So... is it a good thing or a bad thing that the Obama-Clinton race continues?

It's possible that it could be a very good thing, if the candidates keep their mind on what's good for the country rather than what's good for them.

The voter turn-out and the public attention to politics are good for the country. Long campaigns like this one can give all of us, regardless of political affiliation, a chance to look beneath the ads and the sound bites, to think about the challenges facing the country and weigh the candidates' experience and vision.

If Obama and Clinton ramp up the personal attacks, though, they'll destroy the chance to set the country back on the right course. A McCain administration would be way too much like the Bush administration, in foreign policy and in domestic policy. It's going to take long enough to clean up the mess that Bush-Cheney will leave us. We can't afford to add to it.

Either Democrat ought to be able to defeat McCain. But a vitriolic, exaggeration-prone, personal-attack campaign could hand McCain plenty of ammunition for the general election. And it could turn off the very voters who have been flocking to the polls this year.

Political chicanery could also turn off voters. And I'm still waiting for Hillary Clinton to make it clear that she wants to win in a clean fight.

It's entirely possible, now, that the Democratic nominee will be chosen at the party's convention this summer. And Clinton could end up with the nomination if enough super delegates line up behind her, and/or if the Democratic Party goes back on its word and seats the delegates from Michigan and Florida.

For the sake of the country, neither should happen.

I understand the logic behind the power given to super delegates. If a charismatic but unqualified candidate were leading in pledged delegates as the convention opened, and if party leaders were convinced that he or she stood no chance at being elected - or would be disastrous for the country if elected - super delegates could step in. But that's not the case this year. Barack Obama is qualified to serve. If he's ahead by a reasonable margin at the end of the primary season, the super delegates should follow voters' wishes.

And seating the delegates from Michigan and Florida would be a travesty. The Democratic Parties in those states knowingly broke the national party's rules by moving their primary dates. Both Clinton and Obama pledged to abide by the party's rules and not campaign in those states. Obama didn't even put his name on the ballot. There was no legitimate primary in either state, and for Clinton to claim her victories there is both ridiculous and cynical: politics as usual.

If the convention opens with Obama ahead, and ends with Clinton as the nominee thanks to super delegates, Michigan, and Florida, the Democratic Party will suffer for years. Far worse, the party will have told millions of voters that they've been right all along: that politics is a dirty game, and voters don't count.

Party in the Park will not take place at the High Falls Festival Site this year, according to Lorie Lachiusa Barnum, the city's director of cultural affairs. A Rochester Gas & Electric hydro power project slated to begin in the High Falls gorge in May has bounced the free concert series to a new, yet-to-be-determined location.

That new venue won't be the recently renovated Manhattan Square Park, which previously housed the series. "Our event outgrew it," Barnum says of the downtown location. "The size of the crowd and the size of the stage needed for our level of acts."

The city is negotiating a new site for the 2008 season, which will run July 5-August 7, and plans to announce more details soon.

Topic: sex in themedia. We're worn out with the Paterson stuff. It's nobody's business whether he and his wife have been faithful. And maybe, we figure, he really did need those hotel rooms for early-morning meetings. His house may be just outside Albany, but he's blind. Somebody would have to drive him to those meetings.

However: it is somebody's business whether he used taxpayer money for personal or partisan use. In a 4-0 vote, our newsroom says the Paterson story won't go away, and can't.

Topic: the Judas taunt. Hot debate here on whether the always-fascinating James Carville was right to call Bill Richardson a Judas for endorsing Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.

Anti-Carville writers in our newsroom say the comment was harsh, ugly, uncalled-for, and harmful to the Democratic Party. Pro: Bill Clinton appointed Richardson to important posts that he wouldn't have had otherwise (Secretary of the Department of Energy, Ambassador to the United Nations). Loyalty is important.

The news staff vote: harsh and ugly, 2; justifiable, 1; abstention, 1.

Topic: Gore for president? The media keep speculating that if the Democrats can't settle on a presidential candidate before the convention, they'll pick Al Gore. Would that be an outrage? Or a decent solution?

Pro-outrage: Gore has no right to come riding in after the other candidates have gone through this exhausting campaign process. Nice guy, but it's too late.

"Decent solution": Gore is eminently qualified. What if, after three or four rounds of voting at the convention, neither the Clinton nor the Obama forces can attract enough uncommitted and superdelegates to get the 2024 votes needed to win? What are the Dems supposed to do? Stay in Denver and keep voting until November? Nominate somebody less well known than Gore? At some point, the Dems have to pick a candidate. The news staff vote: 2 for selecting Gore, 2 against.

In all likelihood, that's moot, though. As minnpost.com notes, either Obama or Clinton are almost certain to get enough delegate votes at the convention to win - unless a lot of the uncommitted and superdelegates don't vote or vote for a third candidate.

Also on minnpost.com is this little trivia: the 1924 convention took 103 ballots - 16 days - to select a presidential nominee.

One of the ways Macintosh has lagged (and this is coming from a fan boy) is in providing decent backup solutions. Apple took a stab at fixing the software side of the problem when it released its latest major OSX upgrade, Leopard, by including a simple-to-use, powerful backup application called Time Machine.

But it works best with a dedicated hard drive, and it requires a hard-wired connection to your Mac. If you already had a wireless network device that could be connected to an external hard drive for file sharing, this was a disappointment.

You can sort of understand the preference for a dedicated hard drive; the Time Machine software writes files somewhat differently to allow you to quickly browse through multiple dates and sessions of data storage to find files. Storing files on your Time Machine drive prevents those files from being backed up and reduces drive space for backup. But Apple's decision to prevent the Time Machine from working wirelessly truly annoyed users, including me.

Apple's "fix" for wireless was to offer a new piece of hardware, a dedicated uber Airport with a built-in hard drive called the Time Capsule. The 500-gigabyte version costs $299 and the one Terabyte (i.e. 1,000 gigabyte) costs $499. Like most Apple hardware, it's not the cheapest solution, but the ease of use and reasonable power justifies the cost.

Time Capsule comes with a USB slot for connecting external hard drives or printers and three additional Ethernet ports for connecting to other network devices or computers.

The first time you back up your computer to Time Capsule, you'll probably want to do so with a hard-wired connection. This doesn't mean that you can't back up wirelessly; the special version of the Airport software that comes with Time Capsule insures that you will. This is more about the time you'll take backing up wirelessly.

We all know that a wireless connection offers you less bandwidth than a wired one. Backing up the 90 GB of data on my laptop via a wireless connection (done that way just cuz I'm perverse and wanted to see how long it would take) took 24 hours as opposed to the 6 it likely would have taken directly connected via USB. However, as with most modern backup solutions, once the initial backup has been done, only the changes made since the last backup are recorded afterwards. So if you back up regularly, you'll be able to do it quickly, even over a wireless connection.

The Time Capsule setup was reasonably painless, as was connecting the other nodes in my house that connect to printer servers, etc. Now I can painlessly back up the four different Macs in my house every night while we sleep, without having to drag the computers to any specific site to get them backed up or even think much about it.

While the Time Capsule is a comparatively pricey solution, it does get the job done.

The MCC prez: We'll have a reporter at this afternoon's Monroe Community College Faculty Senate meeting. On the agenda: discussion of the selection of a new MCC process. A good number of MCC faculty members are upset about the addition of two non-educators - one of them a former Republican County Legislator - to the list of finalists for the presidency.

The meeting is supposed to start at 4:30; we'll post as soon there's something to report.

Meantime, Channel 13's Rachel Barnhart has posted a nice little tidbit on her blog, which all of us should have figured out before now. Why might former County Legislator Bill Smith be interested in heading MCC? Maybe it's because of the state pension.

Smith told Barnhart that the pension has nothing to do with his interest in the job. And Barnhart notes that Smith certainly doesn't have to rely on the state to make ends meet; he's a lawyer with Harris Beach.

Besides, he's already going to get a taxpayer-funded pension, because of his service in the County Lej. But if he becomes MCC's president, we'll give him a lot more. State pensions are based on your salary. As a County Legislator, Barnhart reports, Smith earned between $18,500 and $23,000. Outgoing MCC president Tom Flynn's making $215,000.

Iraq worries: I'm keeping my eyes on news from Iraq, where tension with Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is heating up. The New York Times is reporting that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has given the militants in Basra 72 hours to lay down their arms or "face more severe consequences."

Cheney's view: Loved this animated editorial cartoon, on washingtonpost.com, on Dick Cheney's comments about reaching 4000 US-soldier deaths in Iraq.

The Democrat and Chronicle did an enormous public service this morning by publishing a group of Speaking Out pieces by area African-American clergy on "race and religion in America." The Revs. Gay Byron, Marlowe Washington, Kenneth James, and Adrienne Phillips addressed the topics of black-liberation theology, the vilifying of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the mission and the voice of the black church.

Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has taken a lot of heat for pointing out the United States' own violence abroad a few days after 9/11 and for saying, "the chickens have come home to roost." Kenneth James urges that Wright's comments "should have been discussed on theological grounds." And, he says, there are theological questions for thoughtful people to discuss - including whether there is a connection between such tragedies as 9/11 and "the behavior of a people or a nation."

"The ‘Don't hate me because I'm beautiful' defense of US foreign policy is an insufficient answer" to such questions, writes James.

Adrienne Phillips notes the importance of social protest in the history of the black church. "For modern-day prophets," she writes, "the challenge is no less than that of prophets of old: to speak truth that not all want to hear or are able to receive."

It's a good, strong collection of messages that white America needs to hear. The links to the individual pieces: Gay Byron, Marlowe Washington, Kenneth James, and Adrienne Phillips. 

In today's Times: Nicholas Kristof discussed what he calls the "bloody" Democratic battle and the odds against Hillary Clinton being able to win the nomination. In the end, writes Kristof, the Clintons' legacy may be that they'll have "the same effect on Mr. Obama this November that Ralph Nader had on Al Gore in 2000."

Poll watch: CNN is reporting that Hillary Clinton's "negatives" have been increasing as the hostility in the Democrats' campaign has grown. Obama's negative rating is staying the same.

Speaking of polls, though: I'm as obsessed with this presidential race as anybody, but polling people now as to how they'll vote in November seems pointless (unless you're a Democratic candidate trying to convince superdelegates that you're more electable than your opponent). We'll learn a lot more about McCain - and the Democratic nominee - in the campaign for the general election.

Online reading: "The Education of a Reporter," New York Times' Eric Lichtbau's piece on slate.com. The topic: "How reporters bought the administration's national-security line - and why we're snapping out of it."

Several media outlets are warning that President Bush is spinning a way-too-simple explanation of the escalating violence in Iraq. Bush describes brave Iraqi government forces pitted against "militia fighters and criminals."

But on baltimoresun.com, Frank James quotes Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies as insisting that this isn't a battle between good and evil. It's a power struggle between Shiite factions, says Gordesman. "No one should romanticize" the head of one of the factions, Moktada al-Sadr, says Cordesman. But nobody should romanticize the leaders of the Iraqi government, either, he says.

"The current fighting is as much a power struggle for control of the south, and the Shiite parts of Baghdad and the rest of the country, as an effort to establish central government authority and legitimate rule," says Cordesman.

"The wars in Iraq (the plural is no typo) are about to expand and possibly explode," writes Fred Kaplan on slate.com, in another analysis of the Iraq situation, "so it might be useful to have some notion of what we're in for.

And the Washington Post is reporting that US troops now seem to be "taking the lead" in the battle against al-Sadr's troops.

A column by D&C writer Denise-Marie Santiago this morning about the disappointing administration of County Executive Maggie Brooks, nicely articulates what some of us around the newsroom have been thinking. Brooks could have used her considerable gifts to heal the partisan wounds inflicted by the Doyle administration. Instead, she's kept up the same divisive tactics as her predecessor: FAIR, the public defender debacle, the gay-marriage appeal, and the brewing brouhaha over the MCC presidency. Whether Brooks is acting on her own or, more likely, at the behest of Republican chair Steve Minarik, makes little difference. She could've used her household name, popularity, and charisma to break Minarik's stranglehold on this community. She hasn't. And it's a pity.

The county's FAIR Plan and a smaller-than-expected increase in state aid are forcing Monroe County's suburban school districts to deal with budget shortfalls. In one of the most drastic cases, the Gates Chili district is closing an elementary school, which has seen declining enrollment. The other choice was to raise the district budget by $1 million and tap reserve funds.

Local media reports show the varied ideas of other districts:

• The Penfield school district is considering several proposals, one of which would include no cuts, a 2.5 percent tax increase and a $3 million increase in the tax levy. All options call for spending increases, some call for larger tax increases than others.

• In Pittsford, school officials are examining ways to cut expenses. Among the areas targeted for cuts are summer academic programs and sports.

• Greece proposes tapping into its reserves and a tax increase. But it also plans to add teachers and programs.

Other school districts, such as Brighton, are still weighing their approaches.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration and an Obama supporter, lashes out in today's Washington Post against President Bush and Senator John McCain's stand on the Iraq war.

"The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for ‘staying the course' draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios," writes Brzezinski. "President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of ‘falling dominoes' that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier."

The US must pull out of Iraq, writes Brzezinski, but the pullout "must be matched by a comprehensive political and diplomatic effort to mitigate the destabilizing regional consequences" of the war.

ABC News, citing a Vermont Public Radio report, says Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy is calling for Hillary Clinton to leave the race. She can't win, Leahy said, and by staying in the race, she's letting John McCain have a free ride.

The tension builds, yes? Will the MCC board majority really have the nerve to ignore public opinion and choose Bill Smith as the school's next president?

One of my news sources said this morning that he figures the board will do the right thing - that there's just too much opposition. But board member John Parrinello's suggestion that the board "abort" the search process doesn't give me hope. The board is meeting on Thursday. We may get an inkling then as to whether a majority of board members are willing to break Steve Minarik's hold.

If they're not?

It's encouraging to see Rochester Business Alliance CEO Sandy Parker coming out in opposition to the board majority. Let's see if other business leaders are upset enough to join her.

Clinton hangs on: I like Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy a lot, but I was relieved to see Barack Obama saying Hillary Clinton should stay in the race. As long as this process is, it's a lot more interesting - and a lot more valuable for the nation - than the kind of quickie selections we've been used to.

Everybody's focused on Pennsylvania right now, but citizens in nine other states and territories are also still scheduled to vote. The Democrats' primary season will close with Puerto Rico's caucuses on June 7.

At this point, without the superdelegates, neither Clinton nor Obama can get enough votes to win the nomination. And so it will be up to the superdelegates to help close things out. That's the process; both Clinton and Obama entered the race knowing the rules, so none of us can grouse about how this is playing out.

The only thing we can hope now is that both candidates will remain temperate and not destroy the chance to take the White House.

If I were advising the candidates, I'd be insisting that they simply run against John McCain as though they were already the nominee. I don't expect the Clinton camp to do that, though. Aggressiveness is in their genes. The challenge for Obama is to quit taking the bait.