OneMind

Well, the last hope of progressives, Sen. John Edwards, is out of the race. I guess it’s time for me to admit that the progressive view doesn’t hold sway in America at this moment. That’s unfortunate because I don’t believe we have a single problem that progressive ideas can’t address successfully. I also don’t believe that the American public would reject progressivism if it were given an equal chance to access with the centrist and right-wing views with which corpstream America is in bed.

But so be it. The media have spoken and so it is.

I’m now reduced to voting for my third choice, Sen. Barack Obama. I do this with only a modest amount of enthusiasm. (That’s OK; my wife has enough enthusiasm about his candidacy for both of us.) I’m not going to contribute to his campaign. I’m not going to work for his candidacy. But I will vote for him today when I send in my mail ballot. He gets my vote for two primary reasons.

First, his positive messages of hope and vision are more psychically in tune with my basic philosophy of life. Even if he lacks experience, I think he displays the correct point of view from which he’s more likely to seek and find positive solutions to problems than is Billary.

Second, he is more flexible and malleable than Sen. Clinton. She’s stuck in her old ways, which are not sufficiently different from those of Republicans of the same era to effect the bedrock change we need if we’re going to recover from eight years of the all-time worst leadership in our nation’s history and make useful progress against the war in Iraq and global warming.

In summary, I guess, I think Obama is more likely to listen and to pay attention to progressive ideas and voices than is Clinton.

But I sure wish I didn’t have to choose between these two.

I am now truly soured on the American political process.

I’ve just become aware of Current TV, a combination of a Web site and a cable network that seems to me to have trapped some interesting ideas. I’m not sure it’s a viable concept in the long term but it addresses convergence of media from the other side of the aisle and is quite interesting.

I spent a couple of hours watching Current TV on cable tonight. While it has a distinctly youthful flare, it has some content that even I found interesting: a piece on the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays, e.g., was a pretty decent investigative report as was a segment on meth problems. Some of it is too “young” or over the top but a good bit of it is watchable.

I am intrigued, too, by how they try to tie the Web site and the TV network together. For example, while you’re watching a show you can go to the site and record a video comment. If you make a comment they think is well done, it gets shown on the network.This is a clear differentiator. Very interesting.

Their idea of a VCAM (Viewer Created Advertising Message) where their sponsors invite viewers to create and submit ads that pay$1k if they’re aired and up to $60k if the advertiser uses the ad outside current TV, is particularly interesting to me. I think this bears a bit more investigating.

I love my 24-inch iMac. I love my iPhone. I love the iWork series of products. I love just about everything Apple has done.

But I gotta say that when they do screw up, they do it in spades. The latest example is the iPhone Bluetooth headset, the worst piece of crap Apple has produced in many years. I bought one tonight. It sucks. It goes back tomorrow.

Not only is the reception from 3 feet away from the iPhone static-filled and lossy, the UI on the phone is horrific. If you get an incoming call, it makes a small beeping sound in the earpiece but it rings on the phone. OK. Then on the phone, you “slide to answer” and you’re talking. Through the iPhone. If you want to switch to the Bluetooth headset to answer, you have to hit a button on the iPhone screen to switch to a view where you have the headset as one of three options for answering the phone.

By that time the call has gone to voicemail or your car is wrapped around a tree. How stupid!

Don’t bother.

My long-time friend Laurence Rozier, who’s one of the smartest guys I know, has a post over at his Meshverse blog today urging fellow black tech bloggers to get involved in the political scene.

An Obama supporter, Rozier makes the point that “too many political organizers in the black community are not leveraging the web as well as they could because they don’t know people who know the tools.” He also bemoans the dearth of black engineering grads.

Laurence has been an activist in the African-American engineering community for as long as the pre-Internet (think Compuserve and earlier) has been around, and he has some chops in that world. So if you’re reading this and intersted and you don’t know Laurence, you should. Check him out.

My buddy Sandi Golden sent me this link to a Dutch shopping site. You can’t order anything and the site’s all in Dutch, but after the page loads, wait a few moments and then watch what happens.

If American advertising had this kind of creativity to it, I might even watch some of it and perhaps even buys something just to reward their ingenuity.

Sen. Barack Obama wins South Carolina by a whopping 28 points and draws 55% of the vote. Sen. Hillary Clinton is a distant second at 27, only a few points ahead of a disappointing third from John Edwards (18%). That means Obama beat Clinton by 3 times as many points as she beat Edwards. That’s a flat-out, old-fashioned whoopin’.

In delegate count (which is the only thing that will matter in the summer when the party convenes to nominate its candidate), Obama picked up 25 candidates, slightly more than twice Clinton’s 12. Edwards had to be satisfied with eight.

Obama out-polled Clinton 4-to-1 among African American voters and no matter how the Clintons spin that number, that’s a huge kick in the gut to them. When Bill was President, African-Americans were one of his biggest solid voting blocs. While it’s easy to dismiss this kind of ratio as due primarily or solely to Obama’s race, the fact is that the Clintons’ message to the African-American community, as it is to the young voters coming out in record numbers, is tired, shop-warn and politics as usual. He grabbed a breath-taking 67% of voters 18-29, who made up 14% of the voters, and 62% of those 30-44, who were 26% of those who went to the polls. In fact, he won a majority of every age bracket except seniors. That’s astonishing.

Polling had shown Obama getting only 10% of the white vote but he actually wound up with about 25% of it. You can take that to mean that a lot of folks lied to the pollsters because it’s the fashionable thing to do in a southern state or you can take it to mean that a lot of last-minute decision makers found Obama and his message more appealing.

One thing I think is clear from this result is that ex-President Clinton needs to tone down the attack rhetoric and act more presidential and husbandly. I won’t be a bit surprised if post-election polling in South Carolina uncovers a deep distaste for the way he sullied the office he held for eight years as he made a nasty transition from Hillary supporter to Obama basher.

Of course, at the end of the day, South Carolina’s not close to decisive and we still have a long way to go. But it does seem to me that Obama has just made the next 10-14 days incredibly interesting and exciting as millions of Americans representing a huge minority of the total delegates to the convention go to the polls. By Feb. 6, I predict we’ll know who the nominee is.

I’m hoping it’s not Clinton. Edwards remains my first choice now that Kucinich is out of the race, but Obama is extremely acceptable and edges a bit closer to the top of my list each time I watch and listen to him.

Well, the corpstream media and the non-Democratic Party have finally succeeded in removing the only legitimate progressive voice from the Democratic Presidential primary. Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich has apparently told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that he is dropping out of the race tomorrow to focus on his re-election bid. The Ohio Democratic machine stood silently by while four Democratic challengers to his Congressional post beat him up.

It is a sad, sad day in American politics. Courage has been overpowered by an Establishment bent on homogeneity and committed to limiting the choices we as American voters can make for our next leader to those it can understand and control.

I’m sorry to see you leave, Dennis. More to the point, I’m sickened at how you were treated. I must now seriously reconsider whether the American political scene is any longer worth spending one second of time and thought on or whether matters of spirituality, climate change and world peace — issues that transcend our muddled-thinking society and its parochial interests — ought to get more of my time and attention.

This video came to me indirectly via the Gaia community of which I’m a member. It shows an MIT professor demonstrating an exciting technology that works from a whiteboard drawing of a system to a computer simulation of its behavior seamlessly. Way cool!

I just got word that my column entitled “DNC Needs to Stand Up to Corpstream Media on Debates” has been promoted to top headline status at OpEdNews.com.

Enjoy.

I’m getting really sick of this crap.

Dennis Kucinich gets dis-invited from national debates by media outlets whose arrogance knows no bounds. In most cases, state Democratic Party machines are complicit in those decisions. Where they aren’t complicit, they are at least compliant and complacent.

Now the Texas Democratic Party has succeeded in keeping Kucinich completely off the ballot because he refused to sign a loyalty oath to completely support the eventual Democratic nominee. You have got to be kidding me!

The Democratic National Committee should de-certify the Texas results based on that clearly prejudicial and last-century stupidity. It won’t, of course. It would rather disallow convention delegates from Michigan and Florida because those state parties had the audacity to schedule their primaries earlier than the DNC wished.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the Democratic Party has no room in its tent for those of us who are real Democrats.