What do United States politics, a Canadian rock song, and a California computer company have in common? Here are some hints: the Pocket Veto, Freewill, and the App Store.

When the President of the United States is presented with a bill, she or he has 10 days to sign it, or veto it. If the President does not want to be seen as having acted in favor of or against some particular piece of legislation, he or she can simply put it in a pocket and wait for the clock to expire.

Or, as the Canadian rock band Rush once said: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Back in late August, Apple claimed not to have rejected the official Google Voice iPhone application. The company claimed it was still "studying" it.

Around that same time, Cerulean Studios submitted the amazing-looking Trillian for iPhone instant messaging application.

Over two months later, Apple has not taken action on either app. Neither app has (officially) been rejected, but they have not been accepted, either. In the case of the official Google Voice app, it feels very much like Apple has simply "pocketed" the application.

This is just becoming stupid. For the past year, we've heard from developers who have had their apps rejected from the App Store for the silliest of reasons. You know, the app might allow someone to access content that could also be accessed through Mobile Safari, it might display an Old-English translation of the Kama Sutra, or include potentially adult language; but this rejection wins the "most asinine rejection ever" award: Because we said so.

Meet Craig Robinson. Craig is an artist and illustrator. For the last ten years, he's been creating these extremely cool Minipops, tiny pixelated renditions of celebrities and musicians. Check out Radiohead and The Office (UK). These creations have built up a nice fanbase, and Craig even published a book, aptly titled Minipops, in several countries. When Yahoo! Music launched a few years ago, Minipops were featured.

So Craig and his friend Matt decided to create a Minipops iPhone app -- essentially a portable version of the Minipops collection, along with some clever commentary for each illustration and the chance to "guess" what each image represents. The app was rejected from the store under the guise of being potentially offensive. This was shocking, but the guys persevered and resubmitted the app. Once again, rejected. Originally, Craig thought it might have been his sometimes sarcastic commentary that was the offensive part, but the second e-mail made it clear that they found the pixelated illustrations themselves offensive.

Keep in mind, these illustrations are very, very cute -- and if anything, flatter the people they represent more than anything else. Plus, these illustrations have been published not only in Craig's own Minipops book, but used in various other media as well. A book about Michelle Obama will even feature the Minipops of the Obama family.

"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."

Opera Software CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said in a New York Times interview yesterday that its engineers have developed a version of the Opera web browser that works on the iPhone, but Apple has rejected it for the App Store because it competes with Safari.

This isn't unprecedented: Apple rejected an app called Podcaster possibly because it duplicates functionality in an upcoming version of the iPhone software. Podcaster was (for a time) available via ad-hoc distribution before that, too, was shut down.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggests that Apple rejected Opera because the browser included its own JavaScript interpreter, something forbidden by the iPhone SDK developer agreement.

Opera makes two flavors of its mobile web browser: Opera Mini for most mobile phones, BlackBerry, Palm, or Windows Mobile; and Opera Mobile, a more featured version for Symbian and Windows Mobile. A beta version of Opera Mini for Android is also in development.

Update: Gruber used his massive Rolodex over the weekend to determine through an unnamed source that the app may not have even been submitted to the App Store. Huh.

We know of a few iPhone applications that were unloved by Apple. What are we talking about? You know ... the cool iPhone applications that developers make -- then Apple doesn't approve of them, and they never see the light of day again (or maybe they do). Needless to say, there are probably more iPhone applications out there that we don't know about.

That is the basis of the iPhone Application Graveyard -- it is a website designed to document all of the rejected iPhone applications. The site is run by Peter Hosey of Growl and Adium fame. Developers can email him tidbits of information about their unloved application, and he will post it to the site.

Which rejected application do you wish you could have on the App Store?

An iPhone developer who created an app that manages and plays podcasts says the app was disqualified from the App Store because "it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes." That's right, iTunes for the desktop.

This opens up unsettling possibilities for other developers. There are many applications that duplicate the functionality of Apple software for both the desktop and mobile devices. For instance, there are many calculators that duplicate the functionality of Calculator. Twitterrific has a small browser built in, duplicating the functionality of Safari. NetNewsWire duplicates some RSS reading functionality in Mail for Mac OS X.

There's a well-defined slippery slope here. While Apple is within its rights to accept or reject any app into the App Store for whatever reasons it sees fit, its communication with the developer community leaves a lot to be desired. (We talked a little about this on last Sunday's Talkcast.) Even though the developer says he followed all the rules, there's still a chance that an app will simply fall ill of Apple's fickle fancy.

Will this latest move by Apple chill relations with developers? Or are the upsides still too great to ignore? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

Update: And commenters think I'm overreacting: Frasier Speirs, developer of Exposure, isn't writing any more iPhone apps because of this whole mummalum. [Via Metafilter.]

Thanks, Mike!