OPINION
Sean Penn has shown up in New Orleans to save the day!
Spicoli showed up overnight with a boat to personally go rescue stranded children in New Orleans, but the thing sprung a leak and didn't get far.
He's just trying to help out The Children. Why do you hate The Children so much Al? It's a subtle distinction. It's not The Children in general that I feel contempt for, but the 45 year old manchild incompetently trying to commandeer our nation's worst natural disaster for a cheap public relations ploy.
For starters, he's showing up WAY late to be out on this kind of rescue mission, and has no apparent connection to organized rescue efforts. He just showed up with his entourage and a personal photographer with the apparent intent of just wandering around looking for a good photo op.
Did I mention that he shows up for a rescue mission with a PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHER? Such a person would be not just useless, but obviously a positive hindrance- if your goal was helping out hurricane victims. Of course, if your goal was just to put on an act for the cameras and convince everyone that you're a HERO, this deal makes more sense.
You can easily imagine the photo that he was hoping for. Imagine Sean Penn standing in a boat with a Jesus look on his face, cradling a freshly rescued dirty, wet and miserable child lovingly in his arms- preferably a brown or black one.
Instead, the boat sprang a leak near immediately, and the image we end up with is Penn with his little red plastic cup frantically trying to bail the water out of his toy boat.
On the plus side, at least no real emergency response crews had to stop their work to go rescue the little boy out playing "hero" in the water.
Sean Penn at Cannes Film Festival, 2000.

Academy Award winning actor and political activist Sean Penn has just thrown his support in the 2008 US Presidential election behind 
Dennis Kucinich.

In a San Francisco speech described by his PR people as "a blistering indictment of political leaders and an impassioned endorsement of Presidential proportions," Penn threw his support behind the lesser known Democratic candidate.

The Kucinich campaign did not vet the speech.



Other recent celebrity endorsements in the race include Oprah Winfrey for Barack Obama, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling for John McCain, Harry Belafonte endorsed John Edwards, and both 50 Cent and Barbra Streisand behind Hillary Clinton. Chuck Norris has backed Mike Huckabee in a high profile, comedic endorsement ad.

Penn first became politically active in October 2002, when he spent $56,000 on a full-page ad in the ''Washington Post'', asking President George W. Bush to end "a cycle of violence". He visited Iraq briefly in December of that year, Iran in 2005 as a journalist, and met with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez for two hours in 2007.

Penn went to New Orleans to "aid rescue workers" after Hurricane Katrina; many questioned how much of a liability an untrained worker, especially when his boat sprang a leak, would be. One website commented "just showed up with his entourage and a personal photographer with the apparent intent of just wandering around looking for a good photo op."