Kudos to CNN for using holographic imagery for the first time in TV reporting.
35 high definition cameras surround Jessica Yellin in a tent in Chicago at the massive Obama rally as she is beamed live to the CNN situation room to talk with Wolf Blitzer.
The imagery is imperfect but of a high enough quality to suggest we’ll be seeing this tool used more and more as a virtual meeting environment.
Good job CNN !
Election Day 2008
Voting is still underway but the outcome is already clear – Obama will win our US presidency by either a modest or large number of electoral votes and probably about 54% or more of the popular vote. Many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief that the outcome today is clear and uncompromised by the many flaws of our counting system.
Election and electoral irregularities, negative campaign strategies, and the flaws of Democracy aside, all Americans should be very proud that our nation will once again make our qaudrennial peaceful transition of executive leadership from one administration to another after a national vote.
The Obama victory, combined with large gains in congress for the Democrats, will likely be viewed for centuries as one of the most significant transformative events in American history. This will be one of the largest swings from “conservative Republican” to “liberal Democrat” leadership in all of history.
In a decision based overwhelmingly on political rather than racial considerations, Obama’s rise to the US Presidency will also demolish the pervasive-but-misguided mythology that has suggested for over a generation that America could never transcend our history of prejudice and elect an African American to the highest office.
Yet Americans can transcend the challenges of our past.
We just did.
Speaking in London Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made an obvious but important observation: the collaborative aspect of the internet – what many would call a key aspect of “Web 2.0”, is still in its infancy.
Although Wales seemed to focus on video collaboration and how that could improve I’d suggest that the real power of the online medium will *not* be video – rather we’ll find that many different combinations of photos, videos, and community will evolve into the next key style of web interaction.
This could be along the lines of a more powerful and more ubiquitous Flickr, acting within loose alliances of connected niche sites connected by Facebook and Myspace and Google Social and Open ID.
The niche aspect of the internet is already clear in Politics, where you find blogs and commenters and social networkers sticking pretty close to home, preaching to their own choirs and repeating the same themes throughout loosely connected social networks dominated these days by either Obama supporters or Obama bashers (who generally are McCain supporters but almost never talk about McCain!).
Obviously there are many, many exceptions, but if you look at many of the most successful major blog efforts it is interesting how partisan they are and how uninterested they are in providing more than ideological fodder consistent with what their readers already think: DailyKOS, DrudgeReport, Huffington Post, WorldNewsDaily are a handful of commercially successful sites that add little to an informed discussion but remain more popular than the far more balanced views you’ll find elsewhere. It’s encouraging that CNN and other major news outlets are looking more to interactivity and blogging, though I predict they’ll find it very challenging to monetize these social media assets in the amounts to which they are accustomed. As with Yellow Page websites, I think major media blog sites may struggle with the difference between advertising costs and expectations online and off.
Today on Zakaria GPS we have Robert Rubin, Citibank and Wall Street megamoneymeister and Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury.
Rubin is always one of the most impressive observers of the economy, and distinguished as one of the few Secty’s of treasury who presided over a Federal balanced budget. He articulates complexity well and also avoids the partisan nonsense that clouds these debates. For example he was complimentary of Paulson’s efforts
Main point was that we need to do more to address mortgages at home and bank level to stabilize things and that he wanted a *huge* stimulous package – probably not in the form of tax rebates because they don’t tend to hit economy fast enough and are often saved.
Rubin is Obama’s economic advisor (along with Volker, Buffett, Summers). Rubin was very complimentary of Obama’s style and intellect, pointing out that at the meetings Obama is always quick to divorce the campaign considerations from the economic solutions, and to listen to those who agree and disagree.
The bad news is that Rubin sounded like he was not willing to go back to Washington and take the position of Secretary of the Treasury again even though many (certainly I) would like to see him there again.
Although I’m a political junkie I’d hoped to try to stay objective in a race I knew would be clouded with the usual nonsense of our American democratic experience where marketing and the politics of personal destruction *always* trump an intelligent discussion of the issues. However I’ve been especially alarmed by the very personal and deceptive attacks on Obama’s character and personal history. Thanks to some huge comment streams this blog has become mostly political for the past week so I should let readers know where I stand.
Barack Obama for President.
Like Christopher Buckley I’m normally a small government low tax fiscal conservative, but also like Buckley I think more than anything right now the country needs a “first class mind” in the oval office. The world faces the greatest fiscal crisis since the great depression, and global terrorism remains a critical threat around the world. Perhaps the John McCain of the 1990s would be a good man for the job now, but that John McCain is not running for President.
Obama, unlike any other prominent American leader, will send a signal to the world that the USA remains both the shining beacon of prosperity we have always been but also is asserting an entirely new approach to internal affairs – an approach characterized by flexibility, compassion, and intelligent reflection rather than the knee jerk ideological responses that have compromised our reputation and standing in the global community for much of the past 8 years.
Obama is the right choice for these challenging times despite some flaws. I’ll keep hoping that the economic challenges will force Obama into more realistic ideas about how the economy and personal responsibility. I hope Obama will soon come to realize how the national debt and deficit are ticking time bombs that pose a greater than the current looming financial crisis, and work hard towards a balanced federal budget.
But trumping those concerns for me is that the country will benefit from Obama’s ability to galvanize support and bring people together. Some will choose to fight Obama and to continue the smears and personal attacks, but in the same way that approach has failed in the campaign I hope that approach fails with America as we move forward to the great challenges that we all must face together, like it or not.
The future is uncertain and potentially very perilous. Major changes and challenges are coming at us with each passing day. We need inspired new leadership.
Obama for President.
Anyway … the cooler logo should win this thing
The inane stupidity of the “Joe the Plumber” discussion tells us a lot about how out of touch the campaigns and media are with America, and frankly how little most Americans seem to understand about small business taxes. After listening to CNN’s Lou Dobbs’ take on the situation and hearing McCain say he’s out to help the Joe the Plumbers (implying his tax plan would do more to help plumbers than Obama’s, which is false and almost certainly a campaign lie) I had to challenge the economically senile statements of these two rich guys and chime in with the truth.
My take is that neither left nor right wing seems to be making sense about all this. Joe the Plumber is relevant to the current debate because he is representative of some middle income Americans who make ballpark of 40-80k per year, would actually benefit in the short term from Obama’s tax plans, but don’t share Obama’s sensibilities about how to run country or the idea that even greater levels of deficit spending than McCain is proposing are a good idea. It’s OK for Joe to be for McCain, but if he thinks that is to his tax advantage he is mistaken.
Here’s a better authority than me – Nobel economist Paul Krugman in NYT writing about the plumbing income issues.
So, with average plumbers making about 47k clearly he’s *currently* better off under Obama’s plan if taxes are what we are talking about. But what if he buys the business?
Details are not all that clear but it appears the business Joe wants to buy has 2 plumbers. Let’s assume they also employ one office person and one helper. Even assuming they can bill those plumbers at $100 per hour, the helpers at $50 and everybody works a full 2000 hours per year (this is very unrealistically high work hours for this type of biz – half this would be closer to normal). But even optimistically the biz probably pulls in about 500k per year.
Assuming that employee benefits and payroll taxes are about *half* the billed rate to the two plumbers employees we have 250k labor expense for workers. Add 30k for the office staff and another 50k for advertising, building, insurance, and more (it’s probably twice that, but I’m being very generous to McCain supporters here).
Revenues 500k – Expenses 330k = Taxable income 170k
So even if he buys the joint Joe the Plumber won’t be making 250k. Sure a few plumbing businesses with several workers might be making that, but the small business guys McCain claims he represents would likely be better off under Obama’s tax plans. Most are are mom and pops making far less than 250k.
Lou Dobbs and some McCain folks have *idiotically* asserted that a lot of *plumbers* make 250k. If you believe this there is only one word for you: Stupid. Plumbers rarely bill at over 100 per hour and there are 2000 hours in a year – do the math because even if they have zero expenses they don’t make 250k and those who think they do are really math and business savvy challenged (e.g. Lou Dobbs who has NO business talking business).
Average plumbing salaries in Ohio are under 50k per year – similar to what teachers, police, fireman make.
To me it is sort of pitiful how folks who will pay *more* under McCain are defending his tax plan because they just don’t understand business taxes. It’s fine for a plumber to support McCain but it’s misinformed to think Obama’s the big bad tax man for the middle class.
Joe is not a small business – in fact he’s not even a plumber. He was (probably wrongly) thinking that if he bought the plumbing place he worked for he’d have trouble paying Obama’s taxes, and Obama foolishly just assumed that was true.
Joe may want to vote for McCain if if NON TAX issues like abortion and gun rights are paramount to him and there are many other reasons Joe the Plumber might want to vote for McCain.
Taxes, however, are NOT one of those reasons.
Caveat: There are some capital gains tax issues that complicate a really good analysis of all the details here since they’d come into play much later and it’s not clear to me how either plan would treat sale of small businesses even assuming the plan was still in effect when they were sold.
Caveat 2: Taxes and prosperity are tricky. Some think that taxing the rich inhibits economic development to the degree it reduces *everybody’s* prosperity. e.g. if his job is lost Joe the Plumber makes nothing.
Ouch. The bailout plan details start to be discussed as Bernanke lays out some of his plans and his take on the crisis. It also seems like the Government keeps spending and doing even more to shore up our aching economy.
Yet the markets remain unimpressed as the DOW drops another 500 today, much of that in the final minutes of trading.
My intuitive take has always been to question the idea that growth rather than efficiency is the cornerstone of a healthy economy. One thing that is now clear is that we are seeing the effects of unsustainable economic “growth” in the sense that the Real Estate price increases were unsustainable and they in turn created a huge surge in paper wealth that encouraged people to live above their means and banks to create bizarre speculative financial instruments.
I suspect the markets are recognizing and/or suggesting to us that we are in for years – perhaps even a decade – of economic contraction where the growth we’ve come to expect will no longer fuel our prosperity.
This does not have to be catastrophic. In fact to the extent folks replace big houses and cars with little ones, take more responsibility for healthy lifestyles, and seek new efficient solutions we could be in for a period where we won’t gain abundance but we might gain some …. wisdom.
When Google bought Youtube for 1.6 billion last year they effectively allocated $400 million of the purchase price towards lawsuits they felt were coming down the pike. Although both the purchase price and that extraordinary “copyright payoff” of 400 million seemed extraordinary at the time, Eric Schmidt and the Google boys may be wishing they’d allocated a few more bucks to stave off the copyright violation bandwagon, which today solidly topped YouTube’s 1.6 billion price by about 179 million dollars.
Viacom is suing Google for a billion already, and today Mediaset joined the fun with a 500 million Euro ($779 million US) lawsuit. Interestingly, Mediaset is controlled by a company owned by Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Burlusconi, so the case will likely become fairly high profile in Europe.
So, assuming YouTube is worth the $1.6 billion Google ponied up for the big show, they’ve got to be more than a little concerned that the legal onslaught has only just begun but already is approaching 2 billion. Obviously neither Viacom or Mediaset expects a full payout but you can be sure many, many others will follow for two important reasons:
1) Google’s got the money. Deep pockets are a *very* attractive stylin’ feature these days and despite some stock price setbacks Google is still sitting pretty pretty in terms of cash and revenue prospects.
2) Videos don’t got the money. Monetizing video remains one of the most problematic features of the online world, and it’s becoming clear that no “magic bullet” is out there. I’ve written for some time that video will not monetize well and I think the jury (that would be millions of us out there in online land) is almost in with the verdict that video simpy will not pay distributors nearly as well or serve advertisers nearly as well as pay per click which remains the most lucrative and effective form of online advertising – probably of any paid advertising for that matter.
For me it is always painful to watch our American “Democracy” at work. I’m an independent and I think that allows me to see more clearly how even when they are combined the Democrat and Republican parties fail to do a good job of representing the country in terms of ideology or action planning.
Today the Dems decide how to handle the votes in Michigan and Floriday after previously deciding to totally disenfranchise those electorates. It is certainly true that rules should matter, and true that both campaigns agreed to these rules, and Obama supporters are right to say that it’s not “fair” to allocate to Clinton votes that might have gone to Obama if Florida party hacks and national party hacks had not mangled this process, but it’s *even more unfair* to disenfranchise the Florida voters – again.
I’m guessing they’ll do the 50% allocation thing – ironically the same idea the Republicans had for rogue voting states, though presumably with far less “processing” committee time.
If they did allocate the delegates according to votes in Michigan and Florida here are some scenarios:
Michigan popular vote: 55% to Clinton, 40% Uncommitted to Obama –
Clinton gains 23 delegates.
Michigan split the uncommitted vote: 75% to Clinton, 20% Obama –
Clinton gains 85 delegates
Florida: 50% to Clinton, 33% to Obama. Clinton net gain of 36 delegates.
Thus if we count these states Clinton would gain a net of either 59 delegates or 121 delegates depending on how you allocate the Michigan uncommitted vote.
As of today 201 delegate votes (160 pledged) separate Obama and Clinton so even the rosiest picture for Clinton would still have her trailing Obama, throwing the election squarely to the superdelegates and more party hack back room wheeling and dealing.
Welcome to Democratic Democracy?
More of my views on this at President Picker
Joe Duck 