The election for mayor of New Orleans is coming up soon.  You might think someone would have to be crazy to want to be the mayor there right now.  You might be right — luckily, there are plenty of candidates who meet that requirement.

One of them is Kimberly Williamson Butler.  Various sources have been reporting over the past week or so about her campaign website, the banner image of which showed her on a New Orleans street corner in the French Quarter, proud to be in the city she loves.  Or, it seemed to.  But if you looked closely at the trash can in the background, you could see a Disney logo on it — Butler apparently had actually pasted her image digitally into a picture of the "New Orleans Square" section of Disneyland.

Makes sense.  You don’t want a picture of New Orleans on your website about running for mayor of New Orleans these days.  That place looks like crap right now.

Disney’s lawyers found out about this and told Butler to cease and desist using the Disney imagery.  The Butler campaign fixed the problem — by digitally erasing the trash can and leaving the picture of Disneyland on the site.  As Blogger Wonkette pointed out, wouldn’t it have taken even less time and effort to just go outside and take a picture of yourself on the streets of the actual city that you want to be mayor of, where you actually live?

As of yesterday, the picture had apparently been removed from Butler’s website, although it was hard to tell today because the site’s bandwidth limit has been exceeded, almost certainly due to all the bad publicity.  But you can see the original preserved at the link below.

Link: Boing Boing
Link: Wonkette
Link: Butler’s website (preserved in original form)