The Jeff Booth Show

Internet Radio with Pictures

Show Transcripts

October 28th, 2007

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Jeff@eroticuniversity.com

(818) 613-9248

Political News

The biggest news the adult entertainment industry has seen in a long time was announced this week. It may mean little to most people, but for the adult world, and me personally, it is huge. USC 2257 was struck down by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. This was a federal record keeping law that has been in place since the Reagan administration. While everyone in the adult industry pretty much made a practice of keeping records to make sure that people in their videos were legally of age, when Attorney General Ashcroftcame to power- he reinterpreted the law written by Congress. His reinterpretation changed into into a chaotic mess, with no one having a clue as to how anyone could actually follow the law. It has been in court battle ever since, with some concessions on the part of the Justice Department over some of the more ridiculous requirements, like the ones that made it almost impossible to legally make adult films with non-U.S. citizens. One of the huge concerns for us was the secondary producer requirement, which required us to have extremely detailed and personal records for content we did not create or where I was not the producer but simply a photographer, such as when I shot an on the set features for Sex in Review to promote an adult movie. Since I could not get those documents, I could not use those photos- even though they were with major companies and there was no question at all that the company documented them and they were all legally of age. It was a problem for the pictures we selected to use to illustrate features on this show. And it was also a problem for our creation of educational content, as the record keeping requirements, included having a full time record keeping staff member with regular office hours along with an extremely complicated documentation system including requiring listing every alias that performer might have ever used. Any violation of these cumbersome rules could get you sent to jail for 5 years. It was an unbelievable infringement on free speech, but I never expected the court to throw the law out completely.  The court found that the law had a chilling effect on free speech, that it impacted commercial and non-commercial speech, that it regulated speech not conduct, and that it “sweeps in a lot of protected speech.” The next step is for the government to ask for a rehearing from the same court, which is unlikely, and after that they have to petition the Supreme Court. No one objects to having to do a little record keeping when you make adult videos or shoot adult pictures, but the reinterpretation of this law went way beyond that into something designed specifically to impede protected speech. For now, the ruling only applies to Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, but it sets a precedent that could be used in other districts and ultimately lead to the final demise of this unconstitutional law that has never had the slightest impact on child pornography, the supposed reason for its existence.

In more bad news for the government censors, Judge Rosalyn O. Silver threw out the charges against two more defendants in an obscenity case that ensnared JM Productions and Five Star Video. The judge rejected the government’s assertion that Five star co-owner Chris Ankeney would have been familiar with all of the contents of the 20,000 videos in the company warehouse just because his office was just 50 feet from the warehouse door. This is the case where the judge has forced the jury to watch every minute of the contested DVDs, including the special features.  The prosecution decided to rest their case after jurors had viewed just three of the four videos. This leaves just the charges against the Five Star corporation, since the charges against JM were dropped last week, from what was originally supposed to be a landmark obscenity case.

We need to have a chat Rudy. We’ve talked about this before, but it is still astonsihing that you continue to defend your good friend and Guillaini Partners employee, Monsignor Alan Placa. I realize you are close- he officiated at your wedding, I don’t remember which one of them, and helped arrange that sleazy little annulmnent of your first one. But Placa has been accused of molesting children not by a single accuser, but by a whole bunch of them. And has been accused of helping cover up for other pedophile priests. He continues to work at Giuliani Partners in New York. But you are running for president. Guys like this as your best buddy is a bad image. You can’t say things like “Oh yeah, he’s just a normal down to earth guy, we hang out together and have a few beers with the boys.”  Its a good thing for him that you hired him, as the church ordered him to stop doing his priestly duties. You just said "We give some of the worst people in our society the presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt. And, of course, I'm going to give that to one of my closest friends." But as a presidential candidate, maybe you should have a little more distance from a guy who had a bunch of children saying that he molested them. He’s been accused of being in the center of a pedophile sex ring. As a lawyer, he developed legal strategies to defend pedophile priests. The New York Times reported in April 2002, “Several families, for instance, have accused him (Placa) of trying to extract information from victims in his capacity as a spiritual adviser, then using that information to help the diocesan legal strategy.” Read the stories in Newsday, or the National Catholic Reporter, or the Grand Jury report. Even if he did not do the initial abusing, his legal strategies and handling of the coverup for the diocese was a secondary form of abuse, noted for its cruel intimidation and often dishonest tactics towards the accusers. Rudy, your personal judgment on these issues blows. Your chauffeur, Bernard Kerik,  promoted by you to police chief and then nominated by you to head homeland security faces possible indictments next month on federal bribery, obstruction of justice, and tax charges. You are not a great judge of character. You picked Hooker luvin David Vitter as your regional campaign chairman for the South. And your South Carolina campaign chair was caught running a cocaine ring. And look at your marital history. To be fair, maybe the wives were a bad judge of character, but still. When running for president, you should not stand behind an accused pedophile, just as children shouldn’t stand in front of him. And you should not appear to be bending over backwards for him, just as children shouldn’t be bending over forwards for him.  Plack-a

When I began as an advisor for what was the largest swing club in the U.S., the wife of the founder had recently been fired from her job as a emergency medical technician. Why? Because she appeared on a television show where she talked about her life in a polyamorous threesome. The three of them, two women and a man, considered themselves married, although it was certainly not sanctioned by the state. It was not the repressive polygamy of a man ruling over two women, but a non-religious joining of three people. Her revealing that she did not comform to sexual norms cost her her job. Because in this country, you have no protections. Your sex life, unrelated to your job, can get you fired and there is nothing you can do about it. The gay community is a little better organized than the swing or poly communities, and they have been working to get congress to pass some protections for them. Barney Frank introduced ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would extend federal employment discrimination law to include sexual orientation. The House was supposed to vote on it this week. They had gone through a lot of negotiation with the Bush white house to craft a bill he could accept. They exempted “small businesses, religious organizations and the uniformed members of the armed forces.” It does not even support transgender rights. The federal policy will be less inclusive than what is already in place in nearly 90 percent of fortune 500 companies. After all of their work, the administration has made it clear that he will veto the bill, no matter what they do.  This is the president who constantly complains the congress never works with him, and on the few occasions he bothers to even talk to them, they reach an agreement that he is determined to ignore. Bush is Lucy, and Congress Brown keeps running up expecting the ball to not be yanked away each time.

Entertainment

The revelation by  J.K. Rawling at a recent event revealing that Dumbledore was conceived as a gay character set off a firestorm of stupididy.  For both of you unfamiliar with the books, nowhere in the text will you learn that Dumbledore is gay. One writer with a lot of time on his hands did figure out that  Albus Dumbledore"  was an anagram for "Male bods rule, bud!” The most likely place you’ll learn about it, though, is from the endless conservative commentators attacking Rowling.

Ultra conservative media critic Robert Knight said on Live with Dan Abrams, “The game plan is to inject homosexuality into school books, kids curricula, and every possible part of the conversation.” Wow. Rowling is now part of the vast gay recruiting empire. With all her wealth, though, she doesn’t need the toasters. Commentator Mark Finkelstein claimed this proves that Falwell was right about the gay teletubbie, as if they are all involved in some vast gay conspiracy in make believe land, which now flys the rainbow flag. Of course, its not a party until Bill O’Reilly says something incredibly stupid. He says that the revelation becomes part of the debate about the gay indoctrination of children, as if somehow kids will see Dumbledore as the new gay role model and all will want to be like him, whip out their wands and just go gay. And of course, the gay bashing  O’Reilly seems oblivious to Rowling’s statement at the same event that one of the important aspects of the books was to teach tolerance. Oreilly is the same guy who objects to gay marriage because it will lead to, as he says, “somebody coming in and saying I want to marry a goat.” If we’re talking about an old out of touch hate filled goat like O’Reilly, I’d certainly want to warn them away from it. Marriage to O’Reilly would be anything but gay.

Pledging your virginity to your father used to be limited to a handful of southern states, but now with purity balls, it is catching on around the nation. A purity ball is a dressy father daughter dance in which the girl pledges her purity to daddy until he hands her off to hubby. And in purity balls held by Care-net , the girls give their dad’s little pink boxes as part of their pledge. Could it get any more ironically creepy.

A new book on the porn industry called Naked Ambition is out. Naked Ambition: An R-rated Look at an X-rated Industry, just published by Rock Out Books, is intended as a social documentary exploration into the American porn industry Mostly, it’s a picture book, the pictures being on the tame side, with photographs by Michael Grecco, including portraits and shots taken at the Adult Video News Awards. It includes introductions by David Navarro and Larry Flint and short interviews and commentary with porn industry professionals. Finally, a porn book safe enough to put on your coffee table when the folks come by.  They might have rethought the title though. Naked Ambition was also the title of Carly Milne’s book about the porn industry published in 2005. Which is why they probably added the long r-rated look subtitle- but still. When coming up with a book name about the adult industry, perhaps you could at least be as creative as the industry itself, which manages to crank out titles like this every second and keep coming up with new ones.

Wow, this puts the marrying a model fantasy to bed, and not in a good way. Pop singer songwriter Peter Andre married British glamour model Jordan. She has appeared in six volumes of Playboy’s book of lingerie, and on the cover of Playboy and in Maxim and FHM. When not being the sexy model, she prefers being called Katie Price, which is apparently what her husband calls her most of the time. Because, as she revealed in Now magazine, the only time he gets sex is when she wants to get pregnant. And then nothing for nine months. He’s living out the film Heartbreak Kid, but I suspect he’s the one with the heartbreak. This story is so sad.

When you visit vegporn.com, don’t expect to see an array of vegetables shoved into naughty places. Its actually a site featuring  nude pictures of men and women, but without an ounce of fat-animal fat. They are all vegetarians. Those new to the vegetarian movement and reading the profiles of the models on the site might be taken aback by the many comments about vegetarians tasting better. No, its not a weird save the animals, go cannibal thing. It has been my experience than vaginally, the taste of vegetarians is a little sweeter. 

Then there’s FuckforForest.com. For a $15 contribution to save the rainforests, you get 30 days access to thousands of photos and videos of idealistic fuckers and lovers, and over 30 couples and lovers doing daily live shows. What amazes is those complaining about eco-porn, including the World Wildlife Fund, as somehow tainting the contributions. Sure, you’ll see some taints, but its all natural. There is a lot of fucking that takes place in rainforests, and it is pretty important for the overall ecology. What better way to save them than by even more fucking?

What could be ironically sadder than street walkers in their old age out on the street?  It was something that Carmen Munoz wanted to do something about. She’d been a prostitute for twenty years herself. With the help of an enlightened city mayor and private donors, she’s opened the first retirement home for prostitutes in the world. It currently supports 30 women in their golden years. No, its not in Amsterdam. Its in Mexico City, which seems to continue to be a progressive leader, where they have legalized gay marriage, abortion, conjugal visits for gay prisoners, and are considering legalizing prostitution. 

So, you go through all of the trouble of opening a Lingerie store in Los Angeles, which requires a lot of hoops to jump through. But you make it through all of the city regulations and zoning codes, and what happens. Your own landlord tries to shut you down. Even though he knew you were opening a Lingerie shop.  The landlord is trying to evict LA Exotique in Encino, just three weeks after opening. Why? Apparently because he discovered that the shop is owned by porn stars. Headed by Nick Manning, other adult porn star partners in the business include Michelle McLaren, Rachel Roxxx, and Sarah Jesse, among others.

And in who’s getting naked now, how about Viggo Mortensen in the new David Cronnenberg film Eastern Promises. Yes, Aragorn does the full monty, but in this case, it is in a nude fight scene that takes place in a steam bath. Nothing sexually steamy, though, but it is rare for male actors to do full frontal nudity. The director stated that he wanted the audience to feel the full intimacy of the brutal fight scene. Sadly, if he had used full frontal nudity because he wanted the audience to feel the intimnacy of a scene of intimacy, the MPAA would have slapped an NC-17 on the film. We are so fucked up.

Whacko

Presidential contender Mike Huckabee, who now appears to have the lead with social conservatives by winning the Values Voter Summit straw poll, just took it over the top to become this week’s whacko of the week. What finally did it for him, allowing him to join fellow presidential candidates Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, John McCain, and Tom Coburn, was his incredibly strange statement about safe sex and comparing it to domestic violence.

Here is what he said when asked if his Christian values would prevent him from supporting safe sex programs.  "The best thing to do is to encourage people to make good choices. For example, if we were really serious about stopping a problem, whether it's drunk driving, we don't say, 'Okay, don't drive as drunk,' do we?" No, I think we use the more grammatical Don’t drink and drive.

His next example was "We don't say that a little domestic violence is okay, just cut it down a little, just don't hit quite as hard. We say it's wrong." So domestic violence, which you can go to jail for and is universally condemned in this country is equivalent to premarital consensual sex that, according to statistics, is practiced by almost everyone? His answer is, he would not support safe sex programs or the use of condoms.

So, we know he is against condoms. He fondly remembers a time when "Gideons gave out Bibles ... rather than school nurses giving out condoms." It is not much of a leap to guess that he is against sex education. He does not believe in teaching "about sex or contraception in public schools."

While making a big deal of  biblical morality, he leaves behind in his governorship of Arkansas a host of ethical questions. He set up a secret charity that appeared to do little more than pay him to make speeches. He was rebuked by the State’s ethics commission five times. He used public money for personal uses, and even tried to keep the furniture donated to the governor’s mansion. He believes, according to his lawyer, in unlimited gifts to politicians. He may have overcome his former gluttony for food when he lost over 100 pounds, but his gluttony for worldly goods seems unabated.

Huckabee is consistent in that he tends to be consistently wrong about facts. He believes that evolution teaches that men came from apes, rather than the actual concept of a shared ancestry, showing a complete lack of understanding of what evolution is- something he does not believe in. He does believe in teaching creationism in the schools, which the courts have consistently rejected because it is basically teaching fundamentalist Christianity in place of actual science. 

Nor is he well versed in history. Our founding fathers were by and large deists or agnostics- not Christians. I just finished the terrific biography on Ben Franklin, An American Life by Walter Isaacson, which makes this point about the founding fathers and religion pretty clear. But Baptist minister Hucakbee introduced a strange mathematical historical revisionism when he claimed in last week’s debate that most of the 56 signers of the declaration of independence were clergymen. The actual number was one- John Witherspoon- a Presbyterian minister. And maybe up to three were former clergymen. To be fair, I think he’s that bad at history, not that bad at math. Hopefully.

He is consistently anti-gay. He supports the Don’t ask don’t tell policy. In his book Character Makes a Difference, he infers that homosexuality is a character problem. He opposes gay adoption. He opposes same sex marriage. He even opposes civil unions, which is a particularly draconian point of view that is difficult to justify.

It goes without saying that he is strongly anti-abortion.  He wants a national human life amendment that would outlaw abortion, including in cases of rape or incest or where the mother’s health might be impacted short of death, and possibly many forms of birth control, since it would define life at the beginning of conception and not implantation.  He opposes stem cell research. He pushed through a bill that would force doctors to tell women that a fetus feels pain, contrary to scientific consensus, and encouraging them to use fetal anesthesia which can create dangerous complications for the pregnant woman. He supports ““Woman’s Right to Know” legislation, which has been used consistently to misinform women about the risks and consequences of abortion, and mandates that doctors give patients information that is often not scientifically supportable.

But one of his worst positions is his skepticism about the use of condoms in Africa, a practice that saves countless lives when practiced. In an interview with CNN, when asked if he would direct U.S. funds to health programs that provide condoms in Africa, he refused to answer directly, saying “"I’d want to see how that’s used …” Here is how it is used, Huck. You put them on your penis. They help prevent pregnancy and disease, and are the most important tool in use in Africa right now fighting AIDS- not the delusional concept of telling people just don’t have sex. He then goes on to say "And it gives some people a false sense of security thinking that they can still live dangerously and recklessly and that that's going to be a fail safe protection when it obviously is not." The horror of this statement is that condoms are remarkably effective when used, but when you imply that they don’t work all that well, people don’t stop having sex, they stop using condoms, the very thing that can save them.

I’m suspecting that Huckabee was home schooled. What an ignorant douche. And I’d probably have to explain to him what that is used for as well.