No sooner do we note that South Carolina wants its Douchebag Trophy back from Arizona, than Arizona steps up to the plate:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

No, nothing at all. Not the “people shouting racial slander from their cars” while children painted, not the city councilman who complained that “the biggest picture on the building [is] a Black person” (actually Latino, but who’s counting), none of that.

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The presenter of this chart argues that the Internet has fucked up the instincts of American Youth for a good ride. But what catches our fogeyish attention is the base year, where we’re stuffed in the far-right gray column:

It’s a rarely acknowledged transformational shift that’s been going on under the noses of marketers for as long as 15 years: The automobile, once a rite of passage for American youth, is becoming less relevant to a growing number of people under 30.

As we’ve observed before, the Seventies Teens on that chart lived through the 1973 gas crisis, and have no excuse for seeing that the future will be a lot different than the past. (Although the Gulf Oil stop-motion commercials were really cool.) But as far as a “rite of passage”, well, you try living on the edge of town with a bike.

Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture? [Advertising Age, via Sully]

Fearing that Arizona was stealing the spotlight as The Most Batshit State in the Nation (Florida having long since ceded the race), South Carolina’s pack of Thoroughbred Assholes have been fighting hard to maintain the Palmetto State’s title.

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British Petroleum officials are having a hard time keeping their oil-slicked boots out of their mouths in the wake of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform which killed 11 workers and has resulted in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. To wit, its CEO, Tony Hayward, was forced by his PR flacks to apologize after he told Louisiana residents “I’d like my life back.”

Yeah, wouldn’t we all, especially the dead workers and dead wildlife.  BP’s attempts to block the media from capturing the extent of the damage, with the complicity of the Coast Guard, are starting to crack.  Apparently, so is their CEO.

Charlie Riedel from the Associated Press got images that would tear apart the most cynical and blackened of hearts, except, of course, the one belonging to a certain Halliburton executive/former vice-president who has seen his stock options go up 3,281% in one year, according to a Senate study.

The good people at the Natural Resources Defense Council are tirelessly covering and speaking out about this so-called “accident” and have compiled some of the bullshit spewing out of the mouth of BP CEO Hayward.

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Our favorite moment in Network is not the Mad As Hell Chorus, not the Black Nationalists arguing contract points with the network execs, not even Faye Dunaway literally having an orgasm over demographics.

No, our favorite moment is when Howard Beale is summoned to the office of Ned Beatty’s conglomerate chairman because he went too far:

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“Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said. ‘It’s crazy,’ one senior official said.” [NYT]

Meet the genius who’s generating all those marvelous Fake BP Tweets:

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them. I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement. As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting. People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

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