Carlos Santana & Rob Thomas

Smooth

Very smooth

Carlos Santana has been a guitar god since I was a kid, and there doesn’t seem to be anything musical that Rob Thomas can’t do.

Whose Art Is This, Anyway?

In light of the fact that Shepard Fairey, the artist who “created” the Obama “Hope” poster was arrested last night for “tagging,” I decided to re-post this piece I wrote earlier in the week about his copyright infringement lawsuit by the Associated Press.  In a side note, it seems like sexism, misogyny and threats of violence against women have been with us at least since antiquity.  From Wkikipedia entry on graffiti:

Quisquis amat. veniat. Veneri volo frangere costas

fustibus et lumbos debilitare deae.

Si potest illa mihi tenerum pertundere pectus

quit ego non possim caput illae frangere fuste?

Whoever loves, go to hell. I want to break Venus’s ribs

with a club and deform her hips.

If she can break my tender heart

why can’t I hit her over the head?

–CIL IV, 1284.

The Associated Press says that the most annoyingly ubiquitous piece of Obama pseudo-art in the whole, entire freaking universe and beyond, and then ten paces beyond that, Shep Fairey’s “Hope-A-Dope” horror movie-colored Warhol Soup Can ripoff (can you tell I don’t like it?) infringes their copyright.  From an AP article posted on CBS News:

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

“The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission,” the AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement.

So, this Fairey guy, who supposedly has a badass maverick rebel’s disregard for “da roolz,” Googles “Obama photo,” finds one, steals it, and uses it without permission to make money?  Open and shut no-brainer, right?  Don’t be dense.  Haven’t you ever heard of “fair use?”

“We believe fair use protects Shepard’s right to do what he did here,” says Fairey’s attorney, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment beyond that at this time because we are in discussions about this with the AP.”

Fair use is a legal concept that allows exceptions to copyright law, based on, among other factors, how much of the original is used, what the new work is used for and how the original is affected by the new work.

I wish I hadn’t read that.  Every time I hear the word “fair” associated with an Obamazoid, I’m reminded of Harold Ickes pleading with the Rules and Bylaws Committee of my old party, the Democrats, to apply the party’s own standards of “fair reflection” in determining the outcome of Florida and Michigan’s delegate appropriation in light of their “rule breaker” status, only to be told by Carl Levin that “fair reflection” couldn’t be applied to a flawed process.  Bastard.

I’m sorry, but I remember every minute of that fiasco of a debacle of a circus of a joke, and I’m still so fucking pissed off about it, I get happy every time another creep assed fuck seems to realize just how screwed we all are because they encouraged and enabled the KoolAid pushing “boneheaded screw-up” they were sucking off to cheat and exploit the system all the way to the White House.  Now, they all want to know why he seems to be so tentative, wishy-washy, unsure.  Because that’s what he always was, you dipshits! That’s who he is! When you (s)elect an inexperienced, incompetent, TelePrompTer reader as Commander in Chief, that’s what you get.  And when you cheat to do it, that’s just so much worse.

Obama’s fighting Pelosi and sucking up to Republicans.  No shit?  We told you he was going to do that.  We yelled our heads off and blogged our fingers raw, and you followed your leader’s email instructions and sabotaged us at every turn.   And cheated.

I’ve written blog posts about it, as have many others, including Alegre, who says we must never forget.  I agree.  We must never allow the Pretender President and all his paid-off enablers to forget that we remember, and let them get away with re-writing their clear-cut history of cheating.

In Michigan, nobody was supposed to campaign or fund raise, but there was no imperative to remove one’s name from the ballot.  The state was having a primary, anyway, so what noble stance would one be taking by removing one’s name from a “beauty contest” that “wasn’t going to count for anything?”  The obvious answer is kiss my ass, none.  Just like there was no reason to campaign for votes under the guise of encouraging Democrats, Republicans, and Independents to vote “uncommitted” in a “beauty contest that wasn’t going to count.  Like Barack Obama did.

This blogger at Our Michigan laid it all out.  However, Obama’s intentions were never secret; the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, Huffington Post, Newsweek, and others documented the ploy, all giving complimentary details of the John and Monica Conyers/Carl Levin-led campaign to get people to vote “uncommitted” for Barack Obama.  They needn’t have bothered; it was on my.barackobama.com, now Organizing for America:

A group of several hundred Michigan voters plan to knock on doors, make calls and hold rallies for a rather unconventional candidate in next Tuesday’s primary — “Uncommitted.”

The only way that backers of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards or New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who withdrew their names from Michigan’s Democratic primary ballot, can show their support is to vote “uncommitted.”

Detroiters for Uncommitted Voters, most of whom say they are supporting Obama, want to make sure that people don’t avoid the polls Tuesday because their favorite candidate isn’t on the ballot.

“We really want to educate people on what they should do,” former Wayne County Commissioner Edna Bell said. “If Michigan voters want change, the uncommitted vote is their way to make their voices heard.”

He cheated.  So, it’s no surprise that one of his followers is doing the same thing.  The only surprise is that so many people seem so surprised how things are turning out.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Updated from an earlier post at Cinie’s World

*I noticed my own glaring omission in not noting that The Confluence as well as all the individual posters here with their own sites have been diligent in chronicling and documenting all aspects of Obafraud.  My apologies for the slight, it was unintended.

Stimulus, Schmimulus

Some Change!

With all the threatening, cajoling, windiness and righteous rhetoric coming from Obama and the Congresscritters over the Frankenstein mishmash called the “stimulus package,” a few glimmers of light have somehow made it through the fog.

The problem with the package is that it’s not what either party claims it is, and everyone knows that by now. Dianne Feinstein gave the Democratic argument in a wonderfully succinct manner.

See how easy that is? Four and a half minutes was all it took. Actually, I can do it quicker, but I’m not a Senator and don’t need to quote all those facts and figures. We did the tax cuts before. They didn’t work. Why should we do it again? Let’s create jobs instead.