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The Spanish Version of Breaking Cover Comes Out Tomorrow

No, I have no idea what any of the cover copy means...

The Naked Cowboy

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It sometimes surprises people to know that a simple country lawyer like me really likes New York City. I wouldn't want to live there, mind you (too expensive), but I do enjoy spending time there, walking around the place, taking in the sights, such as the Empire State Building, Central Park, the Naked Cowboy ...

What's that, you say? You don't know about the Naked Cowboy? Well, pull up a chair and give a listen, brethren and sistern, and let me tell you about him.

The Naked Cowboy (real name Robert John Burck) has been a fixture in New York's Times Square for years. He's a street musician who's become so famous that he's got his own stop on the Gray Line tour.

He occasionally goes on tour outside the Big Apple as well, appearing in such places as Austin, Texas; New Orleans at Mardi Gras; and his hometown of Cincinnati for Memorial Day. He's appeared in music videos and TV commercials. He's even franchising the concept - for $5,000 a year, you too can be your own city's Naked Cowboy (or Cowgirl).

It should be noted that the Naked Cowboy does not, in fact, appear entirely naked. That would probably get him arrested, even in New York. He performs his tunes dressed in a cowboy hat, white boots and a strategically placed red, white and blue guitar that covers up the fact he's dressed in his tighty whities.

Now the Naked Cowboy wants to be your president.

On Sept. 29, 2010, the NC appeared, uncharacteristically dressed in a suit and tie and with his long hair cut short, to announce that he planned to challenge Barack Obama in 2012 for leadership of the Free World. And guess which party's banner he plans to run under?

I know some of you tea partiers are probably muttering under your breath, "Don't let him be one of ours, don't let him be one of ours..." I know you've been trying really hard not to look like a party filled with kooks and loons. I feel for you, I really do.

But sorry, guys, he's yours. The Bare Buckaroo is, indeed, a self-declared tea party candidate.

At first, I was thinking that this had to be some sort of joke, like Christine O'Donnell. Then I remembered, O'Donnell's not actually playing it for laughs, even though she begins her most recent campaign ad by denying she's a witch.

(Here's a hint: If you're forced to start off by disavowing earlier videotaped statements that you once practiced the Dark Arts but that you're much better now, you're already way behind on the PR battle.)

No, the Cowboy Formerly Known as Naked was right out there at his opening press conference with a straight face and a mysterious blonde woman (possibly Mrs. Cowboy) by his side. He was spouting that good old tea party line: The Evil Guvmint's taking over everything, so he's going to reduce the civilian federal workforce by 40 percent "or more" (while of course providing no details about which four out of 10 he'd cut).

He also wants to make all welfare recipients take random drug screens (whether there's any evidence they're using drugs or not). He wants to eliminate the federal Department of Education altogether. Asked about his recent occupation, he hesitated for only a brief second before earnestly explaining that "naked is a metaphor for honest."

But wait, he's not really naked, despite the name, so does that mean he's not really honest? If he fakes his nudity, is he faking honesty as well?

Heh. I guess he does fit right into the tea party. He fits right in with the tea partiers who rail against Medicare while opposing cutting payments to doctors like themselves. He fits right in with the millionaires who rant against stimulus money while getting rich off it.

He fits right in with the politicians like Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who claims to deplore Washington "backroom" deals and then gets caught on tape trying to make just such a deal, offering an opponent access to power brokers if the opponent will just drop out of the race.

The Naked Cowboy is just trying to do what he's done for years. He's a huckster, a showman, trying to shake a few coins out of the rubes from out of town before hopping on the very gravy train he claims to want to derail.

He's perfect for the tea party.

It's Not Government Money If It Goes To Me

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One of the most famous quotes from the Days of Rage over health care reform was spoken by an elderly gentleman who got all fired up on a steady diet of tea party hysteria and Sarah Palin Tweets and loudly demanded that the "government keep its hands off my Medicare."

At first I saw it as an amusing example of just how misinformed some people could be. Then I began to notice more and more that a lot of the people who were complaining the loudest about the dangers of a single-payer, publicly funded government health insurance program were themselves recipients under just such a program (the aforementioned Medicare).

A recent Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi noted the number of people at a tea party event who were riding those little scooters - you know, the ones you see on TV commercials that promise that Medicare will pay 100 percent of the cost. He rather unkindly suggested that "[t]he average tea partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them."

There's an alternate explanation, to wit: Tea partiers suffer from a strange form of cognitive dissonance that causes them to think that, if the money's spent on them or folks like them, it's not really government spending at all. It's the kindest explanation I can think of for the tea party's love of certain candidates whose public stances are wildly out of sync with their behavior when they're not campaigning.

Take, for example, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul. Paul is no fan of Medicare; he's called it "socialized medicine" and is on record proposing that seniors be subject to at least a $2,000 deductible.

"But try selling that during an election," Paul admitted in a 2009 video.

Now it's 2010, and Paul is very, very unhappy that his opponent is using that statement. Quoting him accurately, according to Paul, is "politics in its lowest form." Well, he'll probably scream like a murdered bunny if his rival starts pointing out that the supposedly tight-fisted Paul also opposed a government proposal to cut some Medicare payments to doctors like himself.

He justified this by protesting that he and his fellow physicians "should be able to make a comfortable living." That's the Paul solution: Grandma pays more, Rand Paul keeps his comfortable living. Anyone who'd buy into this must not really think that Paul's getting that Medicare money from the government.

This curious blind spot regarding government money applies to other types of spending as well. Arizona congressional candidate Jesse Kelly, a TP favorite, really hates government spending in general and the federal stimulus in particular.

"It must stop now," Kelly says of the stimulus. "This is bribery with taxpayer money, and it's a disgrace." He also scoffs at the idea that government spending on infrastructure can create jobs. "Government is not a job creator, it's a job crusher," he claims.

Yet, according to an article in The Tucson Weekly, Kelly's company, Don Kelly Construction, gets a whopping 90 percent of its business from federal contracts, including some projects being paid for with that bad old stimulus money. Guess he doesn't realize that government contracts (and therefore the workers he hires to fulfill them) are paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Another TP-backed candidate is Florida gubernatorial hopeful Rick Scott, who also hates, hates, hates the stimulus. According to The Tampa Bay Times, Scott said back on June 2 that he "would fight all the stimulus money" and that Florida "should not have accepted that money."

Perhaps Florida shouldn't have, but when Xfone Inc., a company which lists Scott as a "controlling shareholder," was offered 60 million of those precious taxpayer dollars "to develop high speed Internet infrastructure," Scott put up less of a fight for his virtue than a drunken cheerleader on prom night.

So I have to think that these tea party candidates and the cranky old folks who love them are just suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance brought on by mental illness or possibly a dietary deficiency.

Otherwise, I'd have to believe that they were just unprincipled demagoguing hypocrites who just pretend to care about government spending and only really care that the money's not lining their pockets or being spent by their own people. And that would be terrible, wouldn't it?

These Kids Today

Woman Travels Four Hours with Gun to Kill Mean Internet Commenter

Meet Briana Greathouse of Kansas City, Missouri. Briana, who's 25, recently traveled to Ottumwa, Iowa, four hours away, to meet a man she knew through the internet. And kill him. For making mean internet postings. Her mom was arrested, too.

Reminds me of a story I wrote a while back for Bryon Quertermous and Dave White's Blog Short Story Project.

So play nice.

The War On Terror Is Over. Terror Won.

Toy Pony Sparks Bomb Scare In Orlando

The short version: The cops found a kid's toy pony left behind in a park. They didn't want to take any chances, so they blew it up.

That's how paranoid we have to be these days.

Jesus. I'm not at all sure I want to live in a world like this.

More Banned Books Week, and a Quote I Wish I'd Written

From Peter Steinberg: Banned Books Week: 10 'Flashlight Worthy' Books People Most Want Banned (PHOTOS)

What does "challenged" mean? It means someone requested the book be removed from their public library because of its "offensive" nature. As if, in this age of hot and cold running internet porn, a child would go to a library and check out a book to be titillated.

A Method of Book Banning I Could Actually Endorse

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This week, the American Library Association celebrates its annual Banned Books Week, which it calls "the only national celebration of the freedom to read."

I'm a big fan of the ALA, of libraries in general, and of a lot of the books on the ALA's list that people have attempted to remove from school and public libraries. It may shock you, however, to discover that there's one type of book "banning" that I might just, under the right circumstances, be able to get behind. More about this in a moment.

The ALA began promoting BBW in 1982 to counter a sudden increase in "challenges" to books on the shelves of schools, libraries and bookstores. (A "challenge" is what the ALA calls it when someone who thinks they know better than you what you or your kids should be reading goes to some governing body and tries to get the book taken out of circulation.)

Many "challenges" involve restricting access to books for teens and young adults because they contain depictions of things like drug use, sexuality, racism and profanity. Apparently the theory is that the best way for teens to deal with these issues is to pretend they don't exist.

For instance, one group attempted to ban Harper Lee's classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" on the grounds that a depiction of racial injustice in a small Southern town in the Great Depression (including the use of the dreaded "n-word") might prove "upsetting" to young people, particularly young African-American readers.

Well, that's mighty nice of them, but a well-meaning bonehead is still a bonehead. Young people bloody well ought to be upset by the idea of racial injustice, and anyone who thinks young African-Americans don't know plenty about racism, then and now, is suffering from a severe and probably incurable case of cranial ossification.

The more popular a book is, the more likely it is that someone's going to attempt to ban it. The flaccid -vampire melodrama "Twilight," for example, has attracted the attention of some would-be banners for "depictions of sexuality," even though for most of the series, the characters seem to be striving mightily not to have sex.

Likewise, Dan Brown's blockbuster "The DaVinci Code" was attacked (and outright banned in some countries) because the Catholic Church found some of its cockeyed plot premises offensive.

Neither of these books seem to have suffered at all in sales; in fact, it's entirely possible that a substantial cohort of readers picked the books up just to see what all the fuss was about, which led a writer friend of mine to plaintively inquire, "What do I have to do to get my book banned?"

Which brings us to the above-mentioned type of censorship that I might just be able to endorse.

The Defense Intelligence Agency recently informed the publisher of an upcoming nonfiction book titled "Operation Dark Heart" that the book might reveal classified information. Among other things, the DIA wants to scrub passages describing a DIA "data-mining" operation called "Able Danger."

Anthony Shaffer, the book's author and a former DIA man himself, claims that he learned in Afghanistan that the Able Danger program identified 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The DIA wants this information suppressed, although, since you're reading it right this second, it seems like that particular feline has already exited that particular non-rigid fabric container.

But rather than seek a legal injunction or some sort of executive action, the DIA has made the publisher an offer: It will buy the entire first run of the book, all 10,000 copies, thus giving publisher and author what all publishers and authors most want out of life: an overnight 100 percent sell-out, not to mention the kind of buzz for the second (edited) print run that a publicist could only dream of.

So I'm calling the alphabet agencies out. CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, DARPA: I'm writing a book right now that reveals all sorts of high-tech and sort-of-secret derring-do. You want to keep me from blowing the lid off all your tightly guarded secrets, all you have to do is promise to buy the whole first printing.

Or we could just skip the middleman altogether and you could send me a million bucks right now. Small bills, please. How about it?