I spanked Mike Pintek

Rhetorically, of course.

Yesterday was Good Friday and so I was off work with nothing to do but laundry. I'd been told by the Other Political Junkie that Mike Pintek was the guest host for Honsberger Live! so I wanted to see how he was doing.

At the beginning of the program (just after the "after-hours" calls) he began to rant a bit about "the guy in Mexico" who was arrested for burning a Mexican flag. This really got Pintek's goat. "You can burn an American Flag," Pintek complained, "But you get arrested for burning a Mexican flag." (I am doing this by memory so the quotations may not be exact.)

He also did the "liberal media bias" dance for a few seconds.

I did a little research found this and then called in. Here's the piece in its entirety:

A Tucson man who burned a Mexican flag at a counterprotest to an immigration rally Monday faces criminal charges, police said.

Police booked anti-immigration activist Roy Warden on reckless-burning charges after reviewing televised footage and their own video of the events. They also booked him on assault charges for reportedly pushing a TV cameraman and for damaging the shuffleboard area at the city park where he torched the flag.

There is no Arizona law prohibiting the burning of any flag, but reckless-burning charges can be filed if a fire damages a structure or property, police Sgt. Decio Hopffer said. More arrests may be made, Hopffer said.

Warden was cited and released, Hopffer said. He was ordered to appear in Tucson City Court on April 24.

Warden is the leader of the Border Guardians group and led counterprotesters in Tucson during Monday's protests by immigrant rights activists.

Take a look again. Why was the guy arrested? For something called "reckless burning." The article says that such charges can be filed if "a fire damages a structure or property." So the type of flag had nothing to do with the arrest. It could have been a Canadian flag or a Honsberger Fan Club flag. The issue at hand is the damage allegedly caused by the burning, not the country the flag represented.

Then there's the alleged "pushing of the cameraman" part of the story.

Neither of which actually made it into Pintek's rant. All this from a guy who minutes before was complaining about a liberal media bias. But he was the one who got the facts wrong and he was the one spinning for his own political purposes.

When I confronted Mr. Pintek with this, he began to spin even more. He started down a series of speculations "you know that if it were an American flag, the guy would not have been arrested..." and so on.

When can we begin to talk about Pintek's conservative bias?