Am I the only one to notice the coincidence that the Tea Party Convention met in Nashville, which is also the title of a 1975 Robert Altman movie about (among other things) an anti-establishment presidential candidate? Hal Phillip Walker, the standard-bearer of the Replacement Party, would have felt at home last weekend in Nashville.
Walker's populist platform included forbidding lawye… Continue

In the first midterm election of the year, with the U.S. Senate seat once occupied by President Barack Obama up for grabs, voters sent a moderate five-term congressman from a wealthy suburb to face off against a 33-year-old state Treasurer who used to play basketball with the president.
Mark Kirk, the Republican congressman, won his primary by nearly 40 percentage points, according to the… Continue

You know how everyone slows down on the freeway to look at a car wreck? The equivalent happened for Conan O'Brien's last appearance as host of "The Tonight Show."
After weeks of controversy over NBC's efforts to return Jay Leno to the late-night schedule and O'Brien's decision to leave rather than get pushed back to a post-midnight starting time, 10.3 million people turned ou… Continue

Apple unveiled their mobile computing tablet on January 27 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco.
Many tech sites provided live updates from the event on their blogs and some even broadcasted the event live to the web via their iPhone. The quality was somewhat lacking in these broadcasts and it was often difficult to see clear images of the… Continue

Runners who eschew shoes may be less likely to do serious injury to their feet, because they hold their feet differently, Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and colleagues found.
Writing in the journal Nature, they said runners who wear shoes tend to hit the ground with their heels first, whereas barefoot runners put the balls of the feet down f… Continue