So, The iPhone is out, but…

It is clear that the new iPhone is great, but it is not the breakaway unit that it was when Apple defined the category.

The “herd” has caught up, and with new phones coming weekly that have an actual Apple product to compete against they have a great opportunity.

The consensus seems to be that, as usual, Apple has produced an elegant product that is the product that the trend-setters will want to carry, but…

RIM has a great opportunity with their new BlackBerry, and we have yet to hear from Microsoft. BlackBerry easily outsells even Apple because of their corporate presence, but EVERYONE is getting better – by the minute.

Now if Apple just linked to the iPAD – or the iPAD had phone capability – or AT&T was a better network – or iPhone was on Verizon – or…

Filed Under: If the NY Times says it, etc. …

Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: June 25, 2010

WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

Leadership cannot be appointed

General McChrystal was, as are most warriors, impolitic — but Boy Scouts don’t win wars.

There is a vast difference between peace-time officers and war-time officers – peacetime officers get medals for umpiring Little League games and collecting money for the United Crusade. In wartime, we want men who can man the pass against the Huns, and that is a different breed who get in bar fights and don’t pay their bills. They make lousy neighbors in a tidy homeowners association – but they can crawl through broken glass to silently cut a throat.

In an all-out war, the General would have been forgiven without so much as a note. In peacetime, he would have been cashiered. We are neither at war, nor in peace — so no rules are the order of the day.

If insubordination was strictly enforced, our military would consist of a rotating Honor Guard, a single-engine plane, and a row-boat. Anyone who has ever served any amount of time has been in bull-sessions that would curl a president’s hair — any president of any political party.

There was a time (I remember it) when military officers did not register to vote, because voting for anyone but the existing president would show disrespect and “insubordination.”

Obviously, those days are long gone.

From a political standpoint, I find that firing a liberal, political supporter of the president — and replacing him with a General previously denounced by the left for his views is surreal.

It is all political theater — and it only makes a difference what the troops think. McChrystal is a known GREAT warrior, the kind men die for — his replacement is a great planner and politician. What the troops think, matters. It matters a great deal — and I have no clue.

Patton, BTW, like Douglas MacArthur, got in trouble not for this kind of BS, but for challenging the nation’s policy – Patton wanted to continue to Moscow, and MacArthur into North Korea. Neither got in trouble for what can only be described a “grousing,” as did McChrystal.

Fortunately, we are blessed with a surfeit of fine Generals.

It is much like the don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. What you and I think makes no nevermind. It is what the kid walking into the recruiting station in Tennessee the month after the policy is abolished thinks that counts — and neither you nor I have a clue.

In the current less-than-war atmosphere, any president can replace any General with impunity, if the president has particularly thin skin – or wants to make a political statement. President Obama just had a General Alexander Haig moment. (“I am in charge here.”)

It is what the warriors think that count.

Leadership cannot be appointed.

(It can’t be elected, either.)

Quandry

O.K. – its “inside the beltway” sort of thing, but the Washington Post has fired one of their reporters – a liberal hired because the Post thought he was a conservative, and hired because the post admits that it is a bit overbalanced.

“The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he’s a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he’s liberal is primarily the Post’s fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper’s brass to put him in an unsustainable position.

Weigel first had to apologize for a tweet expressing incomprehension of “bigots” who oppose same-sex marriage. He’s now apologized for intemperate, leaked emails sent to a large, private listserv started by his Washington Post colleage, Ezra Klein. They were the sort of angry, snarky attacks that most people know better than to put in writing (though most people occasionally slip), and which nobody (other than certain aides to General Stanley McChrystal) would say knowingly for print. But nobody would bother leaking what Klein himself wrote privately, or forwarding his tweets to management, to prove he was a crypto-liberal, because Klein isn’t crypo-anything. He’s a liberal blogger, and the Post hired him into a slot that required no pretense otherwise.”

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0610/Weigel_and_the_Post.html

Now, why do you care about this?

Simply because the Post made a mistake, and did not find out that they hired two liberals instead of one liberal and one conservative?

Hardly. Although I find it interesting that the vaunted Post is so dense.

I really question why they can’t differentiate between reporters who report, columnists who opine, and paid, staff bloggers who, do what?

Are the bloggers supposed to be reporters, or columnists, or is there a special category for Bloggers?

Bloggers don’t go to “J” schools, are not accustomed to Editors – and can be more than a bit crazy. Hiring a Blogger, liberal or conservative, to write for an Editor at a major-market newspaper is just asking for trouble.

Then, there are on-line newspapers, like the voiceofsandiego.com locally, and Politico (quoted above) nationally – to what standards should they be held?

I don’t have any answers. I just want reporting reported without bias, and columnists to be as biased as they wish.

I just want to know the difference.