DCF investigators learned the substance was an aromatherapy oil that the assistant placed in a spray bottle, not in Schiavo’s bath.”

… “Jeb!” better have had something more than “air freshener” complaints when he claimed there was “new and compelling allegations of abuse” as justification for nearly causing a constitutional crisis; recall that, as a result of the need to “save” Schiavo, “‘There were two sets of law enforcement officers facing off, waiting for the other to blink,’ said one official with knowledge of Thursday morning’s activities.”

A note to folks outside Florida. Jeb’s campaign materials consist of red signage with “Jeb!” reversed out in white. That’s all, just “Jeb” with an exclamation point. Seeing this year after year, those of us who live here tend to think of him as “Jeb!” all the time.

Fabulous letter to the editor recently in Florida’s Gainesville Sun in defense of our Constitution and judicial review.

Who would be willing to allow the police to beat confessions out of us or allow us to be tried for crimes without the benefit of legal counsel? Who would vote to return to a day when people of different races could not intermarry, were forced to go to different schools, drink from different fountains and sit separately in public arenas?

The change in such practices has usually come from court decisions before the majority of our country fell in line. Times change and values change, or we would still have slavery.

Our Constitution was adopted to protect the minority because the majority has never needed protection. To the extent that the court system may be considered activist because it does not always vote with the majority of our population as represented by Congress or state legislatures, it is in fact carrying out its mandate from the spirit, if not the precise letter of the Constitution.

The letter was signed by George L. Barnett of Micanopy, which, everyone knows, is the town where the Michael J. Fox film “Doc Hollywood” was filmed. Good going, George!

As you may have read below, we learned today that Tom Noe, the Republican moneyman at the center of the missing-millions scandal in Ohio, has put his luxurious Key West home on the market for $4.6 million.

Now comes word that a top advisor to two Ohio Republican governors has admitted he participated in the money laundering scheme Noe orchestrated in order to funnel illegal contributions to President Bush and other Republican candidates last year.

H. Douglas Talbott, a former top aide to two Ohio governors, told federal authorities that Republican coin dealer Tom Noe persuaded him to contribute $2,000 to President Bush’s re- election campaign – then reim bursed him for the donation, The Plain Dealer has learned.

Talbott appeared Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Toledo that is investigating whether Noe illegally reimbursed as many as two dozen contributors to a Bush fund- raiser in October 2003. The grand jury is looking into whether Noe made the reimbursements to circumvent campaign finance laws, which limit individual contributions to $2,000.

His appearance before the grand jury marked the first time a former top aide to Gov. Bob Taft and former Gov. George Voinovich has been linked to the federal investigation of possible laundering of Bush campaign money.

Repeated attempts to reach Talbott were unsuccessful.

(Thanks Julie!)

Late today after the East Coast media had gone home for the evening, the Pentagon released a report in which it admitted multiple incidents of U.S. interrogators abusing the Koran in order to incite Moslem detainees:

The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Koran and was later fired for “a pattern of unacceptable behavior.”

In other confirmed incidents, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Korans to get wet; a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran.

The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report — later retracted — that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee’s Koran down a toilet.

It’s going to be interesting to learn how “a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran.”

Tom Noe, the Ohio Republican fundraiser who is under investigation for, er, misplacing over $10 million in state funds, is also making news in the Florida Keys. A friend who is knowledgable about goings-on down in Margaritaville writes:

Tom Noe’s name keeps popping up in the news in Florida for two reasons — he rented his house in the Keys to prominent Ohio politicians for less than market rate, and now he’s trying (secretly at first, but now he’s busted and it’s public) to sell the place quickly for $4.6 mill.

Speculation is, Noe will need the money for legal fees.

This just in: The bigger story right now is the rush of GOPers to return Noe’s contributions. Sounds like they’re tripping over each other to do it.

Scandal: An Ohio county commissioner, a state official and a company president answered questions in front of a federal grand jury on Wednesday in the political funding case against Tom Noe.

The grand jury is investigating whether Noe, a long-time GOP fund-raiser, funneled contributions to the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign by reimbursing donations from these three notables, among many others. It appears he may have laundered over $100,000.

Bush’s re-election team listed Noe as a “pioneer” for raising more than $100,000 in last year’s presidential campaign.

Federal prosecutors began the grand jury inquiry as state officials continue to investigate Noe’s handling of a $55.4 million coin investment scheme using money from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.

Last week, investigators said $10 million to $13 million in state money was missing.

The investigation focuses on Noe’s work at the fund-raiser that raised more than $1 million for Bush.

Turmoil: Meanwhile, in the State Senate,the Democrats are getting “testy” and the floor “erupted into a shouting match” with Republicans, who control both houses in the state government. The issue at hand was the state’s $51 billion spending plan.

The Dems were demanding that the Republicans justify the bill’s “tax cuts for the wealthy, defend local government cuts that disproportionately harm cities and answer a series of technical questions.”

The bill included significant changes to Ohio’s tax system. “Pushed by Gov. Bob Taft and crafted mainly by the Ohio Business Roundtable, it calls for replacing the state’s corporate franchise tax and tangible personal property taxes with a new tax on businesses’ gross receipts.”

(Thanks Julie!)

It was supposed to be a soft launch. Those of us who masterminded this site at the end of 2004 had planned to announce Pensito Review to the world around the first of June – meaning, now – after a phased-in deployment, during which we slowly but steadily built our readership.

What we hadn’t factored in, however, was the target-rich environment we would find ourselves in. It turns out that in the present historic moment – the dawning nadir of the Bush Era – there is an eager readership for a site that covers liberal politics and media. Because the perspective of the Left is so under-represented, we have experienced popularity far greater – and far sooner – than we could have imagined six months ago.

Not that it all came by accident. Our three-person editorial staff has a combined 60-plus years’ experience in marketing, editorial, public relations and web dev – and about 120-plus years as political junkies, to one degree or another.

When we posted the test version of the site to Blogger in January, I predicted the PR would be doing well to have to have around 200 daily readers within six months. Three months later, after we had moved to our permanent location at pensitoreview.com, we had already reached the hoped-for 200 daily readers (or “unique visitors” in Geekspeak). In May, our readership spiked and by month’s end, we’d had 34,903 unique visits, an average of 1,125 readers a day.

For this modest success, we are grateful. We decided to publish Pensito Review because, like you, we were hungry for real news unfiltered. Turns out, we are Legion. Who knew?

So I guess we can call this a launch.

PS. We appreciate all the comments. But what I really love is that our first flame came from the Left.