(Screencap: Ebay)

It seems as if poor, poor Glenn Beck is the next sympathetic figure to be punished by eBay's Machiavellian auction rules. After submerging an Obama statue in what he claimed to be a glass case of his own urine, he decided to auction the piece of "art" off, with proceeds benefitting his own charity, Mercury One. Someone actually offered $11,300 for the statue, maturely named "Obama in Pee Pee," before eBay swooped in and shut the whole thing down.

Wrote Ebay:

Your listing contain the bodily fluid of urine. We do not allow bodily fluids to be listed on our site. Even if the liquid in the jar is not urine, you are describing it as such.

Now, Mr. Beck is soliciting donations via Gmail, because this is Amurrica, dammit.

The whole thing was meant to be some sort of comment on a piece of artwork where a dude peed on a cross, but really it just made us all acknowledge, once again, that Glenn Beck exists.

But the icing on the cake is that Beck named his new venture Markdown.com.

Seems simple, easy to remember and relevant to the business at hand. Except that uber-famous Apple blogger John Gruber created a product named Markdown years ago. And he owns the twitter account @ markdown. And he hates Glenn Beck.

Markdown is a, "Plain text to HTML converter, relying on standardised but natural formatting syntax in the plain text." It was created by Gruber and activist programmer Aaron Swartz, who was part of Y Combinator's first summer class.

Gruber wasn't shy about pointing at that Beck's rants amount to a variety of "Nazi Tourettes". He took personal offense when Beck called out his hometown of Philly.

As Anil Dash pointed out, "I'm sure Glenn Beck starting a new business with a name that @Gruber's owned in Google for a decade will end well."

Type Markdown into Google and the first five results belong to Gruber. That's going to be a tough hill for Beck's new venture to climb.

And with a Twitter account by the same name, @Markdown could easily make life hell for Beck. "And I expect John will :)" tweeted Swartz.