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The Associated Press filed a dispatch yesterday from the West Texas town of Big Spring, where a man named Barry McBee has stoked the ire of his neighbors and the community by erecting a statue of Michelangelo’s “David” in his front yard.

That was apparently bad enough. But then he adorned the statue with a Santa hat and all hell broke loose.

The AP reports:

Barry McBee says he was aiming to make people chuckle by adding a Santa hat and white beard to the 5-foot-tall replica of the Renaissance statue with six-pack abs — an image at odds with usual depictions of a fat, jolly St. Nick.Then, parents started calling Big Spring city officials saying their children were asking why Santa was naked.”I just like to shock people to make them laugh, kind of break the monotony around here,” said McBee, who has all kinds of animal yard ornaments in his garage. “I just bring them out occasionally.”Last week, code enforcement officials received an informal complaint and an officer went to photograph where McBee had placed the statue, which is normally in the back yard.The sculpture on the corner lot along a main road into McBee’s subdivision did not violate any town ordinances, and the copy of one of the world’s most well-known statues did not involve any obscenity issues, said Linda Sjogren, city attorney in Big Spring, about 290 miles west of Dallas.But Sjogren, concerned that complaints would continue, decided to consult with others on a possible remedy. She posted a query on the Texas Municipal League’s secure Web site, which someone with access to then reposted on Facebook.Sjogren left McBee a voice mail last week, requesting that he put more clothes on David.McBee relented after his friends teased him as well, putting a pair of black and white faux-velvet shorts, with a Christmas bow, on the statue.

I love this story. For one, it carries the wonderfully haiku-like headline, “Naked ‘David’ statue in Texas depicted as Santa.”

Two, it contains a reference to “faux-velvet shorts.”

But, most of all, this story caught my eye because it’s nearly identical to the plot of a Simpsons episode.

Back in 1990, during the Simpsons second season, a David statue shows up at the Springfield art museum, where it’s soon denounced as obscenity by the town’s Morality Squad.

In the episode, Marge Simpson organizes a protest of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon after Baby Maggie — mimicking what she saw on the cartoon — wallops Homer with a mallet.

But Marge’s stunt backfires — in a nice bit of satire — when the protesters also picket the David statue, which Marge considers high art.

(Here’s a full summary of the episode from the Simpsons Wiki site.)

In the end, the David statue remained on display — in both Springfield and Big Spring.

Except in West Texas, the statue is now partly draped in faux velvet.

We haven’t heard much lately about the Cameron Todd Willingham case — not since a state Senate committee hearing early last month.

Makes me wonder if the scandal surrounding Willingham — and Gov. Rick Perry’s decision to replace three members of the Forensic Science Commission just days before a key hearing on the case — hasn’t blown over, just as Perry’s office hoped it would.

When the scandal broke in late September, a lot people wondered why on earth Perry would replace the commissioners? Didn’t he know how bad it looked?

Perry was clearly aiming to endure controversy in the near term in hopes it would die down well before the election.

That play seems to have worked.

Most of the details of the case have already surfaced. And with Williamson Co. D.A. John Bradley — the newly installed head of the Forensic Science Commission — slow walking the Willingham inquiry, Perry appears to have sidestepped major political damage from what appeared — two months ago — to be a major scandal.

It was a controversy — replete with features on CNN and in national newspapers bashing the governor — that might have sunk other candidates.

Of course, there may yet be more revelations in the case. One missing piece is what exactly Perry and his people did with the report they received just 88 minutes before the execution that debunked much of the evidence against Willingham.

But for the moment, the scandal seems to have dissipated. That’s a major political victory for the governor.

Good grief. Just when you think America’s prospects in Afghanistan couldn’t get any bleaker, the Obamacans get hammered by Hamid.

Hamid Karzai is president of that fractious, impoverished country, and his government is infamously corrupt, incompetent and despised by the people. So, naturally, our political and military leaders have been backing him.

Indeed, Karzai has come to be the key factor in deciding whether to spend still more American treasure and blood in the Afghanistan war. To “succeed” in stabilizing this inherently unstable land, we’re told we must first establish a legitimate national government that’s competent enough to manage an army and end corruption. A “reformed” Karzai was said to be our best hope, and the U.S. supported him for a second term in August’s presidential election.

Some reformer. In the election, he openly used government money to bribe tribal warlords to back him, his vice presidential choice was widely known to be a drug trafficker and his ballot-stuffing crew was so blatant that his own handpicked election commission tossed out nearly a million of his votes, forcing him into a runoff.

But the runoff election was so rigged that his opponent withdrew, refusing to sanction the charade. Yet our leaders continue to dance with Hamid, recognizing him as the election winner and bizarrely insisting that his “victory”—achieved only by massive corruption—is legitimate under the Afghan constitution.

Karzai-the-Reformed now asserts that he will clean up the corruption. How? No comment. Would some of the corrupt officials in his government be ousted? “These problems,” he responded, “cannot be solved by changing high-ranking officials.”

How can Obama and the generals even think of sending more Americans to die under the pretense that this guy’s “government” is worth saving?

For more information on Jim Hightower’s work—and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown—visit www.jimhightower.com.

Updated

It’s no secret: Rick Perry is a climate change denialist. Unlike even George W. Bush, Perry’s views on climate change haven’t evolved at all during his time in office. If anything, the governor has amped up the economic fear-mongering and become even more wrapped up in conspiracy theories as primary season unfolds.

Today, the EPA released its long-expected finding that greenhouse gasses endanger the public’s health and welfare. There is a long and wending road that led to this day involving the Supreme Court, years of delay and suppression of evidence by the Bush administration, and years of regulatory review.

But the long and the short of it is that the EPA finally recognized that climate change poses a threat to Americans in the form of heat waves, drought, increased ozone, rising sea-levels, etc.

Perry had a predictable response to the decision. Here’s the first part of the statement released by the governor’s office:

It is unconscionable that unelected bureaucrats at the EPA have declared carbon dioxide a public danger despite a lack of scientific evidence to support their ruling. This action should be of grave concern to all Americans, especially Texans, in light of the recent ‘Climategate’ scandal, which uncovered data had been manipulated and destroyed in order to falsely show a preordained result.

Actually, the EPA ruling deals with six greenhouse gasses, not just carbon dioxide.

But then Perry isn’t really interested in facts. Who believes that the governor actually consults with any of the state’s many climate scientists? (None that I’ve spoken to have been contacted.)

Or, that he or his key staff people have spent any time reading the nearly 500 page EPA endangerment finding, which includes 210 pages of detailed technical background, itself based on Lord-knows how many man-hours of research and analysis by scientists and governments around the world?

The governor is doing what the governor does: Tending to his base in the Republican grassroots, with its nasty anti-scientific streak. According to recent polling, the public’s recognition of human-caused global warming is slipping as the issue has become politicized. 

As the Washington Post has noted, “The increase in climate skepticism is driven largely by a shift within the GOP.”

The horrible irony of this trend is that – pseudo-scandals like “Climategate” notwithstanding – the scientific evidence for global warming has only grown. If anything, scientists are increasingly worried that the effects of global warming could be more catastrophic and happen more quickly than thought just a few years ago.

Perry is partially responsible for reinforcing the worst tendencies of his base. It’s a deeply irresponsible thing for any politician to do.

 

Update: I ran across this quote in a story about climate researchers receiving death threats. Sad to think that the governor of the nation’s second-largest state falls into this camp.

“We have always had a very vocal minority of people who have long since decided to ignore the science and the data and take a deliberately and completely contrarian view, and who have always and constantly accused (all) climate scientists of falsehood and being in it for the money,” said Andy Ridgwell, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol.

“They have been playing Chicken Little and claiming the sky is falling in on climate science for a decade. There is nothing left that is new or different that they can (falsely) claim or accuse us of.”

Could there be hundreds of innocent people serving time in Texas prisons on faulty arson convictions?

I raise that question in a feature story — headlined “Fire and Innocence” — that we posted online yesterday afternoon. This is the fourth story in my Burn Patterns series on flawed arson convictions in Texas. (You can read the previous stories here, here and here.)

The widespread problems with forensic arson evidence has become a national story lately thanks largely to the Cameron Todd Willingham case. (Willingham, executed in 2004, was likely innocent.  If you’re not familiar with the case, go here or here.)

In my series, I’ve tried to show that while Willingham’s case — and, to a slightly lesser extent, the case of Ernest Ray Willis — are the most well-known examples of flawed arson forensics wrongly convicting Texas defendants, they’re far from alone.

Nearly 800 people are serving sentences in Texas prisons on arson convictions. How many might be innocent? Hard to know for sure. But there’s evidence that points to a number in the hundreds.

Gerald Hurst — the Austin-based fire and explosives expert who was the first fire scientist to raise questions about Willingham’s conviction — estimates that 30 to 50 percent of all arson cases could be flawed. In Texas, that would total 250 to 400 people.

I know what you’re thinking: Could it really be that high? I was skeptical at first too.

But then I looked at numbers from Texas’ State Fire Marshal’s Office, and they sent a chill up my spine.

In the past decade — as the new truth about arson forensics penetrated the fire-investigation community — the number of arsons in Texas has fallen more than 60 percent.

I’ll say that again: Arsons fell more than 60 percent in just 10 years.

In 1997, investigators found nearly 16,000 arsons in Texas. In 2007, that number was just under 6,000. Meanwhile, the overall number of fires remained fairly constant — just a lot fewer of them were ruled arson.

(You can find the Fire Marshal’s numbers here.)

What explains that? Are there just fewer arsonists running around? Seems unlikely.

The more probable explanation is that, as the new understanding of fire science becomes more well known, investigators are getting it right more often. In other words, investigators are now correctly interpreting accidental fires that would have been ruled arson in years past.

Given those numbers, it’s reasonable to conclude that 30 to 50 percent of all arson cases could be flawed.

That could mean hundreds of wrongly convicted prisoners.

Yet, so far, the only people looking at older arson convictions are nonprofits like the Innocence Project and a handful of reporters — none of whom really have the resources for a comprehensive review.

This issue desperately needs the attention of state lawmakers. They need to move beyond the Willingham controversy and look at the bigger problem.