I’m dis­heart­ened at how many working-​class peo­ple are still out there that have been deluded into think­ing that McCain, the mul­ti­mil­lion­aire with seven house, is one of them, while Barack Obama is a “Har­vard elit­ist” who doesn’t under­stand the “real America.”:

Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., main­tained last week that, “Lib­er­als hate real Amer­i­cans that work, and accom­plish and achieve.” Such notions get trac­tion quickly in today’s age of instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Walk around Durango High School, where the crowd was wait­ing for a McCain rally to start, and peo­ple spoke glow­ingly of the Viet­nam hero’s kin­ship with “real Amer­ica.” “It’s some­thing Barack Obama can’t pos­si­bly know, because he’s not one of us. It’s like the way (Richard) Nixon was able to talk to the hard hats,” said Jim Wil­son, a dis­trict attorney.

Is Barack Obama a real Amer­i­can or a Har­vard elit­ist? | MiamiHerald.com

Actu­ally, lib­er­als work. I work. I’ve got daily wage-​slave job just like every­one else in my tax bracket. These peo­ple clearly don’t know or don’t want to know that Barack Obama was raised by middle-​class heart­land folks in Kansas, that he and his sis­ter once only got by because their mother was able to get food stamps to buy gro­ceries. That he comes from begin­nings as hum­ble as any Amer­i­can. He made it to Har­vard by work­ing for it, by get­ting schol­ar­ships. Obama’s story is the Amer­i­can dream, work­ing his way up through dili­gence and hard work, and being rewarded for his effort.

But some­thing tells me that’s not the real story here. When peo­ple opposed to Obama say “he’s not one of us,” are they really talk­ing about him being elit­ist? Because any­one who’s read about Obama for five min­utes knows that can’t pos­si­bly be true. Or is it code? When they say he’s not one of us, are they really say­ing he’s not white?

The roots of racism run deep in Amer­ica. It took a hun­dred years after the slaves were freed before they could prac­ti­cally vote, and blacks in Ohio and Florida will tell you that’s not nec­es­sar­ily even the case here in the 21^st cen­tury. In my own state of Col­orado, the sec­re­tary of state is being sued for ille­gal purg­ing of the voter rolls. I can pretty much guar­an­tee the peo­ple purged off the rolls and denied the right to vote weren’t rich white folks.

What do you think? Is the cur­rent of us-​versus-​them “real Amer­i­cans” about class, or is it really about race?

The Wall Street Jour­nal (a pretty good source of infor­ma­tion if you avoid the edi­to­r­ial page) has an inter­est­ing break­down of the eco­nomic pol­icy changes pro­posed by both pres­i­den­tial candidates.

To respond to vot­ers who want imme­di­ate eco­nomic help, both can­di­dates have pro­posed spe­cific plans on how to jump-​start the econ­omy in 2008 and 2009. Sen. Obama pro­poses a $1,000 Emer­gency Energy Rebate to fam­i­lies ($500 for indi­vid­u­als) and penalty-​free with­drawals of 15% from 401(k)s and IRAs up to $10,000. He also wants to tem­porar­ily sus­pend min­i­mum dis­tri­b­u­tion require­ments for retire­ment accounts. Sen. McCain pro­poses cut­ting the capital-​gains rate on stock held for more than a year to 7.5%. He also would increase the amount of stock loss that is deductible against ordi­nary income from $3,000 to $15,000, and would tax with­drawals by seniors from IRAs and 401(k)s no more than 10%.

Obama vs. McCain: It’s About Your Money — WSJ.com

So Obama will off­set your energy bills by up to a grand, which will help work­ing fam­i­lies a lot this win­ter, and allow you take up to 15% of your 401(k) out to keep in the bank for pay­ing bills with­out penalty. Not bad.

McCain… really doesn’t sug­gest a damn thing for work­ing peo­ple. All of his sug­ges­tions cen­ter around stocks and mak­ing own­ing stocks more lucra­tive. Well, that’s great for peo­ple who own stocks, but what about the rest of us, John?

I have to admit I watched the Wall Street implo­sion over the last few weeks with no small amount of schaden­freude. I don’t own a lick of stock, so beyond the over­all impact to the econ­omy, I really don’t care what the stock mar­ket does. I may have lost buy­ing power due to the infla­tion we’re in for, but I per­son­ally didn’t lose a dime this month. Because I get 100% of my money from wages, the stock mar­ket doesn’t mean much to me.

That’s the key dif­fer­ence any­more between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans. Democ­rats are the party of peo­ple who work for their money. Repub­li­cans are the party of peo­ple whose money works for them. If you get the major­ity of your income from wages, as most mid­dle class fam­i­lies do, Democ­rats are the party for you. If you get most of your money from invest­ments, then Repub­li­cans are more your speed.

So, “thanks but no thanks”, John. Cut­ting cap­i­tal gains taxes doesn’t do a damn thing to put more money in my pocket. Your ideas don’t help me at all. I’m vot­ing for “that one.”

Over the past cou­ple weeks I’ve been try­ing a new exper­i­ment. Now that I’ve embraced the “net­book lifestyle,” I thought I’d see what this cloud com­put­ing thing was really all about. While I have Microsoft Office 2007 loaded on my HP Mini-​Note, I thought I’d try Google apps instead.

The way I see it, there’s two dif­fer­ent par­a­digms to use with netbooks.

1. Thin client, or web-​based. Using web-​based appli­ca­tions and liv­ing out of the browser. This has become much more fea­si­ble than it used to be, and oth­ers have made a pretty good go of using only Fire­fox for all their com­put­ing needs. And thanks to Google Gears, you can even work offline (albeit with some pretty sig­nif­i­cant limitations).
2. Thick client, or what used to be called client-​server com­put­ing. Here you use tra­di­tional desk­top soft­ware and either store your data in the cloud or sync your data through the cloud to other PCs.

Tech­ni­cally there is a third option, just using the net­book like any other com­puter and not using net­worked data at all, but where’s the fun in that?

The most pop­u­lar option, at least among the tech­no­rati, is option one. Google’s office suite (Gmail, Docs, Note­book, Cal­en­dar) does a pretty good job of replac­ing heav­ier client-​side apps like Microsoft Office or OpenOf­fice. And if you’re using a com­puter designed to be online all the time, why not use online tools?

Sup­ple­ment­ing Google’s suite with a few addi­tional ser­vices like Remem­ber The Milk for task man­age­ment and ScribeFire’s Fire­fox plu­gin for blog­ging, I tried this out for a week. I even ditched Exchange on my Treo and used GooSync and MilkSync along with Gmail’s IMAP ser­vice to use Google ser­vices on Win­dows Mobile (which works, but not as well as Android, alas). I used Gears to allow offline use in RTM, Docs, etc. And it worked, sorta.

I tried to like it, I really did. And the inte­gra­tion between Google Docs, Note­book and iGoogle is pretty com­pelling. I was able to keep my doc­u­ments online and edit­ing them was fast and easy. I expect I’d like Google Docs a lot more if I was doing any active col­lab­o­ra­tion, it looks really good for that. But the lim­i­ta­tions got to me. You can’t cre­ate a new doc­u­ment in Google Docs when you’re offline, among other things.

Because that’s what really made the deci­sion for me. It’s easy to get online with a net­book, but it’s not a given. I’ve found that WiFi hotspots are far more com­mon that I would have sus­pected, but they’re not every­where. I can tether my net­book to my Treo pretty eas­ily, but that involves a cable (I can’t seem to get it work­ing with Blue­tooth or WiFi, even with PdaNet), which means a sta­ble setup where I’m going to be for a while. For quick work, jot­ting some­thing down quickly (10 min­utes or less) set­ting up a cel­lu­lar inter­net con­nec­tion is too much of a has­sle. And as a result, I wasn’t using my net­book as often as I could have.

If I was using an even smaller net­book, like the Asus eee 700 series with just 4GB of flash and pretty much instant-​on Linux, I’d be more inclined to make web-​based apps work. But I have an XP-​based net­book with a 120GB hard drive. I have the abil­ity to use local stor­age, local soft­ware and the full power of Win­dows. Why not use it along with the best of cloud com­put­ing? (and yes, there is a vision for more, but I’ll get to that in another article)

So instead of liv­ing in the clouds, I’ve got a core group of local soft­ware that ties into the cloud for stor­age and sync, allow­ing me to work offline with no com­pro­mises when I have to, but have all the ben­e­fits of the net when can. I’ll detail my set up soon, but for now, how are you using cloud computing?

I’m sit­ting at Chipo­tle putting the fin­ish­ing touches on an arti­cle about decid­ing between using thick clients (Word, Out­look) ver­sus thin clients (Google Docs, Gmail) on net­books, and a guy walks up to me and stares until I take out my ear­buds (one of the rea­sons I love writ­ing at Chipo­tle is that between my hear­ing dam­age and my –20db head­phones, it’s actu­ally less dis­tract­ing here than at home).

He points at my HP Mini-​note. “Where do you get a com­puter like that?” He explains that he needs to get a PC for his daugh­ter in high school.

I tell him that for a high schooler, I wouldn’t actu­ally rec­om­mend the HP, as it’s a lit­tle pricier than the com­pe­ti­tion. I tell him about the Asus eee 1000, which has a 10” screen, comes pre­loaded with XP and could run all the stuff she needs for school. Then I tell him he can find it locally at Best Buy for $399.

His eyes nearly pop out of his head, and he starts grin­ning widely. I make note of this, and he says, “Wow, that’s such a great deal.” He booked out of the restau­rant and I’d bet dol­lars to donuts he was headed straight for Best Buy.

I see this sort of thing all the time. I’ve talked before about my 12-​year-​old niece’s netbook-​lust, and the other day when she brought her friend over while I was at my sister’s for the Bron­cos humil­i­at­ing defeat by game against the Patri­ots, her friend was also star struck at the pos­si­bil­i­ties afforded by a com­puter of her very own that she could take anywhere.

Paul Thur­rott and Leo Laporte dis­cussed net­books in this week’s Win­dows Weekly pod­cast (along with soundly thrash­ing Win­dows Mobile) and dis­missed them as a tem­po­rary bridge between tra­di­tional lap­tops and future smart­phones run­ning desktop-​class oper­at­ing sys­tems. While I like the idea of a Win­dows smart­phone run­ning the same Win­dows ker­nel as the desk­top ver­sion, using the same API for pro­grams and hav­ing binary com­pat­i­bil­ity with desk­top Win­dows, but using a user inter­face opti­mized for mobile use, that doesn’t obvi­ate netbooks.

I’ve used mobile phones for years as stand-​ins for ultra-​mobile PCs, and the prob­lem isn’t the oper­at­ing sys­tem or appli­ca­tions. As evi­denced by the pop­u­lar­ity of not only net­books but devices like the Celio Red­fly, form fac­tor mat­ters. A clamshell device with a larger screen and touch-​typable key­board is just bet­ter for some things. I post blog entries and read Google Reader from both my Treo and my Mininote, but I read ebooks exclu­sively on the Treo and write longer form work exclu­sively on the Mininote. It’s about using the right tool for the right job, and it’s becom­ing increas­ing obvi­ous every day that net­books are the tools a lot of peo­ple have been wait­ing for.