A recent McCain campaign quote:

In the Senate, Barack Obama has voted in lockstep with President George W. Bush nearly half the time.

That’s right! Every single vote by Barack Obama was with President Bush, except for most of them! While John McCain voted out of lockstep with President Bush a whopping 5% of the time!

I swear to god, you can’t make this crap up.

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When Bob Schieffer hailed John McCain as a man of character because he was shot down over Vietnam, Wesley Clark (after having spent a few minutes praising McCain as a “hero”) said that that did not qualify McCain for president; that was without a doubt not swift-boating, no matter what the wingnuts want to claim.

The latest book by noted sleaze merchant James Corsi, however, is the epitome of swift-boating–not because it was by a former associate of Obama’s who claimed to know him. a usual key ingredient in the definition. It is swift-boating because the author of the book is the original swift-boater himself, and the book carries the signature quality of being jam-packed with errors, innuendo, and mostly bald-faced lies. This time, not even the media will give this book any credibility, but that won’t stop the Republicans from trying to float a “popular” campaign based on it.

The book will premier as #1 on the New York Times best-seller list (one can only assume the editors had to swallow hard when labeling it as “non-fiction”), but not because people are buying it–rather because right-wing organizations are buying it in bulk quantities likely for no better reason than to artificially put it on the “best-seller” list and so inflate the book’s cache with the mindlessly-inclined. McCain’s quip on the book: “You gotta keep your sense of humor.” Yeah, right–like he’d react better if a book of the same caliber on him came out. Maybe he’d like to comment on this YouTube commercial–slimy, even though factually accurate.

This is the essence of the conservative run for the presidency: don’t just lie, but lie about the lies. Yet another reason not to vote Republican–unless you would like this kind of thing to define your personal politics.

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Bush’s frat-boy persona appears to resurface:

But hey, don’t worry; he’s only representing the United States of America at the Olympics, that’s all. Figures that of all of the sports he would choose to dive into, it’d be women’s beach volleyball. Me, I like the food stains on his shirt. Classy.

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Top headline today:

Bush Says Dems to Blame for High Gas Prices

Do I even need to explain how utterly stupid this claim is? I could spend an hour explaining in gory detail how the basic points in Bush’s argument are so asinine as to be mind-boggling. Instead I shall simply snort in derision and move on.

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The music labels are at it again, this time with all-new but oh-so-familiar dizzying heights of greed. This time: Apple wants to add the ability to purchase downloadable music over the iPhone via a 3G broadband connection. The stupid part: the music labels want to charge more for that.

You got it: download a song via iTunes on your computer, you pay one price; download the same song on your iPhone, you pay a premium.

Why? Because they can. At least with ringtones, there’s a premise, albeit a phony one, for charging extra: the music is used in a significantly different way. Your phone rings, it uses the song–and if I understand things right, you can set a different song depending on who calls. It’s still highway robbery, as the spiffy part is in the software modification to link caller ID to change the sound file used to designate a ring, not in the actual music file itself, which you might already own anyway. But the music labels demand the money, so you pay more, even though it’s only a partial use of the song–and even though Apple charges an extra 99 cents for the ringtone, that is actually a low price: ringtones can cost a few bucks on other services.

But for downloading a song over your phone you pay extra? That’s beyond greedy, it’s flat-out indescribable. There is not even a phony premise for charging more for songs you download over a telephone connection, none. The only thing I can think of is that you might get the sudden urge to hear a song so badly that you can’t wait to get to a computer. And when was the last time that happened?

No wonder Apple is fighting it: the premium would reduce the feature to a seldom-used luxury, as most people would see it for what it is: a rip-off. A few people would use it, paying the extra money to look or feel cool, but it would probably fall off rapidly once they realized that others were laughing at them.

I know that the idea in economics is to charge what the market will bear, but there is a more fundamental principle, one might even call it a moral one: you charge for services rendered. If you do not extra work, you are not paid for it. Yes, I know, not the real world, but the moral pricing principle has an effect on what people perceive. Like charging more for bottled tap water than you pay for gasoline, or paying more for a black MacBook than a white MacBook, you’re paying more for an idea than for actual resources or effort. In some cases, it works, but even when it does, people who see through it recognize the dishonesty. Downloading music over a cell phone costs the record companies not one fraction of a penny more than it does over a computer connection. They just see the opportunity to charge more, figure people are stupid enough to do it, so there it is. Economics in action.

Me? Don’t ever count on me using that service. And though I wouldn’t mind using certain ringtones, I’m not going to do it if I have to pay more; instead, I’ll jailbreak the phone and use the music I already own in any damned way I please. As far as I’m concerned, premiums for ringtones and cell phone downloads are a sucker tax. Some people say that lottery tickets are a tax on stupidity, but at least with lottery tickets, you’re buying the ability to add a bit of excitement to your fantasies of wealth; with cell phone music premiums, you’re just a sucker.

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As much as Bush & McCain made fools of themselves in the last week, nothing they did could touch the inappropriate, hypocritical, bullying remarks Bush made addressing the Knesset to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary of nationhood. Bush not only violated the general protocols that say you don’t use foreign podiums nor official appearances at major events to toss out political attacks, he also got his facts wrong and made a baldly hypocritical accusation against Barack Obama:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ”Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.“ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Oh, where to start. First of all, Bush apparently is not aware of what the word “appeasement” means. In short, it means to “pacify or placate someone by acceding to their demands.” Not talking to them–giving in to them. If Bush thinks that talking to someone is the same as appeasing him, then he has just accused Ronald Reagan, not to mention countless other American leaders, of being filthy appeasers.

Second, Bush is clearly trying to attack Barack Obama here. There is no parsing necessary to figure that out: Bush uses the weasel words “some seem to believe,” which he routinely uses when he wants to refer to Democrats without being held responsible. It is clear who he is talking about–Obama is the only prominent politician currently in the spotlight for talks with countries like Iran and Syria (though he balks at Hamas). Bush claimed he was not attacking Obama specifically, but with Obama the only prominent voice, and with the White House press secretary letting slip that she was “not going to get into ‘08 politics” in reference to Bush’s remarks, it appears clear to just about everyone on the planet that this is exactly what Bush was trying to do. If, by some wild chance, Bush’s remarks had no relation at all to Obama, the remark was still incredibly inappropriate because any rational observer would have instantly made that connection–as just about every observer, including most right-wingers gleeful at high-level Obama attacks, immediately saw.

Not to mention that, as Laura Rozen points out, Bush has–by his own definition–been a serial “appeaser”:

Beyond the fact that Bush’s own administration has repeatedly offered to negotiate with Tehran should Iran suspend uranium enrichment, and that his top diplomat in Iraq has talked with his Iranian counterparts, as well as his former ambassador to Afghanistan, both with the White House blessing, as well as the ongoing negotiations with Pyongyang, Libya, and the Syrian deputy foreign minister’s visit to Annapolis; beyond those recent demonstrated exceptions in action to Bush’s rhetoric (I guess the word for it is “hypocrisy”): It’s also worth pointing out, as several Israeli security officials and political observers have recently done to me here, a bit of recent history Bush neglected to mention at Israel’s parliament. That Israel and the Palestinian Authority have chiefly him to thank for Hamas having a degree of political legitimacy it otherwise would not have had. After all, they point out, it was the Bush administration that “twisted the arm” of Israeli and Palestinian leaders against considerable resistance and skepticism on their part to allow the Palestinian militant group Hamas to run in 2006 Palestinian elections that Hamas won — an outcome to its policy interventions that the Bush administration once again failed to anticipate.

So, not only did Bush approve of “appeasement” with many “terrorist and radicals,” but his own ham-handed and actual appeasement to Hamas in 2006 allowed them to win their current place in power.

Apparently fearing that he would be left out of the publicity that Bush generated, McCain took the opportunity to take an “unrelated” potshot at Obama:

Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio, McCain said he took the White House at its word, but then he weighed into the spat himself, saying: “This does bring up an issue that we will be discussing with the American people, and that is, why does Barack Obama, Senator Obama, want to sit down with a state sponsor of terrorism?”

Asked if Obama was an appeaser, McCain said Obama must explain why he wants to talk with leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and added that Obama’s position was a serious error. “It shows naivete and inexperience and lack of judgment to say that he wants to sit down across the table from an individual who leads a country that says Israel is a stinking corpse, that is dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel. My question is, what does he want to talk about?”

The hypocrisy: Not only has Obama insisted that he would not speak to Hamas, John McCain has said that he would. While McCain seems to have forgotten that he favored talks with Hamas, the reporter who interviewed him has not:

RUBIN: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”

McCAIN: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”

APPEASER!!! So, is this a flip-flop? Or hypocrisy? Could be both. Video of the interview:

It is the height of hypocrisy for John McCain to deliver a lofty speech about civility and bipartisanship in the morning and then embrace George Bush’s disgraceful political attack in the afternoon. Instead of delivering meaningful change, John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s irresponsible and failed Iran policy by refusing to engage in tough, direct diplomacy like Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan have done.

McCain’s lapdog Leiberman later joined the fray, backing Bush and McCain, making for a perfect McBush day.

UPDATE: CNN has the story, that White House officials privately confirmed Bush’s statements were about Obama:

The president did not name Sen. Barack Obama or any other Democrat, but White House aides privately acknowledged to CNN that the remarks were aimed at the presidential candidate and others in his party.

Just confirming what we all already knew.

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Man.

I’m going to blog more on this later, but Bush & McCain really outdid themselves today with sheer idiocy and hypocrisy.

Really. Imagine Bill Clinton, in mid-2000, going to Israel and comparing then-Governor Bush with Hitler appeasers. Republicans would have gone nuclear with rage, not the least of which would have been at the idea of an American president going overseas and using a foreign podium to slam another American politician.

And then there’s McCain, whose big day was trounced on by Bush’s speech. Personally, I think Bush did McCain a favor by eclipsing his “Magic Pony” speech, in which he’s finishing his first term in office and he presides over a world of winsome faeries and prancing unicorns. All McCain could do in Bush’s shadow was to agree that that nasty Obama man was indeed an appeaser.

And then the wingnuts, apparently attracted to stupidity light moths to flame, chimed in. Reserving further comment for later, I will simply let you watch Chris Matthews utterly annihilate the right-wing talking head as an unimaginably blustering moron. It is literally breathtaking.

Some days you can be so thoroughly stupid that even your pals in the media come out and call you a laughable moron.

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This is starting to become a habit within the GOP: see if you can take words spoken by Obama, take them out of context, claim they mean something they clearly did not, then smear him with it. Nothing new; they did it all the time with Gore. But they hadn’t done i as much, while Hillary was there to do it for them. Now that Obama’s the nominee in all but name, they’re starting the drumbeat of lies and smears. In just the last few days, McCain did this with Obama’s remark that McCain had “lost his bearings” in terms of McCain’s breaking his promise to keep a clean campaign; they claimed that Obama had made a crack about McCain’s age, which he clearly did not.

Now they’re at it again. Obama made a remark about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling it “a constant wound, a constant sore,” noting that the conflict “infects our foreign policy.” Republicans very dishonestly interpreted it to mean that Israel is a “constant sore.” Here is the exchange:

JG: What do you make of Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that Israel resembles an apartheid state?

BO: I strongly reject the characterization. Israel is a vibrant democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and there’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal. It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.

JG: If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?

BO: What I will say is what I’ve said previously. Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.

Right-wingers are very dishonestly “misunderstanding” Obama, with GOP leaders attacking Obama over the imagined slight, bloggers insisting that he’s flagrantly insulting Israel:

Obama partisans are claiming that he said that the Midle East [sic] conflict is a constant sore. But quite clearly the antecedent to “this constant wound, that this constant sore” in the question is “Israel.” Perhaps the Harvard-trained lawyer who tells us that words are important wants us to believe he was just sloppy. Or maybe words don’t matter when he doesn’t want them to?

What dishonesty. In their quotes, they only cite the one paragraph by Obama, completely omitting the preceding paragraphs which lay down the understood subject as the conflict; as the Washington Post pointed out:

It is pretty clear from this passage that Obama is not calling Israel a “constant wound.” Indeed, he specifically says “no, no, no” when asked if Israel is a drag on America’s international reputation. He is referring to the overall Israeli-Palestinian problem, including continued Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

Goldberg describes Boehner’s characterization of his interview with Obama as “mendacious, duplicitous, gross, and comically refutable.”

The thing is, this is so easy to understand it’s not even funny. Just look at the one paragraph in context; pay attention to the words I have highlighted in bold:

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

If you truly believe that the “constant wound, constant sore” is in fact the state of Israel, then you get in trouble in the very next sentence, where Obama says the very same thing is a problem that “Israel has a security interest in solving.” If, as the bloggers and Republican leaders Boehner and Cantor claim, Obama was referring to Israel itself as the “constant sore,” then the trailing sentence spoken by Obama would have to be read as, “Israel has a security interest in solving Israel.” Which is a stupid assertion to make.

Fortunately, the media seems more inclined to note that this obvious lie is indeed a lie.

So, what’s next? Probably won’t have to wait long.

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In Nagoya today, a man was arrested after dousing himself with kerosene. The police kept asking him to change out of his clothes, but he refused. The police didn’t seem capable of getting rid of the kerosene by either removing his clothing by coercion or force, or by shoving him into a shower and washing the stuff off of him.

Instead, they gave him cigarettes and a lighter.

Oh, I’m sorry, I misreported that. According to the news source, the man, who was being held in police custody, somehow “gained access to a lighter.”

Surprisingly, the man caught on fire.

Who could have seen that coming?

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In response to how Burma handled a cyclone (hurricane) which devastated the country:

Laura Bush condemned the military government in Burma yesterday for its “inept” response to a deadly weekend cyclone, marking an unusual foray by the president’s spouse into a high-profile foreign policy crisis. …

“Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path,” she said. “The response to this cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failures to meet its people’s basic needs.”

Yes, because if there were ever a hurricane that could hit the U.S. in a devastating fashion, the Bush administration would be doing everything it, uh… I mean, it would be ready days in advance to, um… that is, it would never be “inept” about, er….

I mean, really. Seriously. What the hell was she thinking? I can only presume that the reason Laura Bush was tapped to send this message is because of all the people associated with the Bush administration, she was perhaps seen as the least associated with the Katrina debacle.

In other words, yet another brilliant PR move by the Bush administration.

And, predictably, the “Liberal Media™” was completely silent concerning the irony.

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I know we shouldn’t respond to liberal-baiting by right-wing media loons, but I think that in this election season, there is a value to pointing out to people who consider themselves ordinary Americans exactly how sick and depraved the conservative side of things can get.

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh, while playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”–an obvious, racist reference to Hillary winning the Democratic nomination–stated on air that he dreams of, hopes for race riots in Denver to sink the chances for a Democratic win in November.

The dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and we have a replay of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s that’s the objective here. … Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.

The fact that he called the riots an “objective” is what spurred many to understand that he was calling for, trying to instigate riots; with his “Operation: Chaos” history, the impression was that Dittoheads would descend upon Denver and spark the riots themselves, then blame blacks and Democrats for the violence. Rush denied this, insisting that he only expected blacks to riot and prayed for such an outcome, not that he would try to instigate such an outcome (which, after all, would be a felony offense).

When a caller confronted him with this the next day, he claimed that his conduct on the show demonstrated “nothing but love, care and concern for people,” then proceeded to call the woman he was talking to a “mush head.” Defending himself on his racist-toned Denver riot fantasy, he claimed that it was Al Sharpton who was reprehensible and responsible:

The fact is that the Democrat Party has members in it that have already said, ‘There will be riots,’ or something to that effect. Al Sharpton. He was throwing down the gauntlet to the superdelegates: ‘You take this election away from Barack Obama, and there’s gonna be trouble. There’s going to be trouble in Denver.’

Because, as we all know, if Al Sharpton warns of “trouble in Denver,” that has to mean race riots and nothing else, like a contested convention that could be harmful to the party. Reportedly, after making that statement, Sharpton then went straight to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and ordered an “M.F.’ing iced tea.”

I searched the web for any independent source of the Sharpton quote, and could find nothing at all. Rush either picked up on some stealth report of Sharpton’s words, or twisted Sharpton’s words so far out of context that it would not be possible to find the actual quote, or just made up the attribution out of whole cloth.

Whatever the case, whether Sharpton said there would be trouble or not, Limbaugh is showing the same propensity he did when he jumped on an L.A. Times article about the film archetype “magic negro” to launch a weeklong racial tirade against Sharpton and Obama. The pattern is to take a marginal statement out of the media and use it as cover for allowing his racist attitudes to take flight. It’s not him who is racist, you see–he’s just commenting on racial matters that someone else brought up.

Remember also that Limbaugh, while outrageous, is not some fringe loon–he popularly represents a mainstream Republican caucus. If you’re considering voting Republican, consider carefully the company you keep.

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You know how the RIAA whines about how downloading music of the Internet is really hurting the artists? How it’s not so much about the greedy, parasitic corporate suits as it is about the struggling, bona-fide musicians who are just trying to get by–except for all you lousy, stinking criminals who keep stealing their music and taking food out of starving artists’ mouths? And so forth and yadda yadda yadda.

Well, despite the fact that the musicians do all the work, spilling their hearts into the music, writing and arranging and performing, the RIAA pays them a pittance–and now wants to cut that even further. Despite the fact that digital downloads and digital streaming costs far less to distribute than traditional CDs, the RIAA thinks that current royalties paid for a music track (now at 9 cents) is much too high. They want to pay less than that. For a downloaded track, the songwriters are asking for 15 cents; the RIAA wants to cut the current rate by about half, down to 5 cents.

For streaming music–aka Internet radio–the artists want 12.5% of the money made. The RIAA: take 0.6% and be happy with our extreme generosity. Why? Because, they say, streaming music is like radio and artists don’t deserve any of that revenue. Which is full of it, because radio doesn’t pay, last I checked, while streaming music now does. The RIAA wants all the money made from streaming music, and wants to give the artists squat.

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Yes, this has already been bouncing around the net quite a bit since Slate published the story (based on a book by their writer Jacob Weisberg) and Harper’s picked it up as well, but the punch line is so funny that it bears yet another re-telling on a blog, just in case somebody here hasn’t seen it yet.

Apparently, when Dubya was governor in Texas, he had a painting mounted on the wall of his office. The painting depicted a horseman riding up a hillside, with others not so far behind him. Here’s the image:

Bush was awed, moved, and inspired by the portrait, so much so, that he sent a memo to his “hard-working staff” to come to his office and view the painting. Here’s the memo text:

STATE OF TEXAS
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR

GEORGE W. BUSH
GOVERNOR

MEMORANDUM

TO: Hard Working Staff Members
FROM: Governor
DATE: April 3, 1995

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission.

My very close personal friend from Midland, Joe. J. O’Neill, III, recently loaned me a portrait entitled “A Charge to Keep” by W.H.D. Koerner. This beautiful painting will hang on my wall for the next four years.

The reason I bring this up is that the painting is based upon the Charles Wesley hymn “A Charge to Keep I Have”. I am particularly impressed by the second verse of this hymn. The second verse goes like this:

“To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill;
O may it all my powers engage to do my Master’s will”

This is our mission. This verse captures our spirit.

Joe was inspired to make this generous loan during the church service preceding the inaugural ceremonies. It was in this church service when we sang the hymn “A Charge to Keep I Have”.

When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for your service to our State. God Bless Texas!

Weisberg notes, “Bush identified with the lead rider, whom he took to be a kind of Christian cowboy, an embodiment of indomitable vigor, courage, and moral clarity.”

When elected president, Bush took the painting with him to the White House, and hung it in the Oval Office, adding to and expanding the tale of the painting; in 2004, Bush said:

There’s a painting on the wall in the Oval Office that shows a horseman charging up a steep cliff, and there are at least two other horsemen following. It’s a Western scene by a guy named W.H.S. Koerner called “A Charge to Keep.” It’s on loan, by the way, from a guy named Joe O’Neill in Midland, Texas. He was the person, he and his wife Jan, introduced — reintroduced me and Laura in his backyard in July of 1977. Four months later, we were married. So he’s got a — I’m a decision-maker and I can make good decisions. (Applause.)

And so we sang this hymn — this is a long story trying to get to your answer. (Laughter.) This is not a filibuster. (Laughter.) That’s a Senate term — particularly on good judges. (Applause.) The hymn was sung at my first inaugural church service as governor. Laura and I are Methodists. One of the Wesley boys wrote the hymn. The painting is based upon the hymn called, “A Charge to Keep.” I have. The hymn talks about serving something greater than yourself in life. I — which I try to do, as best as I possibly can.

Bush continued to keep the painting in the Oval Office, admiring it and drawing inspiration. In 2007, Sidney Blumenthal noted:

Bush takes special pride in pointing out two paintings he has hung that highlight his motives and legacy. He consciously placed these pictures in the Oval Office at the beginning of his tenure to serve as prescient cultural markers. “The Texas paintings are on the wall because that’s where I’m from and where I’m going,” he says.

One of them, by little-known painter and illustrator William Henry Dethlef Koerner, titled “A Charge to Keep,” depicts a hatless cowboy followed by two other riders galloping up a hill. Their faces are intent as they pursue some quarry in the distance that cannot be seen by others. Or are they being chased? “I love it,” Bush said, further explaining his intimate feeling for the painting to reporters and editors of the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper. He offered his interpretation: “He’s a determined horseman, a very difficult trail. And you know at least two people are following him, and maybe a thousand.” Bush added that the painting is “based” on an old hymn. “And the hymn talks about serving the Almighty. So it speaks to me personally.” When he was governor of Texas and the painting hung in his office, Bush wrote a note of explanation to his staff: “This is us.”

So, there’s the set-up. Almost thirteen years ago, Bush receives a painting and is taken in by it, seeing in the brushstrokes a reflection of himself. This, he decides, is what I am. This is my mission. This striking horseman epitomizes my own Texas spirit, my commitment to God and country. I will be that horseman, I will take his mission on to be my own, to become my calling to fulfill.

The punch line: Koerner did not paint a rugged horseman riding to spread the word of god. Koerner painted the man as a horse thief fleeing a lynch mob.

The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

That explains a lot.

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The Wall Street Journal Report is on the TV right now. The hosts just said, “Happy Holidays”! They hate Christmas! Alert Bill O’Reilly!

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There’s a story getting play on TV news and around the Internet about a fuzzy blue shape that appeared on a security monitor tape at a gas station in Parma, Ohio. Awed witnesses who saw the video were convinced they were seeing angels or a ghost, and started talking about Indian burial grounds and such stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if a sizable chunk of the American population isn’t terminally stupid. A quick look at the video makes it so perfectly clear that it’s a bug crawling on the camera lens that the reactions these people display look pitifully clueless. It’s a testament to how people will so quickly believe what their superstitions lead them to. I mean, images of the Virgin Mary are stupid enough, but this?

And it’s not the first time. This June, a security camera outside a Santa Fe courthouse that showed what to me was clearly a small spider crawling across the lens–but again, people broke out in hysteria, claiming that it was a ghost or something. Of course, it was just a bug.

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A man in Michigan apparently knew so little about gun safety that he somehow let his eight-year-old son walk off unsupervised with a handgun.

The unsurprising tragedy: the eight-year-old shot his 6-year-old sister in the abdomen. She is now in critical condition.

The twist: the father and owner of the weapon is an NRA-certified firearms instructor.

This causes me to question something I had always taken for granted. I had always heard and had never questioned the claim that, whatever the NRA’s stance is on gun control or legally-mandated safety training, the NRA’s own gun safety standards are top-notch. Now, of course, this one guy does not represent all of the NRA, and he might well be a well-qualified gun safety instructor; for all we know, a different adult left the weapon out in the open.

Still, it makes me wonder: are the NRA safety standards as high as they are supposed to be? Or are they just as shoddy as the NRA’s logical standards when it comes to debating various gun facts?

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Reading web sites like FARK or Dave Barry’s blog, you can always find a bunch of really bizarre stuff that’s happening around the world.

Like this story from Nottingham, England, where a mother wanted to arrange a surprising incident for her son on his 16th birthday. So she hired the services of a costumed messenger service to have a guy in a gorilla suit chase him around his drama classroom. The mother even came to school before the event, gave her son’s drama teacher a video camera and asked her to tape her son’s reactions. The twist? The service got the booking mixed up and sent a female stripper in a policewoman’s outfit instead. Believing that the mother knew what it was all about, the teacher videotaped as her student was led around the classroom on all fours by the stripper as she whipped him 16 times, once for each year. The teacher was so stunned that she didn’t stop it–not, at least, until the stripper got down to a bra and panties and asked the boy to rub cream on her ass.

Less funny but also on the topic of moms, boys, and sex, is a story about how a parent can get arrested and convicted of a crime… for telling her teenaged sons about sex. True, she went a bit farther than most parents do; she described some of her own sexual experiences, explained what oral sex was, and showed them a sex toy. For this, she was arrested for “exposing a child to harmful descriptions,” which can be punished with up to three years in prison. The charges were lowered to a misdemeanor “exposing a child to harmful material,” punished with one year of probation and counseling. But it begs the question, where is the line where the state can dictate to a parent what is healthy for a teenage boy to know and what is not?

Here’s a story of a 72-year-old woman who had to pay two tickets for parking in a handicapped zone. She is handicapped, but forgot her placard on those occasions. One would think that all she would have to do would be to show up in court, show her certification, and be excused. But she was told that to appeal the case, she’d have to pay a non-refundable fee more than the cost of the two tickets. Your bureaucracy at work.

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the state government has mandated a “moment of silence” to be observed in public schools. The stated rationale is that the moment of silence will “help teachers control the classroom, keep boisterous students calm and give students a chance to reflect before the school day.” Um, yeah, right. No chance that it is a thinly disguised public schoolroom prayer. Fortunately, at least one school is not having any of that, and is refusing to institute it.

And finally, here’s a story that maybe Paul can corroborate: some airlines are intentionally underfueling their planes so as to save cost on jet fuel. If you give a plane a full load of fuel when it does not need that much to get to its destination, it will use more fuel than is necessary because it has to schlep around the extra weight. Give the aircraft just enough to get where it’s going, and it will require less fuel overall. The problem? Some planes are given so little reserve fuel that they are arriving at their destinations with dry tanks–sometimes even declaring emergencies on arrival. They must land immediately or they will run out of fuel and crash. Lovely.

Stumble it!

There is a guy out there who grabbed some tech-media attention out there when he got a Zune tattoo. The clear consensus was that he had serious issues if he (a) was going to tattoo a corporate logo permanently onto his body, and (b) seriously, dude, a Zune?? Headlines like “Area Man Gets More Tattoos, Fewer Dates” started popping up as the guy added a second, and then a third Zune tattoo (“Welcome to the Social,” pictured at right), likely fueled on by the attention.

Back in June, it was reported that Microsoft had found out about the guy and had decided to fly him out to Redmond for the “star treatment.” However, as far as I can tell, the only source of that info was the tattoo guy himself; at the end of the discussion board thread where he announced it, there was a note that the trip had been “delayed,” and no other information that I can find exists about any such event. Which suggests that either Microsoft sent out a feeler but then cancelled when they realized how bad it all looked, or the tattoo guy just made the whole thing up.

Well, apparently he needs more attention (though who wants attention when 99% of it is saying how big a loser you are?), as he now claims that he intends to legally change his name to “Microsoft Zune.”

There really isn’t that much to say beyond, (a) this guy needs attention from professionally trained people, and/or (b) he needs to have his Internet connection disabled before he hurts himself or those around him. There are limits to fanboy-ism. Not to mention bad taste.

Stumble it!

Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC Universal, more or less admitted that he wants to charge you a lot more for listening to music and watching TV shows over the Internet:

“We know that Apple has destroyed the music business – in terms of pricing – and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side,” Mr Zucker said at a breakfast hosted by Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications.

NBC Universal recently snubbed Apple by not only pulling its TV selection from the iTunes Store and instead offering it via Amazon.com’s Unbox service, but it also started offering its music catalog on Amazon’s download service in the form of high-quality DRM-free tracks selling at 89 cents apiece, while pulling out of long-term music sales with Apple.

All the content producers have been claiming that they want more “flexibility” in their pricing, with the ability to “charge less” for some content, always emphasizing the “value” to the consumer. Well, it certainly seems like that’s what they’re trying to do–DRM-free songs at 256kbps for 89 cents? Free TV shows with just some advertising thrown in?

The thing is, Zucker laid out his game plan in his statement today: Apple “destroyed” the music biz by establishing a dollar-per-track pricing system that everyone now expects; consumers won’t go for $2 or more for a song any more, meaning that Zucker and his pals will have to settle for merely exorbitant profits instead of massively obscene profits, while stiffing the artists.

But there’s hope for TV and movies, Zucker is saying: Apple hasn’t won out that market yet, so there’s hope that we can charge $3, or maybe $5 per TV show!

So why aren’t they doing it already? What’s with the idea of selling better-quality songs for less, or TV shows at the same price or for free with ads? To destroy Apple’s grip on the market, of course. And that’s the danger of going over to Unbox or other services right now: do that, and you are more or less clicking on a check box next to the statement “I accept these terms”–but when you read the terms, they say that you agree to buying slightly cheaper stuff today in exchange for getting ripped off down the road. Not a good deal.

In the meantime, what is NBC paying the “artists” that they always mention when they blast pirates for depriving people of profits? Well, for a one-season DVD set of a TV series which brings in $40 a pop, NBC and the other studios pay writers… four cents. And they are risking a strike by writers because they want to refuse upping that payment to eight cents. They don’t want to pay a writer even two-tenths of one percent of the income from a sale.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what the whole motivation is for the studios, nor that they are endlessly greedy bastards who would charge you ten times more if they could figure out a way. While that does not make Steve Jobs a saint (he also would like to charge you as much as possible), at least the interests of Apple’s media distribution service coincide with yours–to charge less for music and video. And that’s not a terrible reason to stick with their service.

Stumble it!

Michelle Malkin is apparently now offended by a group of high school students for their rather sophomoric rewriting of the pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag and my constitutional rights with which it comes. And to the diversity, in which our nation stands, one nation, part of one planet, with liberty, freedom, choice and justice for all.

Yes, how offensive that they see themselves as unified with all humanity, and prefer Constitutional rights and choice over being forced to pay allegiance to a god they do not believe in. What bastards. What ungrateful, unbelieving, little heathen snots they must be.

Heaven forbid we should be encouraged by these students, whether you agree with them or not, for (a) wanting to stand up for their beliefs, and (b) being creative enough to write their own original pledge. Unforgivable that these students should not want to conform to a pledge which most Americans are forced to utter, like indoctrinated Soviet rubes, many years before they can actually understand what it is they are being made to promise (how meaningful that is!).

And how dare they even think of removing god from the pledge! It’s not as if god were thrown in as an afterthought, an unconstitutional plant by the religious right in the shadow of fear caused by Cold-war anti-communist fervor. It’s not as if the pledge was originally written without god in it, because we’re a Christian nation, right?

Hell, we should hold a contest to see who can rewrite the pledge in the most meaningful way possible, fit for the true, original principles of this country, made so that any loyal American can recite it without gagging on something contrary to their core personal beliefs as guaranteed under the Constitution. Here’s my version:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Constitution for which it stands, written to protect a nation of free people, unified to ensure liberty and justice for all.

And as an added touch, children would not be asked to recite it until, by testing, it is shown that they actually understand what the words mean. I don’t know about you, but I see it as stupid and empty to coerce a promise from someone who does not mean what they say, or worse, does not have the slightest idea of what their words mean. You might as well have the kids recite a meat loaf recipe in Arabic, for all the earnestness it would represent. I seem to recall being taught that unknowing indoctrination of children to mouth government pledges was an detestable Communist practice.

And to hell with the wingnuts, if they stand instead for forcing proselytizing oaths on our youth, and mindlessly attack children who actually understand the Constitution, condemning them for thinking for themselves.

Stumble it!