OneMind

The California Supreme Court today made one of its most unconscionable rulings ever. It upheld an ill-considered decision by the voters last November to strip a minority of rights previously ruled as granted to it by the state constitution. In doing so, it failed utterly and completely to do its job under the Constitution of protecting minorities from tyranny of the majority. It showed a lack of Constitutional understanding as well as backbone.

Stand by for an impeachment petition against these thoughtless, shallow judges.

As far as I have been able to determine, Prop. 8 was the first time in our nation’s post-Jim Crowe history that a state’s population used a Constitutional amendment to restrict human rights rather than to expand them. The voters were badlly misled by one of the most disgusting and dishonest fear-based campaigns that the Right has ever conjured up. Polls today show the proposition would not pass if it were presented again.

A few decades ago, the bigots of the Right succeeded in impeaching Supreme Court justices who balked at playing a key role in the state’s murder of those who commit violent crimes. It is clearly time for the left and mainstream — you know, the large majority who elected a President recently on a more open and liberal agenda — turned the tables.

Yesterday I got a Twitter notification that someone named tweetlessons had begun following me. Following what I understand to be good Twitterquette, I went to his page and began following him.

In the next several hours I was bombarded by more than 40 Tweets. Ironically, one of them was a pointer to a post asking why so many people leave Twitter within a month of joining. My answer: people like tweetlessons who send out way, way too many Tweets in short periods of time. He’s clearly not the only offender. Several Twitterers that I’d love to follow on my iPhone have fallen off my list of those I follow in real time because they over-did their Tweets.

On Twitter, where only 140 characters can be used in a message, the message is “Less is More.” So why do these self-absorbed egoists insist on burying my SMS mailbox with tens of messages every day, often sending a half dozen or more within a few minutes of one another?

Between that and the tremendous outburst of spam and blatant marketing messages, Twitter is rapidly becoming useless to me. Even one person I really enjoy hearing from — Lightcoaching — sends out far too many messages too close together. Her “wisdom” becomes of diluted value to me when it buries me like that.

So I turn device notification off for these folks. Which essentially means I’m not really following them since I get back to the Twitter site relatively infrequently. So, as I said, overuse of the service results in losing followers. You’d think that someone named “tweetlessons” who presumably wants to teach others to use Twitter effectively wouldn’t make that mistake. You’d be wrong.

This story out of the Bleacher Report predicts that the San Francisco 49ers will sport a 10-6 record this year, good enough to in the title in the pathetic NFC West. Contributor Joey Grisso manages to qualify his prediction with enough “ifs” to create a blanket excuse for falling short. ” If Frank Gore has a good year and Vernon Davis makes up for some lost ground over the years, and if Patrick Willis continues to dominate on defense,” then all the Niners need to do is figure out their QB situation, he opines.

Pretty gutsy prediction with the schedule they have. I see them at 9-7 at best. Now that may be enough to win the division and put them into the playoffs but it’s more likely given their recent history that a catastrophic injury comes up and ends their season early. At least the odds against boneheaded coaching decisions are way up with Mike Singletary doing the head coaching chores. But there is no good QB solution on the horizon and without a top-flight winner calling the signals, the team will not amount to much.

Rumor has it that Apple will release a tablet-style computer some time next year. We’ve heard this speculation before, of course, but this time it appears to have a ring of reality to it.

The question is why Apple will go after a market for solutions in search of a problem. Tablet computers — ballyhooed by Microsoft for years — have never really taken hold. When they were first introduced, the idea was that corporate execs who either couldn’t or wouldn’t type would embrace a computer they could write on. Never happened. Since then, tablets have found small niches where workers whose jobs involve the direct manipulation of objects and/or demand portability greater than that afforded by laptops with full keyboards make good use of them. But these applications tend to lead to specialized hardware like the devices carried by UPS drivers rather than apps running on general-purpose computers.

My good friend and colleague Chipp Walters, a world-class designer, sees himself as a potential ideal candidate for a tablet but points out he’s never bought one. And he’s a serious gadget freak.

The one way it might make sense for Apple to enter the market is one that is completely out of character for the company and that would be to provide an OEM platform on which others could build specialized vertical apps to create new forms of tablet-like appliances. That might even make some sense but I don’t see Apple turning into a hardware-focused or platform-focused company any time soon.

If this report is accurate, the next major edition of Microsoft Word — aka FeatureBloatKing — will attempt to provide most of the features that have made LaTeX the word processor of choice in academia.

Just what we need. More gigabytes of Word. Yeesh. I wonder why MS never thinks of doing things like creating multiple word processors or at least making a lot of the features used by less than 10% of it audience add-in modules. It just makes no sense. They are bucking several trends here and the days are long gone when they could establish a new trend.

Weird.

President Obama continues to find a way almost every week to disappoint me and the rest of the left wing of the Democratic Party. His decision last week to flip-flop on the planned release of hundreds of new photos showing evidence of more widespread torture of captives than previously anticipated is the latest example.

In announcing that he would oppose their release despite his earlier promise not to do so, Obama said that they were “not particularly sensational” and then argued that they would somehow put Americans more in harm’s way. Really? Really, Mr. President? You don’t see the logical contradiction in those two statements? It seems to me that he is motivated by one of two forces. Either he is worried that America will be further embarrassed by them (an excuse he explicitly disavowed during the campaign) or he’s bowing to pressure from the intelligence community and Leon Panetta. Either way, he is acting without integrity.

George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley is vociferous in his anger. On the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC Wednesday, he said the decision constituted an “incredibly dark moment for civil libertarians,” then turned his scathing commentary to Obama himself. “…[T]his administration is becoming the greatest bait-and-switch in history.” He accused Obama of “morphing into his predecessor.” While I don’t agree with that statement if broadly applied, it certainly seems to be accurate with respect to this subject.

Political Activist “The Pen” nails it. “What’s really going on here is that Obama has so far resisted in every possible way his duty under the law to appoint a special prosecutor, despite his affirmation that waterboarding is torture, and the arrogant public confessions of those who ordered that torture. Having underestimated the furor for prosecution that the previous release of the torture memos would cause at home, Obama now well knows that these pictures would just increase that pressure.”

I am sure he knows it, but under International law Obama is guilty of complicity in war crimes if he knows or has reason to believe war crimes have been committed and fails to investigate such evidence. This is not a political matter; it is a moral and legal one. It is clear what the right thing is; Obama just needs to do it.

Sign The Pen’s Petition demanding that Obama appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Regime and its high-ranking members for war crimes and to carry out criminal prosecutions if and as warranted.

I finally saw the light this morning. It’s amazing how many times a month I have to go through this kind of thing these days.

I’ve been tangling with a buggy Apple MobileMe service for some time now trying to sync my calendars on my iMac, my Air, my iPhone and my Google account. Nothing seemed to work right. Twice I had my entire calendar wiped out, apparently because sync got confused. Apple support’s answer, after an hour on the phone? “You should probably not try to automatically sync that many things through MobileMe.” Thanks. So much for “Apple. It Just Works.”

The solution was staring me in the face. I spent about 20 minutes today moving all my appointments to Google Calendar and deleting them from my other sources and immediately weaned myself off iCalendar completely and MobileMe except for backup of my iMac. I can get at Google from any of my systems, so only when Google is down will I be without access to my schedule.

Slick. Google is moving into the place of real dominance in my online life.

LATE ADDITION — The irony doesn’t escape me. The day I switch to Google Calendar they have their longest and most widespread outage yet. That’s the Universe playing games with me.

I fully understand that President Obama is not a liberal. I fully understand he feels the necessity to govern from the center, a ridiculous position that has constantly resulted in a persistent shift to the right in this country as the GOP always governs from the hard right while Dems are afraid to govern from the hard left.

I even understand that in putting forth this latest so-called health care reform, President Obama is not breaking any campaign promises. I just wish he would.

This country has, by UN rankings, the 37th best health care system in the world despite its being far and away the most costly by any sane measure. It is the only mature Western democracy without a single-payer system. Only a single-payer system will solve the multi-pronged crisis that is our health care non-system today. Period. End of discussion.

The President’s plan has the backing of much of the health care industry; that in itself is a sure sign it’s not going to help any little people, or at lest not nearly enough of them. The Republican mainstream seems — at least for the moment — willing to let his plan pass, though probably without any real support. Another indicator it’s not good for the little guy. The Republicans never watch out for the little guy except right around election times.

It appears the Democrats are only slightly better.

If single-payer isn’t the only available option — in other words, if we have the kind of choice Obama is calling for — we have a two-tiered system. And that means a separate system for the wealthy. And that ultimately means that those of us who are not wealthy will get sub-standard care if we get any at all. Because doctors, being capitalists (nothing wrong with that; just a fact) will go where they can make the most money. (Not all doctors, mind you.) That’s why the only way to create an equitable health care system with universal coverage is with a single, single-payer health care system.

Anything else is just another sop for the health care giants and their partners in greed and crime. And should be beneath a president of real integrity.

If you agree, go to The Pen and take the action on that page. We the people can change this but only if we act in unison.

Just a quick update. I find myself in the hospital for observation due to possible kidney malfunction issues and an unrelated infection. I’m feeling fine and this appears to be nothing serious but it could have become serious if we hadn’t discovered it when we did.

I have somewhat limited Net connectivity but I’ll be trying to stay in touch as much as I can.

Prayers and warm thoughts greatly appreciated.

Two or three days ago I started seeing it. I’d get an email notifying me that someone with only a female first name was following me. When I went to see what was up I’d see a message about how this alleged person was using a dating service and invited me to join her there. Clearly spam, possibly pornographic and at least likely offensive.

Yesterday I got two such messages and today I got another. But in all of the recent cases, clicking on the link to identify the new follower brought me a Twitter page that said the account in question had been suspended due to unusual activty.

I like the swift way this was dealt with even though I don’t always agree with prior censorship