Mar
06

The Devil You Know

The Devil You know

I haven’t been completely disappointed by the GOP primary circus these past several months.

In the fall, things seemed so promising. We had the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry still in the race–with Sarah Palin not yet totally out of it. But Ms. Palin proved no more than a chimera (go figure), and the other three, along with Mister 999–Herman Cain–each disappeared after one hot minute under the kleig lights of honest-to-goodness fact-checking and reasonably clear-eyed analysis that sometimes infects media coverage in a major political campaign.

So we’ve been left for months with just Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney trying to muster a challenge to Barack Obama from the disparate yearnings of, as Hendrick Hertzberg recently put it in the New Yorker,

[the] excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists

who make up the Republican “base” today.

Read more…

Jan
01

The Best is Yet to Come

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. The dark decade of the two thousand aughts is now a full year in the rear-view mirror and for some, the time has never been better to move forward with a foot on the gas. Read more…

Jul
07

My Dinner With Barack

Say what you will about Barack Obama, the brother keeps in touch.

I gave his campaign $50 shortly after it achieved inevitability in the spring of 2008, not long after I’d been laid off from my last secure, well, my last well-paying job — and about a year before the money ran out.

He’s kept me posted ever since.

Read more…

Jun
22

This Made My Head Explode

The Internet and technology continue to – in the immortal words of the great Muhammad Ali – stun and amaze ya, don’t they?

National Geographic has what, to the naked eye, appears to be a gorgeous, if somewhat pedestrian photo of the Grand Canyon on its website. It’s the photo you see pictured above.

What may cause your head to explode is what you’ll find by clicking in the yellow frame (which can be moved to any place on the photo) — it’s an infinite photograph, with seemingly every pixel being comprised of hundreds of other photographs, all submitted by users to the Geographic site, MyShot.

Wow. Just, wow.

Nov
18

Get Your Story Straight, Honey

I may have to renew my subscription to Mother Jones.  One of my favorite D.C. journalists, David Corn, has a piece up on the MJ blog today showing that the everpresenteverywhere Sarah Palin is just as mealymouthed as any of the unprincipled, career politicians she makes such a big deal out of trying to contrast with her in-touch-with-the-American-people-commonsense-conservative self.

The quote from her now-legendary interview with Katie Couric illustrates classically Ms. Palin’s otherworldly grasp of the issues of the day and the piece in whole gives rise to the question why other journalists in the “lamestream media” don’t call her on her hypocrisy as a matter of course.

Oh, right; she won’t talk to anyone in that particular cohort.  

Nov
09

This is How the Terrorists Won, Pt.2

I was speaking not long ago with a former law school classmate and we were ruminating on how the most sacrosanct constitutional right had come to be not the right to privacy — only the most naive among us ever believed that one — nor the right to Life (certainly not in the last remaining First World nation to still execute its prisoners), but the right, or freedom, to travel.

Interestingly enough, the Supreme Court didn’t enshrine it so out of beneficent respect for any freedom of the individual but rather as a vehicle for upholding the state’s authority to regulate (read: promote) interstate commerce.

Be that as it may, the eventual resolution of the ACLU’s lawsuit on behalf of 17 U.S. citizens and legal residents challenging their placement on the U.S. government’s No-Fly List and the failure of the government to give them a chance to defend themselves ought to be pretty interesting.

Read this sad tale to understand just one more reason why you ought to have little confidence an any assertion that says your constitutional rights have not diminished in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

And don’t think it couldn’t happen to you.

Nov
11

Live Lonnie Cam on the Internet

Stream videos at Ustream

I’ve started a webcam. You never know what you might find. Stop by sometime.

Jun
20

Movin’ On Up

I am pleased to report I have been following my heart and pursuing my dreams and making strides at becoming a writer. My work on the Open Salon group blogging project has been getting positive reaction and I have enjoyed the happy consequence of making new and interesting friends in the bargain. Salon’s editors promise the Open project will move from its current invitation-only status to a public release soon, so IJHTS readers will be able to see some of the things I’ve been up to and can check out the very high-level work of other members of the Open Salon community.

I am also very excited to have just begun blogging news and opinion pieces for WIRED magazine’s News Editor, Leander Kahney, on his Cult of Mac website. I’ll be putting up several pieces there Monday through Friday and actually will be getting paid to do so! Leander says he’s going to pay me, anyway – we’ll see how it goes. Stop on by regularly to keep up with Apple and Mac-related developments, post some comments to my pieces and Digg them, too. If i can help Leander drive more traffic to his site I just might be able to afford to remain in the Bay Area for a while longer.

And finally, I’m still doing some stuff on occasion for MacLife magazine. I had a long feature piece in the June issue, with a profile of US Olympic swimmer and world record holder Nathalie Coughlin coming up in the July issue, so that gig’s coming along, too. Links to everything I’ve done for MacLife should be available here.

May
06

How Low Can You Go?

This post was originally published at OpenSalon, a beta-test group blogging project of Salon Media.

I‚Äôm going to think out loud, if you don‚Äôt mind. I‚Äôve been ruminating on something for a while now and I would like to indulge the openness and apparent civility of this forum to throw some very incompletely formed ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Maybe we‚Äôll end up with a collective Rorschach test that can tell us something about ourselves, or maybe, as with making so much spaghetti back in college, we‚Äôll just end up with strands of uncooked pasta and a mess on the kitchen wall. Read more…

Apr
28

That Didn’t Take Long

ABC News reports Miley Cyrus, Disney’s most recent pre-pubescent cash cow, is officially “embarrassed” by photographs set to appear in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, in which the 15 year-old star of Disney’s hit TV show “Hannah Montana” appears clutching a satin sheet to her naked breast.

Framed in festive graphics with bubblegum hues of pink and purple, Miss Cyrus currently adorns the bedroom walls, backpacks, lunchboxes and projected star-fantasies of millions of young girls across the globe. She has headlined sellout concerts of 10,000-seat plus arenas for much of the past two years and sold several million records of saccharine flavored countrypoppyrock music.

But having the whole world in her hand is never enough and a girl’s got to grow, right? Read more…

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