By way of introduction to my brand spanking new (8-month old) blog, I will blast some chuckleheads who fancy themselves "conservatives."

This past weekend, I interviewed with Ricky Spero for The Context Machine portion the TMO Weekly Round up (iTunes Link).

The Weekly Roundup is a weekly podcast recapping the week’s Apple and related-tech news. It’s great for you folks looking to catch up on everything in one great-sounding podcast. The Context Machine (a name I LOVE) is an analysis segment where Ricky brings on TMO editors to dissect the news, to give it more context, and to offer our opinions on what it means.

This particular show, we talked most about the recent house bill that attempts to stop online poker, while protecting online horse betting and online lotteries. In addition to this bill being hypocritical, pointless, and un-American, it’s real intent is not to stop online gambling (never mind that poker is a game of skill), but rather to be a handy wedge issue for the upcoming midterm elections in the States. It’s pandering to the fundamentalist Christians who don’t get that they’re merely the other side of the Taliban coin.

The Republican party wants to be able to run adds saying that this person or that person supports gambling because they voted against the bill, and they want to bring the fundamentalists to the polls. That they do so while protecting other forms of gambling is just mind-numblingly ballsy, but there you have it.

Now, I said as much in my interview with Ricky, and that of course has already drawn out those "conservatives" who prefer to squelch opinions that differ from theirs, rather than engaging in a conversation about such issues.

It, "used to be good about Macs," writes one illiterate chump at iTunes in a review of the podcast. iTunes user ravenmick is unsubscribing to the podcast, "after such a liberal diatribe FOR online gambling!!!" Never mind that true conservatives want small government that doesn’t intrude on our moral and private lives, criticizing efforts by the government to curtail our freedoms is the equivalent of a liberal diatribe.

"Be objective," he advises, "and report the news not your opinion."

::blink::

It’s The Context Machine, you dolt. It is not reporting at all.

And, frankly, I stand behind our record at TMO and iPO for reporting the news in an unbiased fashion for the last 8 years.

Kyle, however, wrote in to me to tell me in a much more effective and well-written manner that I go too far when I say that laws protecting big media at the expense of our individual rights is an aspect of fascism (my context to his comments), or when I discuss the poker bill in the terms described above.

Now, I’ve gotten this kind of crap from readers and listeners for almost a decade, so I’m pretty used to it. On a few occasions, I’ve had those on the left accuse me of being a conservative, especially when I’ve voiced my opinion about pirates and thieves. Most of the time, though, it’s people on the right who like to label me a liberal right after telling me I have no business expressing an opinion.

Every once in a while, someone like Kyle comes along who does so in a very mature and intelligent fashion. Most of the time, though, it’s an idiot hick who has no idea what freedom means, and even less understanding of what "America" means.

And it’s no coincidence that such attacks have increased in recent years as Karl Rove and the rest of the Republican leadership has so successfully hoodwinked the Midwest and so many blue collar folks into believing that their interests are aligned.

Of course, all of this is completely ignoring the little issue that I also criticized the Clinton administration for its own part in chasing online casinos offshore, a process only finished by Bush’s crew, not started. To "conservatives" (I use the quotes to differentiate between true conservatives and today’s concept of a conservative), by criticizing this poker legislation and naming the Republican party for the evil work it’s doing with this bill, I am a "liberal," and must be turned off or shut up.

Fortunately, I won’t give in to such pressure. My role at TMO has always been a mix of reporting, which I do in an unbiased fashion, and an editorialist who analysizes and dissects the news. It’s what I built the site on, and it won’t stop any time soon.

And when politics and technology cross, as it is increasingly doing, I will blast whomever and whatever is on the wrong side as I see it. That goes for Microsoft, Apple, pirates, Big Media, and Republicans/Democrats/the Green Party.

The Bush administration has stupefyingly arrested David Carruthers, the British subject who is CEO of BetOnSports.com, a British-based publicly traded online casino. The charges are racketeering, conspiracy and fraud related to doing business with U.S.-based customers. Perhaps it’s a thank you to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for sticking by the U.S. in its disastrous execution of the "War on Terror."

Bus Daly penned a nice diatribe against the insanity from the folks in DC focusing on gambling at a time when there are so many real problems in both the U.S. and the world (many of those problems caused by the administration itself, but that’s another issue).

An excerpt: "Uncle Sam is not the least bit deterred by all the bombs and other explosives that are wreaking havoc on civilization. No siree. Amidst all the death, carnage and threats to the existence of the U.S., Dubya is making the world safe for democracy by rounding up and arresting corporate gaming executives."

Zoinks! Apple turned in stellar quarterly results Wednesday, reporting its second highest revenue and earnings, which is not bad considering it’s the June quarter we’re talking about. The company sold a boat load of iPods (8.1 million), a lot of Macs (1.3 million), and the company’s higher education sales were through the roof (up 31% year over year).

There was a bit of angst heading into the quarter over iPod sales, and I think it safe to say that Apple surprised everyone. Certainly extended hours saw Apple trading higher by some 11.5% (at $58.83, up 6.07) when last I checked.

All that said, the biggest surprise to me was the fact that Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook were both a lot more open in a couple of situations where the company has historically been tighter than a drum head.

Surprise #1: Peter Oppenheimer told an analyst "We’re not sitting around doing nothing" when it comes to cell phones [Read TMO’s full coverage for more info.]. In the context of an analyst conference call, that’s pretty much the same as saying, "Dude, of course we’re working on a cell phone, but we’re not there yet.

That’s nothing short of a shocking revelation for a company that subpoena’s journalists to get their sources when those journalist leak an unannounced product.

Surprise #2: COO Tim Cook made strong statements about Boot Camp as a successful lure for Switchers. [Read TMO’s full coverage for more info.]

The quote: "We released the beta in April. The number of downloads that we’ve had are significant, and the customer feedback that we have had on Boot Camp is very, very good. It’s clear that for a Windows user that is considering switching to a Mac, that it makes it even more appealing to them to switch."

Keep in mind that Boot Camp is still a beta release, but that Apple was willing to go on record with the SEC as saying that Boot Camp is bringing money to the table. This isn’t the same sort of surprise as the cell phone comment, but Apple’s track record is to play coy when it comes to the specific impact a specific technology or product is having on sales.

Especially when it’s a beta product!

So what does this mean? Is Apple opening up? Maybe, but everyone was still mum on things like breaking down sales numbers by product, and other aspects of the future not pertaining to cell phones. It’s more likely that these are two issues that Apple felt so strongly (Boot Camp) or comfortable (cell phones) about, that it was willing to hint at the future just that little bit.

*In the interest of full disclosure, the author holds a small share in AAPL stock that was not an influence in the creation of this article.  

I joined the Poker Players Alliance today. This is a lobbying group looking to protect our rights as poker players, and to promote poker as a game of skill that should be regulated and taxed, not banned. The PPA has the support of a number of big name players, including Howard Lederer, Jesus Ferguson, Linda Johnson, Greg Raymer, and a host of others.

Join the organization today if you want to see this sport continue to grow and thrive, and to combat the forces of big government and the religious right that want take away Internet poker.

On a similar note, I noticed that the Alliance is holding a fund-raising rally (link requires a PR Newswire account) at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on July 28th, 2006. Contact the PPA for more information, as the rally has not yet been added to the organization’s Web site.

It’s hot. It’s not Texas hot. Texas hot sucks. But Bay Area hot is almost as bad because so few folks have AC. I don’t have AC. That makes the hot suck. Clearly, BTW, going from unseasonably cool weather to unseasonably blazing-hell hot is proof that our environment is not changing.

Or something.

I got WTFPWNed today playing poker. Gotta love those days, especially when it’s hot. Still it’s been a good month, and life is generally grand. That I have so little to complain about that whining about the heat is top priority is indicative that things are good.

Speaking of good, I am super proud of Darla right now. She’s been busting butt at work, and being very successful while doing so. Her new store opening has been a series of challenges, and she’s risen to meet every one of them. I love how competent and talented she is.

Quick note about a movie: Clerks II was pretty darned good. Darla had me watch the first one shortly before we left (didn’t much care for it, though I respect Kevin Smith’s accomplishment in making it for US$27,000). Second one was far more funny, and of course its budget was a tad larger. Roasario Dawson was terrific and fit right into the juvenile humor that is a hallmark of Jay and Silent Bob films. It’s not for everyone, far from it, but this uptight, doesn’t-like-potty-humor moviegoer enjoyed it (despite the potty humor).

Oh, and it’s still hot.

Let’s start this post out with a quick question: Are you against gay marriage? If you are, but you limit your "against" to disapproval, or even blanket condemnation, I’ll fight and die for your right to have those opinions, no matter how strongly I disagree (or agree) with them.

If, however, you want to legally ban gay marriage based on your own backwards religious beliefs, I posit that you’re an un-American ignoramus whose values threaten the very fabric of the United States of America. If you are of that persuasion, however, you can at least be confident that you are surrounded by million of other idiots who don’t understand what freedom means or what what civil liberties are.

Case in point, Washington State Supreme Court just ruled that the state legislature has the power to limit the rights of some of its citizens, while it extends those same rights to others. More specifically, the court ruled that the legislature has the power to restrict marriage to being between a man and a woman.

How is that even vaguely possible in a country allegedly based on freedoms and inalienable rights?

And that doesn’t even get into why in the world so many frightened Christians are running around screaming about how gay marriage threatens them or their idea of marriage.

"Today’s decision was a decisive and absolute victory for marriage as it has always been," the Seattle Times quoted Pastor Joseph Fuiten as saying in response to today’s ruling.

"Always been?" Are you kidding me you ignorant yokel?

"As a college student who’s not married but does want to be married and have a family sometime, I’m grateful the court isn’t redefining marriage," one Cassie Crawford, 20, told the paper.

For the love of [the lack of] god(s), why are you glad? What does two men or two women marrying each other have to do with you? Why is it that Christians are so threatened by this issue?

I’ve heard most, if not all, of the reasons for people against gay marriage:

• By tradition, marriage has always been one man, one woman - That’s a lie. I can’t specifically cite any examples of homosexual marriage (Rictor Norton says he can, but I can’t vouch for any of it), but marriage has certainly often been considered a union of one man and many women (rarely the opposite), or even between many men and women. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, and all manner of incestuous unions have also been called "marriage" since the dawn of recorded history. Marriage has even at times included property, animals, and who knows what else.
• The State has a vested interest in preserving marriage as being a vehicle for procreation - That’s a red herring, at best. Marriage has seldom ever required children to be issued from the union to make it official, and today we have many people choosing to remain childless. In addition, allowing Gay people doesn’t bloody well have any effect on heterosexual couple’s ability to have children in the first place. The truth is that with as many parentless children as there are in the world, having some marriages out there without natural-born kids isn’t a bloody bad idea.

  And, is the lack of kids really a problem in the U.S.?

• Homosexuality offends God - So what? The U.S. isn’t a theocracy, at least not yet, and limiting the rights of some in order to assuage the ego of a supposedly omniscient being is still un-American!
• Homosexuality is not natural - Says who? Your religion? See the above note.
• First gay marriage, then polygamy - Who gives a flying frack?

Etc. (Here’s an amazingly deceitful and twisted list of 10 reasons to oppose gay marriage.)

As a person who obsesses over understanding the little pieces of missing information that can make one person’s act appear irrational to another person, the fright spewing forth from the anti-gay marriage camp just escapes me.

I mean, I get the fact that some conservative Christians, Muslims, Jews, and maybe even Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Worshipers of the Great Rock (OK, scratch the last three, as it truly seems that radicalism is more common in the first four religions, and particularly in the first two) want to force everyone to live according to their, and only their, vision of the world, but there are an awful lot of otherwise sane Americans who are slavering at the mouth over this issue.

I just don’t get it.

History won’t get it, either. It may take 10, 20, or a 100 years, but time is going to eventually condemn all of you as the hateful, frightened, backward dolts that you are.

How is it that the lameness quotient of my fellow Americans seems to be ever-increasing? A couple of weeks ago, Darla and I were bowling with some friends (power outage, no AC, it was hot, etc.), and we noticed that the majority of our fellow bowlers were using bumpers.

Bumpers.

And almost all of these folks were adults. Worse yet, they would celebrate when they hit a few pens, even after bouncing the ball off the damned bumpers.

That’s just seriously lame.

On Sunday, we went to play some mini-golf. We had a great time ( I used to love playing Putt-Putt golf when I was a lad, though Darla soundly crushed me), but we noticed that we were surrounded by people who weren’t trying at all.

Wait, I did see a couple of kids that cared enough about "winning" to cheat.

Look, I am not being That Guyâ„¢ who obsessives about his bowling or his golf (I obsess about other things). I am not looking down on people who can’t putt well, or who can’t bowl, either; [the lack of] god(s) know(s) that I suck at both. It makes me sick, however, to see people high-fiving each other after moving the ball on the putting green, or getting a strike with a bank shot off the bowling bumpers.

Few people have any pride in what they do, and fewer still want any sort of a real challenge.

Why is that?

I’ll blame the forces of political correctness, and whatever umbrella housing the folks who forbid teachers from giving a failing grade to students lest it hurt their self-esteem.

Bah, that’s a longer post for another time, I think.

Top five favorite bands: The Who, Love & Rockets, The Church, David Bowie, The Beatles (not necessarily in that order at any given time).

With that as a background, Darla and I went to see The Church (their MySpace site has more information and is more up to date) last night in San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. It was a great show. Absolutely fantastic. Steven Kilbey’s voice is as captivating, smooth, silky, and enrapturing (is that a word?) as ever — even if he does look more like Lemmy these days than the charismatic and removed figure of his youth — and the band’s chops have only increased with time.

Indeed, one of the things I enjoyed the most was hearing so many songs played differently than their studio originals. Firstly, the guitarists (Marty Wilson-Piper and Peter Koppes) had only acoustic guitars, which provided for mostly, but not entirely, more mellow-interpretations of their work.

Above and beyond that, however, the band wasn’t afraid to play with their own compositions. There was a bossa nova version of "Almost with You" (I forgot to write down which tune that was, but I think it was that one), and lines from "Atmosphere," "Heroin," and "Because the Night" that were snuck into the middle of Unguarded Moment.

We also had a great introduction for "Under the Milky Way," that included a list of all the TV shows the song has been used on, including a forensic show called Cold Cuts. Accordingly, Steven sang "Sometimes when this morgue gets kind of empty…"

And we laughed.

One of the highlights of the night, though, was the almost lounge-lizard take on "Reptile." The song leapt about with utter abandon, changing from a hard rocking assault to a soft, laid back, piano-driven number with a jazzy beat throughout the 8 minute performance (the piano played the moving part throughout the song, which was interesting to me in that I have such strong memories of the original video with Marty playing said part and trying so hard to look cool).

"Reptile" ripped through the audience one way or another, and when an older fan next to me saw me again on our way out, he turned to me and said, "Man…That version of ‘Reptile’ was like…’Snakes on an Astral Plane,’ man."

Indeed it was.

The show was intimate, just a few hundred people in a great venue, and our seats were just above the stage, looking down. The Church is just as vital (to me) today as they were at the height of their limited fame in the late 1980s, and at least as interesting. I have their latest album (Uninvited like the Clouds) on the way for reviewing at iPodObserver.com.

Is there hope for our country? For our democracy? For our freedom and civil liberties? I become more concerned about these issues daily, as the Bush administration does its best to destroy the foundations of our civilization and ruin any and all of our credibility throughout the world.

I am guessing I’ll be writing about these subjects often through the remaining 29 months of Bush’s reign of terror over the U.S., but what has me riled up today is the idea of using torture in the process of "defending freedom." I refer to the secret detainment facilities we operate somewhere in eastern Europe, as well as the torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu-Gharib, and who knows where else.

Rolling Stone published an excellent article on the torture of a then 15 year old boy captured fighting for Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan shortly after he invasion of Afghanistan began. The boy was held until he was 16, where he could then be transferred to Gitmo on orders of George W. Bush, who unilaterally ruled that 16 year olds could be treated and tortured like adults.

This, despite treaties we’ve signed that consider 16 year olds to be children that are not subject to the same treatment as adults.

Now, Omar, the young man in question, was hell-bent on the destruction of the West, and was fighting to support the tyranny of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Because of that, he gets little or no sympathy from me, despite the fact that he was largely brainwashed by a father who urged Omar’s older brother to become a suicide bomber.

::blink::

And, Omar killed U.S. servicemen who allegedly tried to get him and his fellow fighters to surrender.

Again, not a lot of sympathy from me.

But he has effectively been tortured for the last several years. Beatings, environmental distress, drugs, pain, massive psychological damage…The whole works from an administration that redefined torture to basically not cover anything that doesn’t induce organ failure or death so that they could torture the bad guys for information.

All so they can defend democracy and freedom.

My problem with this is that when we torture folks, no matter how rotten they are, we become the bad guys, and we become the force of tyranny. This is what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donal Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of the neocons in power have turned us into, a tyrannical force that can do anything it wants to whomever it wishes. Neither laws, nor treaties, nor our Constitution, nor even common decency will get in their way.

And for what? What vital intelligence did Omar or the other hundreds of detainees in Gitmo have to give about Osama bin Laden? Clearly not much, because Osama is still on the loose, and these men have been tortured for years now.

In my name. In your name. In the name of the United States of America. The land of the free. The home of the brave.

These people have been tortured in our name.

Remember the way we were taught how evil the Viet Cong were for torturing our soldiers? Or the Japanese in WWII? Do you remember how we were taught that the Nazis were evil for the torture and killings they performed on Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, gypsies, and other "undesirables?" Do you remember learning about the horrors of the Soviet Gulags? Those were the bad guys.

The Bush administration has made us into the bad guys in the eyes of not only the undeserving swept up into Gitmo (as opposed to the true Al-Qaeda members who made up the minority of those taken there), but in the eyes of the rest of the world. The Bush administration has told the world that liberty, freedom, justice, and the American way of life are nothing but a pack of lies.

Of course, the Bush administration has also told U.S. citizens that those things mean nothing inside the country, either, as they have wiretapped us without warrants, searched our library records without warrants, threatened with imprisonment librarians who told anyone that records were searched, and in many and sundry other ways curtailed our freedoms and civil liberties.

All so they can defend democracy and freedom.

Does this sound to you like we are free, or like we are the force of good?

The bottom line is that no one can defend democracy or freedom with the tools of tyranny. Once the external enemy is defeated, all we will have left is more tyranny, making us no better than the religious fundamentalist nut jobs trying to destroy us.