Our host, Blogsome.com, had some downtime for an upgrade. Now I’ve got to catch up on the things I wanted to post for the last couple of days….

Like saying how cool this is.

No words can adequately describe quite how breathtakingly cool this i.Tech Virtual Keyboard is. Bluetooth enabled, it uses infrared to project a clear and crisp keyboard onto your desktop, and then transfers your keystrokes via wireless networking to your PDA, Pocket PC or smart phone - it sounds far too futuristic to be true. But it’s very much for real, and it’s awesome.

Or this, about how Ben Franklin valued secrecy.

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant on calls between American citizens in the United States and people abroad who are, or are suspected of having ties to, terrorists?

Benjamin Franklin (whose 300th birthday is today) would not have thought so. In 1776 he and his four colleagues on the Continental Congress’s foreign affairs committee (called the Committee of Secret Correspondence) unanimously agreed that they could not tell the Congress about the covert assistance France was giving the American Revolution, because it would be harmful to America if the information leaked, and “we find by fatal experience that Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets.”

While the Constitution was being ratified in 1787 John Jay (later the first chief justice) in Federalist No. 64 praised the Constitution for giving the president power “to manage the business of intelligence in such manner as prudence may suggest.” And of course Article II of the ratified Constitution gave the president the nation’s “Executive power” and states that “the President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

When in the early 1800s President Jefferson hired foreign mercenaries to invade Tripoli and free American hostages, he did not inform Congress in advance. In 1818, when a controversy arose over a diplomatic mission abroad, House Speaker Henry Clay told his colleagues that since the president had paid for the mission with his contingent fund it would not be “a proper subject for inquiry.”

So it is clear that the Constitution’s original intent was that the president had the authority to take undisclosed foreign actions to protect America.

Or this fascinating (and long) argument by liberal Jim Sleeper about conservatives, the decline of morality in the public square and a pornography double standard.

“CHANNEL SURFING WITH JESSICA, who’s 9, we stopped at an early evening rerun of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show — irreverent, we figured, but not wrong for her,” my friend Dave wrote me recently. “Came the bit about the gay male escort/model who’d mysteriously gotten White House press clearance torepresent a Republican-funded online ‘news’ service and lob the president softball questions. The show flashed a photo from the escort service’s website showing the man naked, spread-eagled, his genitals blurred. Jessie gasped. Her face clouded over and she looked our way but didn’t ask anything, and sometimes you just let things roll. We clutched hands silently, knowing damage had been done. I don’t want to beat up on Stewart; I’m a liberal. Maybe I should have used better judgment, but, man, my parents never had to think about jumping up and shielding my eyes when we watched Walter Cronkite.”

Why was the photo flashed? Was it news? Social commentary? Ratings lust? All of that, surely – even news of conservative sexual hypocrisy, of which there is no end. But “sex” itself is what sells: “People want it, so we are trying to provide it; the more X’s, the more popular,” an Adelphia Communications spokeswoman told the Boston Globe recently after the company, among its other dubious distinctions, became the first U.S. cable provider to offer triple-X rated pornography. What Dave’s family got wasn’t porn, exactly, but it forced him to think about how he’d explain to his 9-year-old that people sell their bodies – and that TV “sells” their doing it. That Dave faults his own judgment doesn’t quite make him fair game.

It certainly doesn’t explain what’s coming to us unbidden in roadside “Erotic Empire” billboards, bus-shelter underwear posters, fashion-cum-kiddie porn ads, commercials for erectile dysfunction cures, and the fetid currents wafting suddenly through our homes at prime-time. The Thing that’s exposing itself to us increasingly is more degrading than porn because it’s so unchosen, so public, and so purely commercial: The pornification of public spaces and narratives, an eros-burning equivalent of second-hand smoke, isn’t malevolent as much as it’s a mindless groping of our persons to goose profits and market share. Don’t call it free speech; these sensors are beyond censors. They aren’t bringing us artists’ art, activists’ politics, or fellow-citizens’ opinions, and the only social message in their leering come-ons is this: “Our company can bypass your brain and heart and go for your erogenous and other viscera on its way to your wallet. Nothing personal, by the way.”

Or the fact that college students don’t have any skilz.

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

There. Got that out of my system. :-)