If a Gmail arrives in the Internet forest and no one is there to read it, does it really exist? The Internets were aflame yesterday when Google’s Gmail program, used by 10 million active users, went down for up to 15 hours. The centralized use of the company’s online apps, points to a significant Achille’s Heel in cloud computing. For those who don’t have 20 emails like I do, and solely rely on the Google program, not getting email for a significant portion of the day, can seriously thwart business. Though Google apologized for the outage, it’s hard to overlook the possible pitfalls of putting all your eggs in one basket—if you used Google Apps and relied on that for business interaction, as well as the Gmail program—you were up a certain creek without a paddle. That said, I found all the links for this news item on, where else?, Google.

Maybe there is such a thing as Obama Republicans: Fox News is reporting that there’s a host of former and current Republicans who would rather vote for a Democrat than hold their nose and vote for John McCain. What’s odd about this is that the reason many Republicans don’t like McCain is because in his more “maverick” days, he bucked the Republican M.O. and sided at times, with um, the Democrats. So siding with a Democrat because the Republican candidate is like a Democrat, strikes me as counterintuitive, no? Whatever, this just means more votes for the Dems in November and this (despite our claims to be unbiased) is a good thing! High profile GOP-ers coming out for Obama, include:former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach, former White House intelligence adviser Rita Hauser and
former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

Hillary Clinton turns out to be a semi-decent politician, after all. An upcoming story in the Atlantic Monthly reveals that her former campaign strategist, Mark Penn, advised Clinton to cast Barack Obama as “un-American,” which she refused to do, perhaps, costing her the nomination. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who
is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his
values,” Mark Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to Clinton, obtained by the Monthly. Interestingly, McCain’s team has yet to play that card, either, at least directly. Report: Clinton told to cast Obama as un-American - Yahoo! News.

Yet another reason for journalists and aspiring reporters to jump off a bridge: Media consultant Mark Potts, has put together a database containing all the paper layoffs. The former Philly.com employee has found that a whopping 6,300 staffers have been fired in the last year. Not surprisngly, the Los Angeles Times tops the pretty dismal list. They canned a whopping 350 people. If you feel like getting suicidal, there’s even a pretty little PDF that you can download. Does anyone in journalism feel like we’re car makers in Detroit right about now?