OneMind

The Campaign for America’s Future has a contest going on in an attempt to define the word “progressive.” Some great entries have been submitted. Here are my three favorite:

Robert G., Philadelphia, PA:

A progressive identifies with the underdog, fights for the disadvataged, speaks for those without a voice and is on the side of working class and poor people in the struggle for equality and opportunity for everyone.

Julie P., Hastings, NY:

A progressive is someone who believes in the common good—in a fair shake for every person—and is willing to fight for it.

And the one that got my vote:

William W., Canada, MI:

A progressive is someone who understands that personal wellbeing cannot be separated from the wellbeing of society, and that we are all better and stronger when we work together for the common good. From the air and water that we all depend on, to the education of our neighbors’ children, a progressive understands that none is immune from the effects of community underachievement. Today’s progressive understands that the individual is most effective when all in society function highly.

I wish William had stopped after the first sentence. But that first sentence is so strong, I couldn’t vote for any other entry.

American corporations have an aggregate of $643 billion in cash and equivalents in their bank accounts. That’s just the companies in the S&P 500. The companies have so much cash, they’re having trouble figuring out what to do with it. In fact, they’ve had so much extra cash they’ve been on a binge of buying back stock, spending something like $500 billion on that little endeavor. Which means their real cash excess is over $1 trillion.

Now I’m not one of those folks who thinks corporations shouldn’t be profitable. And I’m also not one of those people who thinks corporations have an inherent obligation to fix social ills that the broader society doesn’t seem interested in fixing, either. But I definitely am one of those people who thinks that corporations need to behave like good citizens, responsibly dealing with reasonable profits. This is a clear windfall based, no doubt, on favorable governmental tax rulings, massive expenditures on the war on Iraq, and increased prices.

Corporations take full advantage of an infrastructure — including police, fire, courts, military defense, schools, streets, and other such necessities — supplied by a government to which they often pay little or no tax. When they have surplus cash, it seems to me like they ought to be able to keep some modest reserve but that tax policy and other laws should be crafted to encourage or force them to put the balance of those profits back into the economy in ways that will have broader benefit.

If no other motive works for this, how about the old-fashioned idea of enlightened self-interest? Why aren’t these companies, e.g., reducing prices on goods, particularly necessities? Or giving their lower-level employees bonuses or raises? Or contributing a higher percentage than required to a pension fund?

Hoarding all that money is not only bad public policy, it’s bad PR. And it will come back and bite them.

Apple’s .Mac is the only email service for which I pay. Yeah, I know, I get more than email from it, but that’s one of its big draws. But for the past week, email to various .mac addresss in my address book have been returned with the error 553, “Service Unavailable.” Some of these people only have .mac addresses, which effectively eliminates my being able to communicate with them at all. Furthermore, I wonder how many people are sending me emails and not getting them through and perhaps not noticing the bounces.

Turns out that some over-zealous spam blocking service somewhere — God, I hate those idiots — has decided that .mac mail is all spam. Verizon and AOL and other providers are apparently bouncing all such email now. Apple says they’re working to get it resolved but I’ve been involved with one or two of these incidents in the past. The folks who run these “blacklists” are, in my experience at least, arrogant and non-responsive. This kind of activity could turn out to be a huge hole in the email universe that can’t be plugged.

Well, it took a couple dozen at-bats but Barry Bonds finally parked career homer 715 today. That has two immediate effects. First, it moves him into the second spot on the all-time home run list ahead of the immortal Babe Ruth. Second, it unleashes a new torrent of anti-Bonds columns, fan radio show calls and other drivel that passes for commentary in the world of sports where everything matters but not much.

He crushed the ball into the edge of the left-center field bleachers where poor shlub tried to make a one-hand, bare-handed catch and instead knocked the ball into the unoccupied elevated platform behind the dead-center fence. Presumably someone in line at one of the refreshment stands down there — or maybe a vendor — retrieved it.

With the pressure of 715 off, my guess is Barry will go on a bit of a home run tear over the next few weeks, at least to the extent that pitchers and managers choose to throw to him.

It was a quasi-historic moment. I wasn’t watching. There’s something about the fact that he’s now No. 2 that makes it seem kind of silly to mark the occasion. When (if?) he gets to 755, that’ll be worth watching. That likely won’t happen until next year if at all.

way to go, Barry. Enjoy your moment. Don’t let the self-righteous media take away a thing from this achievement. Then go on with your stellar career.

This came to me today via my buddy George Sidman. Politically incorrect on some level, but funny nonetheless.

A win win win situation:

Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border,

use the dirt to raise the levies in New Orleans,

and put the Florida alligators into the moat.

Any other problems you would like me to solve?

GEEZ! WHY CAN’T THE POLITICIANS COME UP WITH SOLUTIONS LIKE THIS?

I haven’t fired up my Linspire box for a few weeks. Today, preparing for a project where Linspire may be a target platform requirement, I plugged it in, hooked up the Internet, connected my USB wireless keyboard and mouse (which I hadn’t used in prior work with the system) and…voila!…it just worked. Not only that, but it found my network connection, logged me into the CNR (Click-n-Run) Warehouse, figured out that three of the apps I’ve downloaded from there had updated versions and offered to do all the updates for me automagically.

Slick.

But I’d heard scary stories about Linspire support for USB drives, so with some trepidation I inserted a newly formatted thumb drive into one of the four USB slots. It came right up as a disk drive I could start using.

This is Linux? Not like it was back in the day when CNET Radio’s Brian Cooley and I were doing a weekly show called “Project Heresy” where we were both trying to live with a Linux desktop entirely free of Microsoft and Apple.

It seems to me that with the exception of a software package or two to which I’ve become addicted, I could in fact live in Linspire.

Conservatives who are leading the charge to eliminate the long-standing practice in the U.S. of supplying election ballots in multiple languages confuse me. Yeah, I know that a working knowledge of English is a requirement for citizenship and has been for many, many years. But that requirement is for newly minted citizens to be able to read, write, speak and understand words in common use. That eliminates just about every ballot proposition and candidate sales pitch I’ve ever read.

I bet half or more of the native-speaking high school graduates in this country couldn’t decipher the state legislative analyst’s discussion of any of the measures on the upcoming special election ballot. To expect someone who speaks English as a second language — even if they speak it well — to comprehend that gobbledygook is clearly wrong-headed.

While I support the idea of requiring a working knowledge of English for citizenship — something most countries in the world demand — I think that to fail to acknowledge a naturalized citizen’s greater comfort in their native tongue with important legal and voting documents is to risk uninformed voting and other civic behavior.

Don’t we have enough ill-informed voters as it is? Let’s not throw out the baby of an informed mulitcultural citizenry along the bathwater of English as our basic national tongue. We can have both.

I’ve been a MacBigot for as long as I’ve been using the Mac, which goes back to its very early days. I generally defend the Macintosh’s design decisions as superior to those of Windows. But in the past few months, I’ve been using a multiple-monitor setup at home and at work and I’ve concluded that the Windows decision to have menus associated with windows rather than with the system is superior.

Too often, I want to do something in an app window on my external monitor and have to travel with the mouse a (relatively) considerable distance to get to the menubar to invoke an action. Some apps (NeoOffice, e.g.) don’t behave well when the app window is in a different screenspace than the menubar. Toolbar dropdown menus in the program open, not below the toolbar where you’d expect but in the same relative position on the monitor where the menubar is located.

I think Apple should consider a hybrid solution that duplicates app-specific portions of the main menubar in the appropriate app window to make usage in this kind of situation — which I suspect is going to become more frequent as multimedia gains more and more traction — more comfortable and natural.

Three California Democratic Congressional candidates have joined forces as the “Impeach Team” and are openly soliciting support for a call to Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice-President Cheney immediately. You can go to their site and send your Senators and Congressional rep an email urging them to back impeachment of this lying bunch of thieves.

If Bill Clinton could be brought up on impeachment charges for indiscretions that had little or no demonstrable effect on his performance as President, surely an administration that has lied to us, brazenly and openly broken the law and dared us to do something about stopping them, needs to be brought up short. In the past, I’ve opposed impeachment because replacing Bush with Cheney or Frist or whoever else is in the ugly line of succession didn’t seem all that profitable to me. But we’ve reached a point where this bunch of rascals must be given its comeuppance. We can’t risk more than two more years of corruption, lies and incompetence.

The past three days I’ve had numerous emails bounce back from Apple’s .Mac accounts marked “service unavailable.” And the Apple page doesn’t report any problem with their services. And there’s no obvious way to report the problem to the powers that be in Cupertino.

They’ve apparently been taking too many pages from the Redmond Reader.

How do I get through to these guys to tell them their system is bollixed?