The Democratic presidential nomination race continues to favor the challenger, Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Obama has now won 12 state primaries in a row, and is looking increasingly like the inevitable Democratic candidate for president in 2008.
Although Senator Hillary Clinton has campaigned long and hard, and has certainly been a tough competitor, Barack Obama continues to gain important endorsements from powerful legislators and political figures around the country. Representative Jon Barrow of Georgia is one of the latest to endorse Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee.
Senator Obama has now garnered the official endorsement of all five of Georgia’s Democratic representatives; while Senator Clinton now finds herself without a single endorsement in the state. To add insult to injury, another Georgia Democrat, Representative John Lewis of Atlanta has announced that he will be switching his support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.
Georgia is traditionally a very conservative state, even within Democratic circles. The overwhelming endorsement of Barack Obama by Georgia representatives is a clear indication that his appeal crosses over class, race and even political boundaries.
Georgia may well turn out to be an important state in the 2008 presidential election. In the last several elections, the state has gone overwhelmingly Republican, but there are growing signs now of a renewed Democratic Party in Georgia, and even some Georgia Republicans have expressed a willingness to cross over and vote for Obama.
To the contrary, his opponent Hillary Clinton does not enjoy the same type of bipartisan support in Georgia, or indeed in most of the Southern states. Conservatives throughout the South have been nearly unanimously united in their fight against a second Clinton presidency, a widespread attitude that is improving Senator Obama’s fortunes in the South.
As many political pundits have already observed, if the conservative “Deep South” states are favorable toward a black president, there is absolutely no doubt that the country as a whole is capable of electing a black president. While this is certainly a welcome change of attitude, particularly in the South, the real question is, will Senator Obama be our first black president?
At this point in the race, most experts believe that the Democratic nomination a Senator Obama’s to lose. Barring some extreme and shocking news, or a Herculean effort by Senator Clinton to get her message out, Obama looks unstoppable at this point.
And although recent polls indicate Obama would do well running against Republican John McCain, it is still a long time until November, and in presidential politics anything can happen.
Related Business Directory Categories:
The major records are certainly a litigious lot. And come to that, they’ve never really been comfortable with the idea of the internet in general. Their new lawsuit against the music search application SeeqPod (www.seeqpod.com) is a good example of this:
SeeqPod is a simple search engine, like Google, Yahoo, or any of the others. The only difference is, SeeqPod searches exclusively for media content — i.e. music and videos, and streams the result directly from their search results page. A nifty idea, and one that is akin to online radio, except the user gets to search for whatever they want, not simply wait for the next song and hope they like it.
SeeqPod does not allow users to download the music tracks and videos it finds, they are only streamed online. However, it does allow registered users to save playlists and even share playlists with friends. And it could be this “sharing” aspect of the site that is sticking in the throat of the major record labels. A suit has been filed against SeeqPod requesting millions in “damages” for unfair use of intellectual property.
There’s only one flaw in the music industry’s plan to sue SeeqPod out of existence: they’re not doing anything illegal.
The Digital Millennium Copyright act clearly allows all search engines to report the existence of any file accessible online, without being held accountable for the legality of said file. And this is exactly how it should be. Can you imagine if Google was held responsible for the legality of every single web site it catalogs online? That’s absurd at best, and it would virtually shut down the Internet as we know it.
And this, in a nutshell, is why the record labels will lose this one, and lose big. Basically, if SeeqPod can be sued for the files it “finds” online, so can Google, and Yahoo, and Ask, and Microsoft, and…well, you get the picture. The internet would be a pretty barren place if such ridiculous laws were allowed to stand.
So, if it is clear to any interested observer that the recording industry is fighting a battle here that they cannot possible win, why exactly are they doing it? That’s the million-dollar question, and journalists and industry experts seem just as perplexed about the rationale of the suit as anyone else.
Perhaps the major label music companies have become so lawsuit-happy since the dawn of the Internet era, that it is simply a knee-jerk reaction; when faced with any new technology or challenge, their policy has become “sue first, ask questions later.” Whatever the reason, one thing is for certain: the music industry has some serious “control issues,” and they’re wasting serious money here on a lawsuit they can’t win.
Related Business Directory Categories:
Election years in the United States rarely remain civil and polite — at least not for long. And this is especially true when the stakes are high and the outcome of the election is as critical as this November’s presidential election. Case in point: the Democratic primary is starting to turn ugly, as Senator Barack Obama begins to take the lead, winning the endorsement of many powerful figures in Washington, and influential labor unions.
In the past three weeks, Senator Obama has won hundreds of delegates in primaries around the country, and for the first time has pulled ahead of Senator Hillary Clinton in the primary race. Its funny how quickly things can change; only five weeks ago Senator Clinton was practically being “inaugurated” by the press as the de facto Democratic presidential candidate.
With an ex-president husband, and decades of experience inside the power structure of Washington, most observers believed Hillary Clinton to be unbeatable in the race for the Democratic nomination. But Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, has failed to go quietly into that good night, and in the last few weeks has won primary after primary, continuing to build momentum and raising millions of dollars toward his presidential bid.
Obama’s strategic gains in the past few weeks have put the “fear of God” into the Clinton campaign. Senator Clinton recently restructured her campaign organization, and “loaned” her campaign $5 million of her own personal money to compete against Senator Obama in the Chesapeake primary.
It is interesting to note that while Hillary Clinton is easily able to write her campaign a check for $5 million, Senator Barack Obama’s total net worth is reported to be approximately $1.7 million.
And although the Democratic campaign has been mostly a “love-fest” so far, things are now beginning to veer into darker territory. Senator Clinton is now going on the offensive against Obama, accusing the junior senator of being both inexperienced and a talker, not a doer. Visiting Cincinnati earlier this week, Senator Clinton said, “It is time we had a president who was a fighter, a doer and a champion for the American middle class,” a possible jab at Senator Obama’s relatively short-lived career in politics.
Clinton has also begun to associate her candidacy more closely with the middle class. But while she claims to be “from and for the middle class of America,” the reality is that she grew up in a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, going on to attend both Wellesley College and Yale Law School. Not exactly a middle-class résumé.
Oddly enough, Clinton has also attacked Obama on what many see as his greatest strength — his ability to communicate coherently and passionately with the public. Senator Clinton has suggested that Obabma is all about the “rhetoric,” not substance, saying “You can choose speeches or solutions.”
Related Business Directory Categories:
As a company, Yahoo has always been just a little bit different. Yahoo’s Silicon Valley “campus” is arguably the most collegiate corporate headquarters of any major company in the United States, with a distinct and often irreverent culture that is the antithesis of many modern corporations — including that of Microsoft Inc.
With the announcement last week that Microsoft is attempting to “buy out” Yahoo Inc. in its entirety with a $44.6 billion “unsolicited bid,” many Yahoo employees fear that a successful merger with Microsoft would rob Yahoo of its quirky and unashamedly humorous culture.
Within the IT industry, Microsoft has a reputation as the “big gray giant” on the playing field. A reputation only made worse by Microsoft’s monopoly-like status, and the dozens of anti-trust lawsuits filed against the corporation every year.
To the contrary, Yahoo has a reputation as a fun-loving workplace. A major part of Yahoo’s success has come from its sense of humor–not taking themselves too seriously. Even the company’s television commercials reflect this irreverence; the famous Yahoo yodel being one glaring example of the company’s quirkiness.
And though Yahoo’s stock has floundered over the past several years, the company’s spirits have remained high. That is, until the prospect of being swallowed up by Microsoft came into view. ZDNet.com is reporting that morale is now quite low at Yahoo’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
While employees are somewhat validated and encouraged by Microsoft’s huge multibillion-dollar offer for their company, at the same time, many feel that it is the end of an era, and that Yahoo’s quirky “Dharma Initiative” style progressive workplace will soon be a thing of the past.
Many feel there will be an inevitable culture clash should Yahoo become just another “tentacle” of the massive Microsoft Corp. Yahoo’s fun, irreverent and innovative culture could be the first casualty of a merger with Microsoft, and could potentially move the company far away from its quirky entrepreneurial roots, and toward a more traditional “gray suit and cubicle ” American company — in other words, boring.
But if Microsoft does take over Yahoo (and it appears they probably will), their best strategy would be to preserve as much of the company’s offbeat culture as possible. After all, Yahoo’s unorthodox workplace has attracted amazing talent to the company, and has led to many outstanding web innovations.
For now, Yahoo employees will simply have to wait and see if the special culture they have created over the years is strong enough to survive a takeover by “The Big Gray.”
Related Business Directory Categories:
Comments