the browntable

You’d think by now anybody with sense would feel ridiculous promising fast cash through easy loans. Alas, not Magic Johnson. It’s tax season, and he’s shaking his enchanted moneymaker for one of the oldest, most predatory lending scams in the business: high-priced payday loans. “It’s money like Magic,” Johnson beams in TV and web ads…

The Obama administration is announcing that this year’s traditional Easter egg roll on the South Lawn of the White House will be run in Web 2.0 style. From the news release: For the first time, tickets for the Easter Egg Roll will be distributed online so that more children and families from across the United…

A recent trend piece in the NEW YORK TIMES continued the public parsing of the “Crihanna” debacle. Attitudes toward domestic violence among the teenagers interviewed for the story are disturbingly blasé. From the story: “[Rihanna] probably feels bad that it was her fault, so she took him back.” Her friend nodded. “I don’t think he’ll…

The NEW YORK DAILY NEWS’ Mike Lupica might want to think about sticking to sports. This morning, Lupica went full metal hatchet on President Barack Obama’s in-progress media campaign. Lupica, whose own “The Mike Lupica Show” on ESPN2 was cancelled after only a handful of episodes, took the president to task for doing a series…

I spent the afternoon that the war in Iraq started in a mosque in Paris. When the news of the invasion broke, my group, taking tea in the café within the compound, fled. We had already tried to shed our American accents—tensions had been running high for the previous months, as a Metro bioterror scare…

I was in a taxi, about a mile from the World Trade Center, when the first plane hit on September 11. I remember the streets of New York being filled with smoke, and people wandering around dazed, like something out of a doomsday movie. I remember the free-floating fear, and thinking, “We are at war.”…

I’m one of those Rep. Charlie Rangel has complained about from the outset: I haven’t had to sacrifice much for George Bush’s war. I’m an East Coast, college-educated, yuppie, liberal gay. My friends don’t join the armed forces. The last family member to do so fought in Korea. Sure, I’ve marched, I’ve declaimed, I’ve voted…

As if Wednesday’s public Congressional flogging of AIG head Edward M. Liddy weren’t enough, pitchforks, frothing mouths and Molotovs are still a concern for the insurance giant. A leaked AIG internal memo suggests the corporation has finally noticed the outrage (from Barack Obama, no less!) directed at its brazen pillaging of the US Treasury. And AIG is not the kind of company…

Web advocacy group ColorOfChange.org has its members hounding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his band of Southern-guv rebels over their refusal to use stimulus cash. (I’ve worked for ColorOfChange.org as a consultant.) More than 600 of the group’s members bombarded Sanford’s office with calls earlier this week, and 28,000 had signed a petition demanding…

I have a theory about that campaign stop almost exactly a year ago, where President Barack Obama bowled miserably at Pleasant Valley Bowl in Altoona, Pennsylvania. For better or worse, most of the time a black candidate doesn’t have to worry about convincing voters that he’s got some basic coordination and rhythm. Since Obama already…