There have been a lot of post-mortems in the wake of the disturbing passage of Proposition 8 in California, which would have upheld the state Supreme Court’s decision in May to allow same-sex marriages. Protesters have taken to the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco voicing their dissent. Some have marched on the steps of the Mormon temples, especially since it’s been revealed that LDS money from Utah helped fund the Yes on 8 campaign throughout the state. Tens of thousands have also taken to signing petitions that seek to overturn the vote.  Other petitions charge that because of its overt involvement in the campaign, the Mormon Church should lose its precious tax exemption status. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s it?!

Governments sign agreements or treaties, even arms control deals every day. Armed conflicts find resolutions or ceasefires. Mergers between companies that run into the billions happen all the time. Tribes sit down and settle centuries-old differences every so often. Marriages end in divorce, sure, but every once in a while there are reconciliations. People do find a way to patch things up. Sometimes it takes some special intervention to make things a little more peaceful. Read the rest of this entry »

Where do I vote in California?

It can be tricky - voting stations move and don’t always send location-change information.  Below is a list of California polling places (addresses, phone numbers, and a relevant website if available) so you can find your designated voting location and get out there and make things happen.

Currently, Calvoter.org is jam-packed with visitors and the site is teetering due to the large (and very refreshing) demand for info on where to cast your ballot.

You can also call the Voter Assistance Hotline 1-800-345-VOTE for additional information, should the list below not have what you’re looking for.

OR Give Google’s new 2008 US Voter Info a shot and enter the home address where you are registered to vote:

Alameda (01)
1225 Fallon Street, Room G-1
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 272-6973

www.smartvoter.org/ca/alm/

Alpine (02)
PO Box 158
Markleeville, CA 96120
(530) 694-2281
No Polling Place Look-Up Available Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve got free donuts and a free scoop of ice cream. Now on November 4, Starbucks wants to reward you voters with a free cup of coffee. Launched last night on “Saturday Night Live”, the commercial, part of the “Shared Planet” campaign, states that everyone who votes will get a cup of Starbucks coffee. Sounds like a deal. Now would you believe there are people who actually have a problem with this? KCBS-TV in Los Angeles apparently has questioned the legality of providing what could be seen as bribes to voters.

There is a California Elections Code, section 18521 (b), which prohibits rewarding people for voting or not voting. Another California companion statute contains similar language, saying the law is meant to prevent people from being bribed with money, food or alcohol. Technically speaking, any violation of the law could get you a prison sentence of 16 months to 3 years. Read the rest of this entry »

From the Huffington Post this afternoon, a deliriously rich and successful prank on Sarah Palin. Montreal’s own Masked Avengers somehow got on CKOI radio and managed to snag Palin’s people on the phone with the tasty bait that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France wanted to say hello. How on earth would this possibly happen? Aren’t Palin’s people a little suspicious of a head of state using a Quebec radio station to spread a little last-minute campaign cheer? This is a radio station! Idiot DJs, only in this case the Masked Avengers have been successful before in hoodwinking celebrities like Queen Elizabeth, Jacques Chirac, Bono and Donald Trump before. With folksy Sarah Palin, they have landed on a goldmine because in the following five minutes, not only does the interviewer or the pretend-President Sarkozy not lose his composure, but Palin just keeps up that fawning, down-home charm and spunk that she’s famous for—and is essentially clueless. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever wonder what it would be like to have your entire online world babysat, censored and ultimately severed by the biggest brother you could possibly imagine?

And no, I’m not referring to the brazen site blocking efforts put forth by our friends at Panera Bread…

It should come as no surprise at the mention of the extreme and unrelenting efforts the Chinese government have gone through to make sure that its population remain “untainted” and live lifestyles that are “good for the national interest”.  No outside politics, no unfettered human rights declarations, and.. no religion too.

But as menacing and severe as this seems, Read the rest of this entry »

The start of the “Rachel Maddow Show” on October 10 made for some pretty arresting TV. The daily MSNBC talk show, which premiered in late September, had as its lead topic the increasingly hateful and obnoxious crowds that have been whipped up as some sort of strategy by both John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. Things had reached a breaking point, and so too, had the 31-year old host, herself an incisive political analyst, Stanford-educated and a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. That Friday was also the day that John McCain ran into a nasty crowd and tried to placate it by saying that that Obama “was an honorable man” while supporters tried to boo him. One elderly woman went so far as to call Obama an “Arab” as she stood there, microphone in hand, as McCain quickly tried to correct her. It was both an uncomfortable and remarkable moment. This is where the McCain/Palin campaign, so bereft of message and purpose and cynical enough to have us believe it’s better to simply smear, that it has now been able to rile up people in ways that have become coarse and divisive, and sometimes downright dangerous. Read the rest of this entry »

It was about five years ago that I first discovered Robin Thicke. I didn’t quite know what to make of him then –and perhaps even now. Featured as a VH-1 artist “You Oughta Know”, he appeared in a heavily-hyped video for a song called “When I Get You Alone”, which itself was pretty bold. An ambitious take on Walter Murphy’s disco anthem “A Fifth of Beethoven”, “When I Get You Alone” showed a long-haired Thicke rolling up and down Manhattan streets on a bicycle working as a courier. The long hair was memorable, especially since now he prefers a much shorter, controlled ‘do, but the song also seemed to defy any classification. Perhaps because of this, Thicke’s first single and album, “Cherry Blue Skies” were not successes when released in 2002, despite the marketing efforts of hip-hop producer and President of Uptown Records,  Andre Harrell, who became the guru and mastermind behind Thicke’s career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, indeed, the sane and thoughtful political discourse in this country is alive and well, thanks to Diddy’s latest video blog entry from his site on Bad Boy Records. John McCain, and not Sarah Palin, he says, scares him because of the “That one” remark from Tuesday’s debate. Diddy has TiVo? Looks like he just replayed it. Incredulous, he likens this remark to something that could be said “in 1962” when in fact “it’s 2008”. What is a multi-millionaire mogul rapper-stylist-baggy-clothes-designer-NY-bon-vivant-general nuisance supposed to do? He tells us he really could “say something” here that’s “insane”, but, whew, he spares us what he is really thinking. What a relief.

Memo to Diddy:

If you really want to see something scary, try turning on your TV to Read the rest of this entry »

Sry 2 Say

According to Nielsen Mobile, Americans have become little more than touch-typing androids:  sending 1’s and 0’s to one another as a means of communication.

As of the fourth quarter of 2007, it turns out that US cell subscribers sent text messages more than they phoned - for the first time ever. And since then, the averages subscriber’s # of text messages has increased 64 percent as the # of actual calls (what are those?) has dropped slightly.

According to the folks at Nielsen, this is all attributed to spread of the new QWERTY-style kepads on cellphones. QWERTY owners send 54 percent MORE text messages than folks with ordinary keypads.

Additionally, companies are now offering larger text messaging plans (unlimited in many cases) where it actually makes more financial sense to send a few lines of text than to engage in a full-on conversation that could potentially put you over your monthly minute threshold.

By far, the most prolific texters are teenagers ages 13-17, who pump out 1,742 messages a month, according to Nielsen Mobile. Read the rest of this entry »

We really hope this doesn’t get more attention. We mean it. This video clip serves no escapist or entertainment purpose. Of course it is NSFW, and even saying this seems far too lenient. No one should or would derive any pleasure by watching a second of this most ultimate of fame-whorish trash that has been seen recently in celebrity-dom. No, you can’t catch it on TMZ or Perez Hilton, or even the more mainstream celebutard magazine sites like People or US Weekly. Nope, this one’s far too crude and lascivious. In fact, we’d say it’s exploitative because it is also profoundly distressing.

On September 13, 2008, Janet Jackson brought her enormous and elaborately-staged show to the Oracle Arena in Oakland Arena for her “Rock Witchu” tour. It’s been a tough year for Miss Janet. Her last album, “Discipline”, which featured several interludes of her talking to a computer named Keiko, was a disappointment, both commercially and artistically. This is Janet’s third (or so) failed comeback for her, and her career has been in a consistent freefall in the past few years, especially since she bared her famous breasts to the world during the Super Bowl in Houston in 2004.

So what’s a girl gotta do –a girl of 42, mind you –to restore a career as Read the rest of this entry »

Well that didn’t take long. Not even 24 hours had passed since John McCain, in only his reportedly second meeting, announced that Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska would be his running mate, that the knives have come out from all corners. While social conservative types like Pat Buchanan (whom Palin supported in 2000) and Rush Limbaugh are beyond themselves in rapturous excitement, much of the media and other rational heads have called the pick the single biggest political gamble they had ever seen in modern American history. Ed Rollins, former Reagan henchman and former supporter of Mike Huckabee, has admitted just as much. David Gergen, former administration official under both Republican and Democratic White Houses, an Independent and respected analyst, told Wolf Blitzer he had not seen this coming. A gamble, yes, but one that had potential to possibly ruin McCain’s chances to be President.

The usual suspect of Democrats or Clintonistas are naturally apoplectic. Horny toad James Carville declared himself at “a loss for words” to Larry King on Friday night. This before taking apart Stepford Wifish Nancy Pfotenhauer, once respectable economist-turned McCain acolyte on payroll for repeating over and over again that Palin was the most popular governor in the country right now. As if that brings experience and as if the former mayor of Wasilla, AK three years ago is poised to become Commander in Chief should, God forbid, something happen in the next few years to the 72-year-old McCain. To think this was the most qualified of all Republicans –even, to take the female argument, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas—that McCain could have chosen only points to the political contrivance of this all. Read the rest of this entry »

The Class Action

In the Class Action filed in 2007, Plaintiff alleges that VW knowingly concealed, suppressed and omitted to disclose to consumers that Class Vehicles contained defectively designed timing belt tensioners, timing belts and/or associated parts (”timing belt system”), and that VW failed to disclose and/or misrepresented the appropriate service interval for replacement of the timing belt system in Settlement Class Vehicles. VW has denied any defect, wrongdoing or liability whatsoever and deny that this lawsuit could properly be certified as a class action for trial.

Has yours snapped yet?

Mine did. And it was a thoroughly sickening and indignant episode that occurred during an extremely heavy commute time, on a dangerous and well-traveled curve in the road, along one of the most congested streets in all of Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the end of summer. Time to pack in all those pool parties, the outdoor barbecues, and maybe have one more fling out on the beach before –ugh—school or work starts in earnest in September. Summers are, after all, made for relaxing and not really having a worry in the world. High gas prices? Pschaw! Georgia being pelted by Russian surface-to-air-missiles? Where’s Georgia? (Or where’s Russia?) Democratic Convention starting tomorrow in Denver? Ugh. What a snoozefest. Offshore drilling as a strategy to help the energy crisis? Offshore what? Dude, let me get back to my tunes. Don’t we want to remember this time for all the cool tunes that summers are made for?

There is some truth in this. Every summer does seem to have a song that gets a lot of airplay and seems to blare out of every speaker, window sill, bodega, monster SUV, or requisite poolside. Only now we don’t really say “airplay” too much anymore, now that we are in the MP3 age. That iTunes is the most preeminent venue for consuming music and, in the parlance of the record industry, it’s the place where all the new music “drops” every Tuesday. And given that a lot of young people are home during the summer, what better time to focus on those songs that linger, those tunes that you just can’t get out of your head, no matter how hard you try. Read the rest of this entry »

Your DIEBOLD Vote Hasn’t Counted For a Decade

Are you a lucky lotto winner? I hope so.  With the recent announcement from the e-Voting champions themselves stating that their e-machines are inherently flawed and that they have been dropping votes for years, the chances of getting your vote through and making it count are as slim as they’ve ever been - but for a change, you’re now painfully aware.

The logic error is present in both types of voting machines made by the company: touchscreens and optical scan systems. These machines are used in 34 states (1,750 jurisdictions). For example, in Ohio’s March primaries, it is known that the machines temporarily lost 1,000 ballots.

The e-Voting machines “contain a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point”.

Clearly the most shameful element of this scandal and recent admission is that Diebold (ahem… now Premier Voting Solutions) has previously denied any malfunction or impropriety in their e-machines, and they have continued to Read the rest of this entry »

The Scenario

So you went a little nuts on your MySpace profile - you posted your age, your interests, some of your funniest home movies and the secret spots you like to frequent on Saturday following your morning dog walk. It felt freeing and liberating to tout your spot in this world and advertise your status to your online “friends”.

And it exploded from there: you started posting in public forums without hesitating to include your full, given name (so you can get credit for your impassioned responses), then proceeded to open numerous accounts on the Facebooks, Friendsters, LinkedIns and Meebos of the world. You even dropped your digits at one point on Craigslist, where they remain cached to this day on Yahoo!. There’s no question about it: you’re now officially “out there”.

But as your friends began to accumulate and as your forum posts became popular (and distributed), your online presence began to balloon to uncontrollable (and uncomfortable) proportions. Personal commentary, asides and intimate information usually reserved for loved ones was now on public display - an inadvertent consequence of your own making.

And with the recent advent of employers checking potential job candidates online before making their hiring decisions, it might be wise for the current job-seeker to Read the rest of this entry »