After reading some Left listservs and blogs, you might think Obama is the continuation of the policies of George Bush under another name. I mean, there’s some serious gnashing of teeth and fury going on. How dare he be a centrist. He’s not for the immediate withdrawal of troops. He’s a sellout and his presidency will mean no change.

Get a grip folks. Does anyone think that having a centrist adult in the White House will be as bad as George Bush?

More to the point, think back to what Ralph Nader said in 2000 (and I did drink Nader’s Kool Aid then), that there’s no difference between Al Gore and George Bush. Is there anyone left on the planet who thinks a Gore presidency would have been as destructive as Dubya’s has been? Didn’t think so.

Sometimes I think the Left is so used to losing and being marginalized it wouldn’t know what to if things started looking even slightly optimistic. An Obama presidency will open the door to progressive change, whether he wants it or not. So, the Left need to push Obama that way, and not stand on the sidelines sniping, refusing to play, and thus inadvertently insuring its irrelevance.

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Suspected miscreant flagrantly misuses resources.

Aquanomics details how voluntary compliance and education are ineffective in cutting water usage, as Los Angeles and San Diego are learning. As are their “git tough” programs that upon examination, are toothless.

The new L.A. “drought busters” program where, 16, count ‘em 16, water cops will prowl a city of several million looking for evildoers wasting water (”drop that garden hose and reach for the sky, punk”) is just a silly PR stunt that will accomplish little. San Diego is worse, they want neighbors to inform on those who might be wasting water. Will we see grannies there led away at 4 am in handcuffs after a neighbor spotting them watering their petunias during the day?

There is, however, a proven and effective way to cut water consumption, says Aquanomics. Raise prices with a tiered rate system that penalizes heavy users.

Yet all this seems absurd when you consider that agricultural users in California, who use enormous amounts of water, pay extremely low, highly subsidized water rates to grow rice cotton in the desert. Madness, isn’t it?

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My laptop just lost the “E” key and no replacement keyboard exists anywhere (and putting the “E” back is not doable.) My desktop computer has major problems with Firefox, locking up multiple times a day. Ditto for the laptop. Both computers are about three years old and have a creakily obsolescent 512MB of RAM and CPUs first made in the Pleistocene era.

On a hunch, I tried using Sue’s desktop, it’s a Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM. Firefox runs fine on it. No lockups. Plus everything else runs much snappier too. So the real problem was underpowered computers.

My new laptop, on order from HP, will be a

HP Pavilion dv6700t
Vista 64, 4GB ram
160 GB HD
15.4″ monitor
Core 2 Duo 2.0

Vista 64 can address 4GB of RAM, while regular Vista can’t. So, this computer will be able to handle anything for a couple of years to come, as 64-bit apps are just now starting to emerge.

Yes, I do want to get a Mac, someday. Was at a Mashable Monthly Meetup on Thursday in S.F. Met a personable guy at the door and we chatted. Turned out he was Pete Cashman, founder of Mashable. He said, hey Macs are great but I’ve been using Windows for years and I know how everything works. Yes, that does count for something. Quite a lot, actually. Plus, I have a few apps, crucial to me, that only run in Windows. Sure, I can get VMWare and run Windows off the Mac desktop, but this starts to get complicated.

So, no Mac this time, rather, a solid workhorse for a very reasonable price that’ll easily handle anything I’ll want to do, including video editing.

But Apple is sneaking up on me. I have an iPod and my next cell phone with be an iPhone. And maybe a Mac Mini is on the horizon too.

PS The Mashable Meetup was excellent. Lots of smart people with a zillion startups, everyone talking geek, wanting to know what you’re doing too, with none of the egos that inflate to fill the room that you sometimes see at other tech meets.

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Despite all the previous grumbling about Obama possibly choosing a safe, gray haired Anglo, his choice of Biden has been quite well received. Hillary has blessed it, and Biden’s zinger about McCain having to choose between seven kitchen tables seems to have sealed the deal.

The Democratic Party is unifying.

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