Al Franken's Playboy Problem

Funny man Al Franken is taking heat from Minnesota Republicans over a 2000 "Porn-O-Rama" column he wrote for Playboy.

ABC News today reports that the Minnesota Republican Party on Thursday released a letter, signed by six prominent GOP women, calling on Franken - a former Saturday Night Live star - to apologize for his "demeaning and degrading" article. Franken is the front-runner for the nomination of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL) in Minnesota. If he wins, he will try to oust incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman from his Senate seat. But now, some are questioning whether he has the right "values" that Minnesotans want in their Senate rep.

"The words and descriptions you write about are beyond vulgar," reads the GOP letter. "They demean and degrade women as thoroughly and disrespectfully as any article we have ever seen, and we are horrified to believe that someone running for the U.S. Senate could have written them. This column shows flagrant disregard for women, and an extreme objectification of women as sex objects for your pleasure. While you may attempt to defend your writing as satire, we hardly find anything defensible about your finding humor in your desire to have sex with women or robots that look like women simply to give yourself a good time.

"Denounce this article and apologize immediately."

In the 2000 column, Franken wrote about visit to a made-up sex institute where he takes part in sexual acts with humans and machines. They are explicit, disgusting, and it's disturbing to think someone running for office actually put these words on paper for the world to see. Because I like this gig, I'm not going to directly link to them - you can find them on your own easy enough.
But I will say that one blog gleefully posting the latest on the Franken flop is "Minnesota Democrats Exposed," a political blog created by former Republican Party researcher Michael Brodkorb. He has been an apparent thorn in Franken's side, broadsiding the campaign with news that Franken owed $25,000 to the State of New York for not paying workers' compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California. The reports led to Franken hiring new financial advisers to take stock of his money situation.

The New York Times reports on how many Minnesota Democrats are writing Brodkorb off as a mere mouthpiece for the GOP trying to utilize back-alley tactics. But the paper also details the partisan ping-pong going on between various blogs as they try to dig up dirt on the candidates. Hmmm, wonder if there's anything in Coleman's closet that can rival a Playboy column about Sexbots...

The Star Tribune, meanwhile, details Franken's relationship with Playboy. CEO Christie Hefner on Monday night held a campaign fundraiser at her Chicago home for Franken. (Just to be fair, the Tribune also notes that DFLers want Coleman to give up nearly $10,000 his campaign received from the political-action committee and employees of a lobbying firm that represented Myanmar's military regime.)