…that John McCain is highly unlikely to win the Republican nomination for the Presidential election.

I say this as a fan of McCain. Oh, I wouldn’t vote for him; it could be Dennis Kucinich vs McCain and I’d still vote for the Democrat this time around, because the nation desperately needs a Dem to win.

But McCain is a true American hero. During the Vietnam war, his plane was hit by a rocket that misfired on the deck of the aircraft carrier Forrestal. McCain was screwed; the rocket hit his fuel tank and he couldn’t take off and couldn’t eject. He also couldn’t sit in the plane, what with it being on fire and all. He jumped out, walked as far down his refueling probe as possible, and dropped down to run/roll to safety. Just a minute and a half after his plane was hit a bomb that had been loaded on his plane blew up, destroyed the plane, and would have killed McCain.

132 men wound up dying in that fire.

McCain could have wrangled himself a rotation to the States, but got himself reassigned to another carrier and a few months later, on a mission over northern Vietnam, was shot down. He was captured. Both of his arms were broken, along with a leg, in the ejection/crash. When taken prisoner, he was beaten pretty badly, and even bayonetted a couple of times.

McCain’s father was the head of the American Navy in the Pacific at the time. The North Vietnamese knew this made him valuable and offered to release him early for the PR coup they’d attain. He refused, saying that it should be “first in, first out” and that he would only go when every man who’d been captured before him was released. They tortured him pretty mercilessly, to the point where even now, decades later, he can’t raise his arms above his shoulders.

McCain wound up spending over 5 years in the Hanoi Hilton.

McCain’s politics are not all great for me, but he has tried (as much as possible) to be a man of honor and dignity. He has been willing to back off of things that were wrong; for example, he openly referred to his captors as “gooks”, insisting for years that he didn’t apply it to all Asians or Vietnamese, but only to those that had mistreated him so much during his POW days. Later, he recanted and apologized for it. It was probably at least partially motivated by political pressure, but nonetheless it was the right thing to do.

It’s been 40 years since he was captured, and while I wouldn’t vote for him or ask anyone else to, I’d say that the nation would be a lot better off had he won the nomination in 2000 and would still be better off if he could somehow win the nomination for 2008.

So less than four years ago, a guy named Mark Zuckerberg (who’s just 23 now) was a college student at Harvard. He created a new social networking site, originally for fellow Harvard students, called Facebook.

At some of the stuffier colleges, “facebooks” were common; they were basically like an annual, only they were put out as soon as possible in the school year. The idea was that you could see who your fellow students were, put faces with names… and of course you could also see their interests, what school (or prep academy) they had attended, and get an idea of where they might rank in their social status.

So Mark fires up Facebook and it’s off to the races. It grows at incredible rates, spreading first to colleges nationally, then they start allowing anyone to sign up. Last year, Yahoo, desperate to play catch-up with MySpace and trying to stay relevant, offered one billion dollars for Facebook. Zuckerberg says “no thanks”.

A couple of days ago, Microsoft bought a small stake in Facebook. They paid a lot. How small? 1.6%. How much?

Get this. $240 MILLION.

That values Facebook at roughly $15 BILLION dollars. That’s 15 times what Yahoo offered just a year ago!

Wow. I mean, WOW. Can you imagine going from being a college student- granted, one at Harvard, meaning with excellent prospects for jobs and income in life- to being a multi-billionaire, in just a year or three?

Now, this is partially because both Microsoft and Google- the two giants in the online world- wanted a hunk of Facebook badly. It’s probably not really worth that much money. After all, it’s a free site to join.

But still, that’s ridiculous dough.

I swear I need to start converting some of my goofier ideas into reality. You never know when one of them is going to stick!