Arlo Guthrie Endorses Ron Paul

Singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, who wrote the anti-war anthem "Alice's Restaurant," has endorsed libertarian Republican Ron Paul in his quixotic quest for the presidency.

Mark Memmott and Jill Lawrence write in USA Today's On Politics blog:

Arlo Guthrie — of Alice's Restaurant fame and son of folk legend Woody Guthrie — has endorsed Republican Rep. Ron Paul's bid for the White House.

"I love this guy," Guthrie says in a statement released by the Paul campaign. "Dr. Paul is the only candidate I know of who would have signed the Constitution of the United States had he been there. I'm with him, because he seems to be the only candidate who actually believes it has as much relevance today as it did a couple of hundred years ago. I look forward to the day when we can work out the differences we have with the same revolutionary vision and enthusiasm that is our American legacy."

via (Skippy)

Tags: arlo guthrie ron paul folksinger music president campaign republican anti-war wtf

Bush's "Christian Cowboy" Hero Was Really a Horse Thief

George Bush keeps a painting in the Oval Office depicting a rider on horseback racing up a rugged hillside, two other riders not far behind. Bush tells people that early-twentieth-century illustrator W.H.D. Koerner's painting is called "A Charge to Keep," and that it depicts a Methodist circuit-rider, a kind of Christian cowboy who helped spread the teaching of John Wesley throughout America in the nineteenth century.

image source: Slate

That's the Bush Administration in a nutshell: The self-image of a high-minded doer of good deeds cloaks the reality of a thieving scoundrel one step ahead of his angry victims.

(via Avedon Carol)

Tags: bush politics president irony history w h d koerner ignorance idiocy painting horseback missionary horsethief psychology self-delusion closed-minded humor funny

The Truth Behind the Southwest Airlines "Stripper Plane"

Gadling's Neil Woodburn relates a lurid story about a Southwest Airlines flight from LAX to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, each Friday afternoon, crammed with exotic dancers on their way to work the gambling Mecca's strip clubs for the weekend:

Every Friday evening, some time before most people have clocked out of work and begin heading home for the weekend, a plane takes off from LAX.

Like so many other flights at this time, this one is also heading to Las Vegas. It's not full of gamblers, however, but rather a disproportionate amount of silicone that bounces and jiggles through the warm, desert-air turbulence all the way to Vegas where, for the remainder of Friday and Saturday night, it will continue quivering away at $20 a pop.

This, folks, is the Southwest Stripper Plane....

No one really knows what time this legendary, perhaps even mythical flight leaves Los Angeles. Seats are reserved months in advance and few mere mortals are able to secure a reservation. A friend of mine claims he once found himself on this flight but can't seem to remember the details, as though some powerful force scrubbed his brain clean, leaving only a trace of glitter on his sweaty forehead.

Gadling is part of the Weblogs, Inc. blog network. Maybe the pittance that Jason Calacanis pays his indentured servants is not enough to reward or encourage fact-checking. But it takes only a few minutes of playing with the Southwest Airlines reservation system to discover that, except on particular high-traffic weekends, seats are available on all Friday afternoon flights to Las Vegas, not just from LAX but from Burbank, Long Beach, and Orange County's John Wayne airports as well.

There is a seed of truth from out of which grew this male fantasy of a pleasure plane packed with pulchritudinous pole-dancers. The strip clubs of Las Vegas do indeed receive an influx of transient dancers from out of town every weekend, and many of these dancers do spend the rest of their week somewhere in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you fly on any Friday afternoon flight on from any of the area's airports to McCarran, some of the passengers will be women on their way to a weekend of work as exotic dancers.

But mark this, horndogs: If you find yourself one one of those flights, sitting next to one of these women, she is not at her job yet. In a strip club you get to ogle and flirt and maybe even grope — because you are paying the dancer directly for the privilege. On the the plane, however, she is just another working stiff commuting to her stressful, emotionally demanding job, so leave her alone. She doesn't want to talk to you.

(You might not even know it: she's wearing street clothes, not a camisole and T-back thong, and she won't put her war paint on until she gets to the dressing room at Cheetah's. Without her glamour on, you might never give her a second look.)

(via Flight International)

Tags: strippers exotic+dancers sex+work los+angeles las+vegas southwest+airlines urban+legend sex

The Terrible Cost of Bush Administration Lies About Iraq

"Bush Lied, People Died," the protesters' say. Have you ever wondered precisely how many people die every time George Bush lies?

The Center for Public Integrity assembled a prodigious compilation of 935 out-and-out falsehoods uttered by George Bush and seven senior Administration officials in the two years following September 11, 2001.

Based on the detailing of these lies, Lynn Kendall has done the math: Each Bush lie about Iraq has killed four American soldiers and wounded 31. Each Administration attempt to deceive us killed 86 Iraqi citizens at a bare minimum [1] Every eight lies kill a journalist. Every untruth that passed their lips cost US taxpayers more than half a billion dollars.

I mourned when Slobodan Milosevic died — because it meant that he couldn't be George Bush's cellmate when Bush is finally brought to justice, as I so fervently hoped.

[1] Kendall uses the Iraq Body Count, a summation of deaths reported in media reports, hospital and morgue data, and government figures, which is guaranteed to be undercounting violent death in Iraq. A recent survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine counts 150,000 violent deaths, almost twice the IBC number; a study published earlier in The Lancet estimated 650,000 excess deaths from all causes, including war-related disease and malnutrition, almost 8 times the IBC number.

Airline Re-Brands as "Ank Air" With Embarrassing Results

Flight International reports that Turkish air carrier World Focus Airlines has rebranded itself as Ank Air — with a new logo that bears an unfortunate resemblance to the letter "W." As Travolution Blog puts it, "Thankfully the web address will be less embarrassing."

(via Debbie Notkin, who got it from Arthur Hlavaty Feòrag NicBhrìde)

Rob Paravonian's Pachelbel Rant

Rob Paravonian breaks the silence about the secret hatred many of us feel about Johann Pachelbel's diabolical Canon in D Major:

(via gunga_galunga, in a comment in the Lone LiveJournal of the Apocalypse)

Advice for Relationship Problems from Golden Age Wonder Woman

(via Avedon Carol)

Anti-Gay Bigot Wins Young-Adult Fiction Award

The Young Adult Library Services Association has awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Orson Scott Card. Card publicly advocates the jailing of gay-rights activists.

According to School Library Journal, which sponsors the award, the specific body of work for which Card is cited — his novels Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow — do not explicitly reflect Card's views on homosexuality. Nevertheless, critics say that his public record of homophobia should have been a factor in the award jury's deliberations. David Levithan, author of gay-themed YA literature says:

“I would like to believe that the Edwards committee would not have honored someone who had written essays that were as racist or as anti-Semitic as Card’s are anti-gay. The charter of the Edwards award says that it “recognizes an author’s work in helping adolescents become aware of themselves and addressing questions about their role and importance in relationships, society, and in the world”—I think Card’s writings on homosexuality do the exact opposite of that.”

Anti-gay essays aside, one has to wonder what the award jury was thinking. The moral underpinnings of Ender's Game, in which the intent of the actor outweighs morally the outcome of the action, may well be important in terms of understanding how America as a culture can kill half a million Iraqis in order to bring them freedom and democracy. But recognizing the widespread impact of an evil idea is not the same as celebrating its goodness.

(via Farah Mendlesohn)

Microsoft Office for Mac Launch Party

2008 Macworld Blast with Devo Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Sometimes life does not permit itself to be parodied. Who could outdo the real thing?

More on the Gizmodo CES Prank

Gizmodo's Brian Lam has written an apology for the TV-Be-Gone stunt at the Consumer Electronics Show last week which is one of the least apologetic apologies since the death of Socrates. Lam claims that running through the exhibition hall with a remote control was an act of civil disobedience: "Our prank pays homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. ... In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience." If you say so.

Fake Steve Jobs, ready for Macworld, gives Lam a stern warning:

I just want to send out this warning to Gizmodo and anyone else who might be thinking about blasting out TV screens at Macworld: Think twice, losers. Because we will not be banning you from our show. We'll be fucking tasering you right there on the floor. Then, when you're lying there on the floor in shock, we'll carry you off the floor and put you on a plane and rendition your ass to someplace so awful you'll be praying for death. I mean it.

P1000810 Originally uploaded by violet.blue.

Political Quote of the Day

"Chris Matthews can't keep Bill Clinton's dick out of his mouth." — Richard Dutcher

Gizmodo's CES Prank Rocks the Boat, Threatens Blogger Perks

Gizmodo's editorial team pulled a stunt at CES. They took a TV-Be-Gone remote clicker and ran wild in the exhibition hall, extinguishing arrays of flat-screen displays as they went. Watch the video on the Gizmodo page. It's pretty funny, if you're the sort of person who likes calling up the local butcher shop and asking if they have pig's feet. ("You better wear shoes!") Shutting down Panasonic's Wall O' HDTV is a hoot. Shutting down the Motorola press demo repeatedly would be funny if the frontman were Judge Smails, but it's a bit much for some unfortunate PR flack just trying to do his job.

John Biggs at CrunchGear responds. Tech blogging, it seems, has finally found its place at the table, and the Gizmodo stunt might get everyone cut off from the free booze and schwag. Bloggers should grow up, Biggs tells us, because, well, it's grown-up. (Yeah, right, knock off these juvenile stunts and be like real journalists, like Chris Matthews or Maureen Dowd.)

The bitch-slapping between bloggers who get more traffic in a minute than I get in a week might be motivated in part by the fact that Gizmodo is part of Nick Denton's Gawker Media, while CrunchGear is owned by Michael Arrington. Are the rival Blog Empires getting snippy with each other?

Howto: Hack a Diebold Voting Machine

The gap between polling and voting results in New Hampshire last Tuesday has suddenly made this picture more topical. Why settle for making just your own vote count?

How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine
Originally uploaded by joshillustrates.

The Wire - Fifth Season Link-O-Rama

Here in these parts, we love The Wire, HBO's series about crime and punishment in the mean streets of Baltimore, Maryland, also known as The Best Show on Television^TM. The show's creator, David Simon, makes Joss Whedon look like Aaron Spelling, and that's saying a lot, because Joss Whedon makes everyone who isn't David Simon look like Aaron Spelling.

The fifth and final season began airing last Sunday night. The occasion of the final season is marked by a great deal of ink (and magnetized ferrite) being put out in the media. Here is some of what I have been seeing:

In The New Yorker last October, Margaret Talbot's 11,000-word profile of David Simon, Stealing Life, looks at both The Wire and Simon's next project in development.

This Nick Hornby interview with David Simon appeared in the August 2007 issue of The Believer.

Slate has just reissued Meghan O'Rourke's 2006 interview with Simon, as well as Jacob Weisberg's analysis of the show, the one in which he called it the best TV show ever broadcast in America because it portray[s] the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.

New York magazine has brief interviews with cast members, including Andre Royo (Bubbles), Michael K. Williams (Omar Little), and Jamie Hector (Marlo Stansfield).

Now appearing in The Atlantic is Mark Bowden's The Angriest Man in Television damns The Wire and David Simon with faint praise, going on to call the show a bleak fiction and Simon a hack.

"Bleak" is the epithet tossed around like a Karl Rove talking point by the show's detractors. The Bleakness of the Wire is the title of Reihan Salam's critique at at The American Scene. Salam wags his finger at Simon for portraying the situation in Baltimore as hopeless. Matthew Yglesias chimes in with David Simon and the Audacity of Despair: Fundamentally, I think [Simon's] vision of the bleak urban dystopia and its roots is counterproductive to advancing the values we hold dear. David Simon responds in the comments. At the blog Shadow of the Hegemon, Demosthenes raps Yglesias on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper

Lastly, HBO's Web site presents three videos of the backstory, episodes in the lives of some prominent characters -- Proposition Joe, Omar Little, and the first meeting between Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland.

Of course, if you like sipping from firehoses, you can find more at del.icio.us.

BoingBoingBingo! Livens Up the Boing Boing Reading Experience

Boing Boing Bingo! Originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

(via Violet Blue)

New Jersey Legislator Says US Blacks Should Thank the Lord for Slavery

Michael Patrick Carroll, a Republican member of the New Jersey state assembly, says that African-Americans should be thankful for slavery:

[I]f slavery was the price that a modern American's ancestors had to pay in order to make one an American, one should get down on one's knees every single day and thank the Lord that such price was paid.

Carroll made these remarks in expressing his opposition to a bill before the assembly that if passed would make New Jersey the first northern state to express apology for the institution of slavery. Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia have passed similar apology bills, and another is being considered by the Georgia legislature.

Yes, thank the Lord for slavery, without which it wouldn't be true that in California a black man is more likely to go to prison than to a state college. Those poor bastards who died in shackles in the Middle Passage were just unlucky. Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, drugs in the ghetto — Praise Jesus!

(via Mary Shaw)

Blatant Egotistical Self-Promotion

Those of you with memories of '60s television shows might appreciate a comment I posted to The Sideshow. Avedon Carol appreciated it; she promoted it to her front page, and even linked to it when she started an open thread on Eschaton.

The backstory is that Matt Yglesias is both a prominent liberal blogger and a junior member of the community of opinion-shapers called "the Villagers" by Atrios, Digby, and others. Atrios and Digby were probably inspired by M. Night Shyamalan, but my twisted brain went in another direction.

RIAA: Nodding and Grooving While Wearing Headphones is Piracy

IPod-listeners beware. The Recording Industry Association of America aims to stamp out piracy.

The RIAA is taking the position, in its suits against alleged file-sharers, that making personal copies of music CDs onto one's own computer hard drive is unlawful. But sources close to the recording industry have revealed to As I Please's team of investigative reporters the next front soon to be opened in the RIAA's war against piracy: grooving to music in public.

Is this music piracy?

Some industry observers say that a music pirate on a subway, city bus, or even just walking down the street, must actually sing along or at least hum the tune for infringement, or "pirate performance" to take place.

But the RIAA holds that anyone who grooves to headphone music even silently is a pirate performer. "That's stolen music in the first place," says one source. "Even if the courts holds that some pirate performance is not music theft — and no court has yet said that it is not — the sort of scum who engages in pirate performance is in all probability grooving to stolen music in the first place. It's prima facie evidence of piracy. It's probable cause for police investigation."

Asked if cracking down on subway music listeners might be seen by the public at large as unfairly targeting people of specific cultural backgrounds, the source responded, "The RIAA has a zero-tolerance policy towards piracy. The problem keeps growing. We need to get the message out to the public: Pirates aren't cool. Piracy sucks."