Why Beetlejuice Could Take Master Classes From Mike Weinstein When It Comes To Spinning: The AHF/ImmoralLive "Condom Letter"

WOW...just when you thought AHF couldn't get any freakier.

Yesterday, Mike Weinstein held yet another of his publicity stunt press conferences in yet another attempt to push his condom mandate law on Los Angeles County Public Health officials and impose his "condom Nazi" regime on porn shoots.

The centerpiece of this farce was a letter that was sent by AHF's legal counsel, Mark McGrath, to LA County DPH Director Jonathan Fielding, in which McGrath decided to level his complaint at one particular porn company, Dan Neal's ImmoralLive.com, for allegedly violating the newly passed condom mandate law by shooting performers unwrapped.

Apparently, AHF was alerted of the alleged violations by "an anonymous letter" that was sent to them, which they then verified through "a review of content at ImmoralLive.com". Why the letter wasn't sent directly to LACDPH for review and investigation rather than shephereded through AHF is an open mystery.

The full letter is a .pdf file that is available here, though I've gone ahead and taken screencaps of it. I've removed the extraneous header info for brevity's sake, and there is some duplication due to the limits of my screen capture software.

Now...the funniest aspect of this is that Weinstein and AHF is supposed to be so distrustful of LACDPH in enforcing their new playtoy condom law that they are attempting to break the City of Los Angeles off from LACDPH and form their own health care jurisdiction (a referendum on the matter is currently being circulated for inclusion in the ballot for later this year). So, I guess we should assume that this is Weinstein's shot at the bow of Fielding, as if to say: "Don't fuck with us; enforce our law or we kick your ass again!!"

But, that's not all, folks...apparently, at Weinstein's presser, the subject of Mr. Marcus, the performer at the center of last year's syphilis scare, came up again....except that this time, it was over an incident that took place last week on an Internet radio show hosted by Jessica Bangkok, and hosted at the same studios where ImmoralLive.com does their shows.

To summarize what went down: Marcus was a guest at Jessica's show in early March, where the producers decided that it would be a really cool idea to have Jessica watch her own scenes...with hopefully the obvious results. It worked all too well, because Marcus then decided that he just couldn't help himself and decided to "relieve the tension" with a unknown young female performer who was at his side....all of this going on live on air in the studio. Problem was, legendary performer Lisa Ann, whom had her own show following Bangkok's, was a witness to the hijinks, and she went apeshit all over Marcus and Bangkok on Twitter later that night, complaining about why Marcus or his sex accomplice hadn't been tested and why the studio would risk losing everything to allow live sex in their shows. Manwin, the porn megacorp who owns the studio and the shows, promptly investigated, and then dropped the unemployment hammer on not only Bangkok, but also Debi Diamond and Nikki Hunter for performing live sex on their shows as well. (The latter two have gotten Internet radio gigs at other venues.)

Of course, since I wasn't there at the presser, I can't say what was said there, but I'm guessing that Weinstein and his allies were probably attempting to use that incident to justify their stance and to have their "anonymous" sources (mostly paid shills) sneak into porn studios to catch performers Fucking While Unwrapped. (Though, since Manwin always had and is now aggressively enforcing their "no sex on the air" policy on their shows, the attempts will probably not be so fruitful.)

In the meantime, the mystery of how a mostly broke county with more than enough real HIV/STD cases in the real world will find the time and resources to meet Mike Weinstein's demand that they play "condom cop", continues unabated. As does the court challenges.

BTW....former starlet Lydia Lee (fka Julie Meadows) has a rather pithy critique of AHF's latest whackadoodle at her fantastic blog....please go there and educate yourself.

Jenna Jameson's Endorsement of Mitt Romney: Mavericky Move, Or Just Plain Foolish??

You would think that the war against the condom mandate would be at the top of porn people's minds right now....but the big buzz overtaking Porn Valley this weekend has less to do with defending the right to go unwrapped. It has more to do with more traditional rights...as in, voting for President.

Jenna Jameson may be long since retired from porn, and may have even generally repudiated it (though, to be fair with Jenna, she has not as of yet gone Shelley Lubben or Linda Lovelace), but she still casts a huge shadow on the industry, having been its most visible brand name for the 1990's and early 2000's. Ever since her controversal biography A Cautionary Tale was released around 1997 or so, Jenna has parlayed her notoriety and her porn queen status into a very lucrative and affluent (as far as adult performers go) lifestyle; her net worth has been estimated to be in the range of $20-30 million, according to the CelebrityNetWorth.com website.

I guess that from that alone, you could tell exactly whom she would endorse for President of the United States this coming election.

CBS San Francisco affiliate KCBS-TV first broke the story of Jameson publically endorsing former Massachusetts governor/Republican Mitt Romney over incumbent POTUS/Democrat Barack Obama last Thursday, and it spread throughout the news cycle and the Internet like wildfire pretty rapidly.  At least Jenna was direct and honest about the endorsement: it's all about the Benjamins:

"I'm very looking forward to a Republican being back in office," Jameson said while sipping champagne in a VIP room at Gold Club in the city's South of Market neighborhood. "When you're rich, you want a Republican in office."

Funny, since in 2008 she actually backed a Democrat, Hillary Clinton, for President; and she didn't pull the trigger for John McCain, the ultimate Republican nominee that year who ended up losing to Obama. Perhaps Sarah Palin was just a bit too....shall we say, idiotic for even a diehard GOP'er like Jenna Jameson to take??

But Jenna's endorsement raised some eyebrows for totally serious reasons, too: Mittenz, as I tend to gloss him, was a generally moderate Massachusetts Republican while he was governor of that state, but like most GOP'ers, he has been forced pretty far to the Right due to the pressures of the Religious Right conservatives and the Tea Party "populists" who now have become the predominant voting "base" of the GOTP; not to mention the influence of big money billionaires such as Sheldon Acheson and the Koch brothers, and political commissars like Grover Norquist. And, that would also include going hard right on sexual expression, too; Romney has been most recently loudly about the scrounge of pornography and how he would control it through filters and prosecutions. Indeed, one of the main persecuters of the Bush era antiporn campaigns, Patrick Trueman -- who now heads the group Pornography Harms -- has even boasted that Romney (through his aides) has now endorsed fully their plans to crack down hard on porn speech and expression as an assault on "decency" and "morality".

Also, Romney had (when he was still campaigning for the Republican nomination against Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich) signed a written statement produced by Trueman's organization Morality in Media specifying "strict enforcement of our nation's obscenity laws" and a promise to appoint an Attorney General who would "vigorously" enforce same laws.

Given all that, one could wonder why someone like Jenna Jameson would basically turn so heavily on the industry that gave her her good fortune.

However, it should be noted that most upper-middle-class professional artists tend to become more conservative politically, and there are plenty of porn performers and producers who are otherwise strong conservative Republicans and supporters of Mitt Romney in general. Even someone like Ron Jeremy, who did manage to deliver a vicious smackdown at Rick Santorum for his fundamentalist zealotry against porn, was willing to give Mittenz a benefit of the doubt, calling him "a good man" who "means well", as well as "a good father". (The Hedgehog, though, is still committed to voting for President Obama.)

Some critics have raised some ulterior motive of racism against Blacks as a prime mover of Jameson's voting habits, citing Jenna's hesitance during her career of working with Black male performers (and remember, some of Hillary Clinton's followers were willing to go down that path during 2008); while others far more obtuse have simply blamed way too many facials and creampies and the nature of Jenna's "profession" for her supposed idiocy.

But while all this has become a running snark of the usual double enterdres and adolescent catcalls; there is a serious and often very dangerous aspect of dismissing Jameson's right to express her political opinions due to her chosen profession. "Slut shaming" is about as much a common practice in American culture as baseball and apple pie; and hating on women because of their sexual prowess is a custom that is far, far too common. It's more overt on the conservative side of the spectrum because that's where the more predominant antisex/antiporn attitudes lie...but it's not totally absent on the political Left, either.

The fact that Jenna Jameson happens to be a conservative Republican should not be an excuse by anyone calling him/herself a liberal or "progressive" (or any other political label, for that matter) to demonize or diminish her as a fully grown woman merely because you don't like her choice of profession or her private sex life. (And that goes to infinity for YOU, Gail Dines....I see your next CounterPunch essay working, madame.)

Also, for all you progs/libs/Lefties who are enjoying the spectacle of Jenna Jameson being raked over the coals for her conservative views: I suppose that some of you are the very same ones who were sporting #ImWithSECupp hashtags when the MSNBC hostess/right-wing libertarian/atheist apostate got satirized by Larry Flynt's HUSTLER magazine in June with the notorious "dick in her mouth" photoshop. But, if what HUSTLER did was over the top and pretty close to "misogyny", then what do you think the vicious smearing of Jenna Jameson for being a porn icon is?? Education??? Never mind that none of that pseudo-feminist solidarity with Cupp transformed her into her any less of an antifeminist/anti-contraception Tea Party sychophant. But then again, when Gail Dines can still get more run for her idiocy about porn in lefty circles while Nina Hartley, who has more authentic lefty/prog/feminist cred in her right butt cheek than a thousand clones of Dines put together, it shows how much real learning folks of the Left could use about their own sex negativity.

Jenna Jameson can and will live with her political endorsements. Maybe we can all do the same, whether or not we agree with her.