¡Viva Presidente Hussein!

Today I'm off to a big inaugeration party at one of Madrid's posh hotels. I'm very happy that Julián will grow up thinking there's nothing strange about a black man being president of the most powerful country in the world. Barack Hussein Obama will be the first president he remembers. I'm glad he's too young to remember Bush!

To celebrate the occasion, I've created a new Facebook group called "President Hussein" and other Cool Names. This is a semi-serious group advocating tolerance of unusual names. Feel free to join. The description is below.

"When people hear the name 'Hussein' they tend to think of a pot-bellied Middle Eastern dictator. Well, there are millions of people named Hussein and most of them are pretty cool. One just became president of the United States, despite being hounded by certain media outlets about his middle name.
"This is a group to get rid of the stigma of foreign-sounding names. You don't have to be a Democrat to join (I'm not), you just have to be able to hear a foreign-sounding name and realize it doesn't sound foreign somewhere else in the world.
"By the way, my middle name is Geldard. Bet you haven't heard that one before!"

Stupidity and Hope on YouTube

I'm finishing up the text for my book Guerrilla Tactics of the American Civil War and while eating lunch today I decided to rewatch the chapter on Nathan Bedford Forrest in the excellent series The Civil War by Ken Burns. Forrest was the best Confederate cavalry raider of that war and Shelby Foote, a historian interviewed in the series, has some interesting stuff to say about him.

After watching the segment on YouTube, I saw a link to another video about General Forrest so I clicked on it. It turned out to be a recruiting video for the Ku Klux Klan! Forrest was elected its first Grand Wizard shortly after the war but eventually distanced himself from the organization, saying it had become too lawless. That's putting it mildly.

I was really depressed to see this crap had gotten 185,000 views, so to scrub the filth from my eyes I watched will.i.am's hokey but heartfelt video "Yes We Can" about Obama. You know how many views that's gotten?

Fourteen million.

I felt better after that.

Internet Plagiarism at the White House

In a move reminiscent of lazy high school students, the White House issued a press release that included a biography of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi lifted straight from a website called Encyclopedia of World Biography. Both BBC and CNN covered this because the biography of one of Bush's few European allies says he is "one of the world's most controversial leaders" and his government is known for "corruption and vice."

And the insults just kept on coming. Whoever wrote the biography obviously didn't like poor old Silvio that much. The entry has since disappeared.

What the news sites didn't talk about was the fact that the flaks at the White House press office lifted the information off the internet (probably without attribution) and didn't even read it. If they had, they would have probably changed the bit where it said Berlusconi was "hated by many."

This is what happens when the Internet generation cheats their way through school and ends up with important jobs.

As an author of four books and hundreds of articles, I wonder how many times I've been plagiarized?