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When I was a little kid, I loved all animated cartoons. It didn’t much matter whether they were any good. When advertisers started pushing Popeye macaroni — green spinach-flavored macaroni in the shape of Popeye characters — I pestered my mom until we got some.

Oh, it was terrible!

Maybe that’s why I stopped loving Popeye cartoons. Or maybe it was the crude rubber-limbed early animation, Olive Oyl’s grating whine, Popeye and Bluto’s inarticulate mutters and grunts, or the dim-witted, predictable stories. As I grew older, I still loved cartoons, but Popeye fell by the wayside.

Then, many years later, I saw three long color cartoons: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor, Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. They were good — good enough that I’m having trouble now deciding whether to buy this forthcoming DVD of the first sixty Popeye cartoons.

Could it be that Popeye just went over my head? Were Popeye cartoons making serious points about the human condition, and I was just too immature to get them? Roy Zimmerman found something:

Nixon looks rational, Reagan looks fiscally responsible. Dan Quayle looks like a genius.

If it turns out Woody Woodpecker is deep, I’m in serious trouble.

Via Boing Boing, computer scientists are developing software to spot fake photos:

Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College … has created mathematical tools to determine whether a digital photograph was altered after being taken. His methods work so well that the Associated Press now asks him to scrutinize any photo that seems fishy.

“We’ve developed a bag of tricks,” Farid says. “Every time somebody tampers with a photograph, we try to understand what they did and how to detect it.”

…

[One] way to doctor an image is to piece together two separate photographs. For example, during the 2004 presidential campaign, an image surfaced on the Web showing John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda at an anti-war demonstration in the 1960s, complete with an Associated Press insignia. Some veterans of the Vietnam War reacted with rage at seeing the presidential candidate sharing a stage with the controversial actress and anti-war activist. But the picture, it turned out, was a fake.

With computer software exposing faked photos, how will dishonest politicians stand a chance in future elections?

“Even after it was determined that it was a fake, people were still talking about Kerry at a war rally,” says Farid. “The power of the images stays with us.”

Oh. Guess the important thing is to get the image out there, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or fake. You can hear the Swift Boat crowd breathing a sigh of relief.

Hillary doesn’t have a lock:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign announced Wednesday that it raised at least $25 million in the first quarter of 2007.

The total comes close to the $26 million raised by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign in the same time period and calls into question the New York Democrat’s status as her party’s front-runner in 2008.

Mystic prediction time: Hillary is out of the race before the first primaries.

There are plenty of Democrats who would prefer almost anybody but Hillary, for good reasons or bad.

Clinton was able to raise $26 million largely because she seemed like the inevitable candidate. But if Obama, who was just an Illinois state legislator a little over two years ago, can almost equal Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut, Hillary no longer looks inevitable. Those supporters who only want to be on-board with a winner — a substantial part of the Clinton constituency at this early stage of the game — are going to start looking at the other candidates. Watch for Clinton’s poll numbers to drop fairly significantly over the next few months.

Second mystic prediction: John Edwards will surge in the polls as supporters drift away from Hillary. This will be the first clear manifestation of the race issue in Obama’s candidacy — as Clinton’s fortunes fade, “pragmatists” will be looking for a credible alternative to Obama, fearing that the country isn’t ready for a black president.

I expect Edwards to be ahead of Clinton in the polls by the fourth of July. I make no prediction about Obama’s poll numbers.

If these predictions come true, remember you heard it here first.

If these predictions don’t come true, heh heh, it’s all a joke, see, about idiot pundits who make grand predictions based on the teeniest scraps of evidence. Boy, are those guys dumb, or what?

Cartoonist Don Asmussen may have explained why John McCain’s still running for president.

Tom Tomorrow shows who secretly runs America.

Ward Sutton considers past behavior to predict several right-wing reactions to Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer. (Warning: offensive language — but that’s the point.)

Mark Fiore on greenhouse gases: “Whatever you do, don’t do anything!“

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the breadth and depth of stupidity in politicians, some politicians will step forward with a bold new idea and surprise you:

With little fanfare, the Canadian government recently introduced legislation that breaks with conventional trademark law and would grant the Vancouver [Olympic] organizing committee rights to “winter” and a long list of other common words, among them: “gold,” “silver,” “medals,” “sponsor,” “games,” “21st,” “2010,” as well as the name of the host city itself. The legislation would also give the committee special enforcement powers.

…

The law would also allow the organizing committee, a private group, to act like a government agency when it comes to enforcement. That means it would be able to obtain a court injunction without proving that an infringement of its trademark for, say, “winter games,” has caused it “undue harm.”

When some U.S. legislators demanded that french fries and french toast be called “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” after France wouldn’t support the invasion of Iraq, I believed they were setting a record for stupidity that would stand the test of time. But it’s very competitive out there in the world of political stupidity. I’d say this is an Olympic-class example, but I can’t afford the lawsuit.

As always, Bob Geiger has collected another good batch of political cartoons. The second cartoon, comparing Newt Gingrich and John Edwards on family values, is particularly illuminating.

Interesting comic on belief vs. reality.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

But there are exceptions.

Josh Rosenau says that while we’re all focused on the big political stage, extremists are making their move at the local level:

One of the great ironies of politics is that the most local offices, the ones that ought to be most responsive to constituent needs, are often the least-known. Presidential elections are hotly debated, even in a state like Kansas where the outcome is fore-ordained. But a local or state school board election can be decided by a few hundred votes, yet draws substantially less interest. That apathy towards local races has made them prime targets for extremists and ideologues…

A disturbing number of local extremists wind up in Congress. Time to start paying a lot more attention.

Respectful Insolence insults chimpanzees.

Ed Brayton has a number of videos of musical comedian Roy Zimmerman. Here’s one of them:

More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Guess who:

Our men and women in uniform love their country more than their comfort. They have never failed us, and we must not fail them. But the best intentions and the highest morale are undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, and rapidly declining readiness.

… these are signs of a military in decline and we must do something about it. The reasons are clear. Lack of equipment and material. Undermaning of units. Overdeployment. Not enough time for family. Soldiers who are on food stamps, and soldiers who are poorly housed.

That was candidate George W. Bush back on August 21, 2000.

Now he threatens to veto bills calling for the troops to be fully trained and equipped when they ship out to Iraq.

If the Democrats had a time machine and could bring the George W. Bush of 2000 into the present day, they might suppose he would switch parties to join the chorus of voices criticising the way this administration has failed our military. But they would be disappointed. The Bush of 2000 was only kidding when he said “we must not fail them.”

Surely the total disaster of this administration isn’t something that happens by accident.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Al-Jazeera television is an influential voice around the world, but the English language version is difficult to find it on cable or satellite TV here in the Land of the Free. Conservative groups have pressured satellite systems and cable operators not to carry the channel.

U.S. Navy Captain Frank Pascual, part of CENTCOM’s Dubai Media Team, thinks this is a mistake. On the PBS program Frontline, he said:

I’ve never been afraid of ideas. And I have no fear that any ideas brought through journalism to the United States would be something that would so harm us that we not only can’t survive it, but can’t learn something from it and do better. And it’s [the Middle East] a part of the world we need to do better in.

The problem with ideas is that they get people thinking. And once you get Americans thinking, this Administration and the rubber-stamp Republicans in Congress don’t have a chance.

Madeleine Albright last night on the Colbert Report:

I understand that there are 100 million Americans who believe in the Rapture … and that they believe that the end of the world will come that way, but Armageddon is not exactly a foreign policy.

I remember when the government worked hard to prevent the world from ending… just yet, anyway. This administration is full of bold new ideas.

Via Slashdot, voting machine manufacturer Diebold is suing Massachusetts for picking a competitor’s product over their own.

Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the country’s largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.

Diebold says it will ask a judge to overturn the selection of AutoMARK, a Diebold business competitor, because the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin failed to choose the best machine.

…

[A lawyer representing Diebold] said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes “it’s worth the time and money” of going to court to challenge the contract’s award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.

…

“We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition,” he said.

Weisberg said the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state’s office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection.

This isn’t Diebold’s first controversy. For example, a former CEO raised campaign money for George W. Bush and sent out fundraising letters saying he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president” in 2004.

Looks like the paranoiacs were right. If Diebold thinks the wrong candidate has been chosen, it will stop at nothing to change the vote.

Via This Modern World: aren’t you glad we have an “fair and balanced” alternative to the old, biased news media?