I see yo are in favor of ruby, assembler is out of the question, and it is definetely true that a programmer should know more then just one programming language (I personally know Logo, BASIC, Pascal, C, Perl, shell, and some markup-languages and even TeX ;-) ), but:
You've got to start with one.
I know Ruby does have it's beauties, and as far as I know it is the only programming language where you can write a multi-threaded HTML-server in only for lines of code ... but this is of no interest to someone, who - as you yourself empathised -
wants to learn programming.
If you are completely new to the topic, Python is your choice.
Again: I am far from being religious, computers (including things like software) are tools, and it is always best to use the tool that fits your needs best. For a beginner, before python came into existence, I would have recommended LOGO albeit it's limited practical use, now for python being in this world, I recommend python.
Another point: The One Laptop Per Child-Projekt (see
http://laptop.org/ for further information) uses python for a programming language. There is a reason for this.
If you wanna make advertising for a programming language for web2.0-apps or so, then name it. For beginners/learners, python is definetely the best choice.