On the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall near New Orleans, all the ink was about the progress, and lack thereof, in restoring the city and the rest of the Gulf coast.
We live in an era of failed leadership. Corrupt and incompetent politicians. Thieving CEOs. Priests as pedophiles. Media monopolies. A president’s unpopular, intractable [...]

And why, you might ask, would we at Pensito Review be partying on Aug. 8? To celebrate our founder’s birthday, of course! Happy birthday Jon! Love ya! Mean it!
Please add your own special birthday wishes for Jon in our comments section.

2003 – Millions of people around the world protested the threat of a U.S. war in Iraq. The war began on March 20, 2003.
1959 – My uncle and aunt celebrated the birth of a baby girl who would grow up to be Pensito Review editor Trish. Happy Birthday Trish!
1954 – Matt Groening, creator of The [...]

2007 – Today has been an urban emergency “breaking news” kind of day:

This morning,cable newsers were practically hyperventilating about a mysterious natural gas smell in lower Manhattan.
Mid-day, bomb squads blew up a palette of provisions near a cruise ship in Miami. It tested positive six time for the plasitic explosive, C-4.
A tanker truck began [...]

2004 – A tsunami generated by a 9.0 earthquake in the Indian Ocean killed 280,000 people.
1997 – Lesbian Regan Wolf of Lancaster, South Carolina, was knocked unconscious by three men who brutally beat her, strung her up from her front porch, and painted “Jesus weren’t born for you, faggot.” Despite giving police the identity [...]

1970 – Elvis is in the building: On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley paid a visit to President Richard M. Nixon at the White House in Washington, D.C. The meeting was initiated by Presley, who wrote Nixon a six-page letter requesting a visit with the President and suggesting that he be made a “Federal Agent-at-Large” [...]

2001 – The chairman of the militant Jewish Defense League, Irv Rubin, and an associate, Earl Krugel, were arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up a Los Angeles mosque and the office of an Arab-American congressman. (Rubin died in November 2002, 10 days after what federal officials described as a suicide attempt in jail.) [...]

Armand Hammer, CEO of Occidental Petroleum,a staunch supporter of presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush — and long-suspected Soviet spy — died on December 10, 1990, in Los Angeles. He was 92 years old.
Hammer grew up in New York and received a medical degree from Columbia University, but never practiced medicine. Instead, in the 1920s, [...]

1958: John Birch Society founded. Organized by Robert F. Welch on December 9, 1958, the John Birch Society was an ultra-conservative politcal force in the era after Sen. Joseph McCarthy disgraced the American right by leading an anti-communist crusade that turned into a witch hunt.
The JBS was based in McCarthy’s hometown, Appleton, Wisconsin, and perhaps [...]

1969 – At a news conference on December 8, 1969, Pres. Richard Nixon announced that the war in Vietnam would soon be resolved. Just two month earlier, Nixon had announced at a conference in Midway that the United States would be following a new program he termed “Vietnamization.” Vietnamization has echoes of Pres. [...]