Free Republic

Hugh Hefner, the 81-year-old Playboy magnate, is again rumored to be having a baby with his main squeeze, 27-year-old Holly Madison. Please, say it isn't so! Dlisted reports that Holly and the rest of the gang attended the Monte Carlo TV Festival last week...and not only wore figure concealing outfits...but also refused booze. Oh my!

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is seeking to become the first woman president, and a man who has published countless pictures of naked women is pitching in for her White House bid. Hugh Hefner, the founder of the Playboy Enterprises empire, is among the many celebrities who have picked their favorite candidate to succeed President Bush in 2009. Hefner contributed $2,300 (the maximum allowed in the primary) to Clinton’s campaign on March 28, identifying his occupation on the fundraiser form as “editor-in-chief” of Playboy magazine. Hefner has given thousands to Democrats over the years, including $2,000 to Sen. John Kerry...

Hugh Hefner is set to marry his favourite girlfriend Holly Madison. Playboy mogul Hugh - who shares his infamous mansion with Holly and two other girlfriends, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson - is now reportedly planning to make Holly his wife. The wedding - which will be 80-year-old Hugh's third - will be aired on reality TV show 'The Girls Next Door' - which depicts life at the Playboy Mansion. A source told the New York Post newspaper: "This is very secret, but the word is 'yes.' Hef has decided he will marry Holly, and he wants it for his...

SCIENTISTS are poised to press ahead with controversial plans to create hybrid human and rabbit embryos. It emerged yesterday that three British teams - including one led by Professor Ian Wilmut at Edinburgh University - are due this month to seek licences from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority allowing them to create embryos that are 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit. The scientists are also looking at the possibility of creating similar "chimera" embryos by mixing human and cow genes. The aim is to find a ready source of "human" embryonic stem cells without the ethical...

The scholar who exposed fraud and exploitation in the work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is blowing the whistle on the E! cable channel's new "reality" show about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends. Judith Reisman, author of "Kinsey: Crime and Consequences" and a soon-to-be-released new title, "Kinsey's Attic: How One Man's Pathology Changed the World," says "Girls Next Door" is Hollywood's latest and boldest attempt to normalize pornography in our culture. The author, who served as a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department on obscenity issues, is angry the network is investing so much time in...

Hugh Hefner is pushing 80, and he's sired four children - one of whom, Christie, runs Playboy Enterprises - but he sounds ready to spawn again. "Holly and I have talked about that," Hef told me yesterday as he held forth in his trademark red velvet smoking jacket in a bedroom at the Peninsula Hotel. "I wouldn't reject it out of hand. I certainly think it's possible." As for grownups David and Christie, from Hef's first marriage, and teenagers Marston and Cooper, from his second, they won't be consulted. "It's not a committee decision," Hef said. Holly is 25-year-old Holly...

It is not often that I commend the writings of a liberation theologian. And I'm not about to do so now, at least not in totality. But Native American liberationist Vive Deloria's thirtieth anniversary edition of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion has some important insights about the state of mainline Protestantism. Deloria, in the midst of the typical revisionist proposals for Christian theology, offers the idea that Hugh Hefner should be pronounced "Protestant saint of the century." This is because, he suggests, of the ways in which the mainline bureaucracies have embraced "almost every kind of sexual...

NEW YORK — Wannabes finally have a chance to digitally mingle with celebrities and sexpots at the most infamous house in North America thanks to the release of Playboy's first video game, "Playboy: The Mansion." In "The Sims"-like game, which hit stores Jan. 25, players don the pajamas of Playboy impresario Hugh Hefner and are tasked with building the Playboy empire by developing contacts, keeping the bunnies happy, furnishing the mansion and, of course, throwing lavish parties.

I am starting a grammar thread at the behest of Xenalyte and TheMom. Post your most irritating pet peeves of grammar or usage here.

Now that Britney Spears is a single woman again, she already has at least one potential beau: Hugh Hefner. The 77-year-old Playboy founder said he's interested in adding the pop singer to his bevy of beautiful blonde girlfriends. "Britney would make a great girlfriend," Hefner told Us Weekly magazine for its Jan. 19 issue. "Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now," he said. "I think it's related to those early movies that had such a great influence on me when I was a kid." Hefner said he'd also like to...

For the past weeks, the media have been gaga over the 50th anniversary of Playboy magazine and the "Playboy philosophy," whose guru, Hugh Hefner, began to mainstream pornography and de-couple sex from a committed marital relationship. What interested me most about this latest excuse to run pictures of almost naked women on television and of the 77-year-old Hugh Hefner in his silk pajamas, surrounded by surgically enhanced women young enough to be his great-granddaughters, was the usual media complicity in promoting a one-sided and incomplete picture of the "free love" generation (which, as it turned out, was neither free nor...

     Hugh Hefner’s stroke was the fault of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell? During a taped interview with Playboy founder High Hefner on Thursday’s Today to mark the magazine’s 50th anniversary, Matt Lauer reminded him of the days after Reagan’s inauguration: "I think you refer to it as we went through in this country a period of 'sexual McCarthyism.’" After Hefner identified Reagan and the Moral Majority as threats to him, Lauer, over footage of Jerry Falwell and anti-pornography protestors, recalled: "The backlash against Playboy was expensive. Hefner and the magazine were marginalized. By mid-decade he suffered a stroke."     ...

Christianity Today, December 2003 Hugh Hefner's Hollow VictoryHow the Playboy magnate won the culture war, lost his soul, and left us with a mess to clean up. By Read Mercer Schuchardt This month marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Playboy magazine, which some proclaim as a cultural watershed for a new liberation. As a young recipient of this cultural inheritance, Read Mercer Schuchardt, founder of cleave: The Counter Agency, begs to differ. The following article originally appeared in the Gen-x magazine re:generation quarterly, and is reprinted with permission. One of the occupational hazards of Christian cultural analysis is...

April 8, 2002 Cybersmut and Debt Undermine Penthouse By DAVID CARR ob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, fought for decades to introduce pornography to mainstream audiences. In succeeding, he may have built a gallows for his once hugely successful magazine. Pornographic images of every bent are now just a click away on the Web, often at no charge, and Penthouse, which once sold almost five million copies a month, now has a circulation of 650,000. The auditors of Mr. Guccione's debt-ridden company, General Media, the parent of Penthouse and affiliated enterprises, stated in its annual report that the company would...