I’m a huge Bob Mould fan, and my friend Norman, who lives in San Francisco, has an encounter with him at the gym:

Today, September 29th, 2010, I shook hands with Bob Mould at the Gold’s Gym
Castro. I complimented him on his music at Blowoff last weekend, shook his hand
(I will never wash mine again), then he proceeded to tell me that he was
concerned about out of towners ruining the event. For just a minute, I felt a
part of his fabulous “inner circle.” But then his definition of out of town
probably included Bernal Heights [Ed. Norman lives in Bernal Heights]

And then a very fat queen came between us to use the seated row machine and we
were thwarted to opposite corners of the weight rack. I tried to continue the
conversation at a distance (a very long distance), but the magic plain vanished.
Just like that. Poof. I was just another face at the gym and he was just
another celebrity at the Castro Golds.

I’m not so much a fan of Mould’s dance stuff as I am of his guitar music. Nevertheless, an exciting encounter.

Are we feeling balanced today? Today is the Fall Equinox. There’s one tree on my street turning color already.

I do love the fall.

There has been a lot of hand wringing regarding the nomination of Christine O’Donnell as the Republican candidate for US Senate in Delaware. Charles Krauthammer provides a typical line of reasoning:

If Republicans want to be a national party, they cannot write off the Northeast, whose Republicanism is of a distinctly moderate variety. Scott Brown broke Republican ranks to vote for Obama’s financial reform. Are conservatives going to now run him out of the Senate? Wasn’t it just eight months ago that his victory in Massachusetts was hailed as a turning point in the campaign to stop the Obama agenda?

You don’t stop that agenda by nominating an O’Donnell in Delaware and turning a Senate seat from safe Republican to safe Democratic.

The point of nominating O’Donnell, of course, is not to win at all costs, but rather to defeat the Republican establishment, an establishment that gave us a new prescription drug entitlement, Ted Kennedy’s no child left behind, TARP, plus an utter inability to control themselves when it came to spending. And let’s not forget, an utter disrespect for small government and grassroots conservatives in general. Let us recount in no particular order:

• The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court
• The attempt to saddle Massachusetts with Andy Card as their nominee in the US Senate race to replace Ted Kennedy
• Establishment candidate Charlie Crist dumping the Republican Party to run as an independent against Tea Party Republican Marco Rubio
• Establishment Senator Arlen Specter, dumping the Republican Party, after George Bush had personally campaigned for him in his previous primary challenge, for the Democratic Party
• Establishment Senator Lisa Murkowski refusing to endorse or campaign for Joe Miller, who defeated her in the primary in Alaska
• Establishment candidate Mike Castle refusing to endorse or campaign for Christine O’Donnell, who beat her in the Delaware primary

I’m sure I could think of more instances if I had more time. Now contrast that with Ovid Lamontagne, who narrowly lost to Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire. He opted to forgo a recount, and graciously endorse his primary opponent (will find link later)

Now which side in all of this is the one that is thinking of the future of the party?

If the Republican Establishment wants to get along better with the people they beg money from, there are two basic things they need to do:

1. Make a serious effort to recruit non-politician candidates who actually want to reduce the size of government and will act on it. If you don’t like Christine O’Donnell’s views on sex and the fact that she seems to have some seriously screwed up personal finances (and I don’t like them either), then recruit someone competent who can run on the small government agenda. Voting for cap and trade (and frankly, being a septuagenarian as well) ought to be disqualifiers for public service.
2. Go out, and grab each and every one of the candidates who lost by the neck and make them endorse their opponents, starting with Lisa Murkowski and ending with Mike Castle. If they can’t bring themselves to endorse their fellow Republicans, then they need to be ejected from the party. Do that and you’ll start to heal the wounds that have been festering since George Bush opened the spending spigot in 2002.

I don’t expect the party apparatus to change until a new presidential nominee is selected. This is a long game, and my sense is that the tea party is in it to win.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the Obama Democrats are run by a bunch of logo designers…

And the latest logo:

9 years ago today…

So Apple has put up a new page detailing what to expect in iOS 4.2, which is the unifying os for the iPhone and the first version of iOS 4 for the iPad. It contains a number of features, including advanced picture taking, a game center, and printing.

So let’s take a moment to review what it doesn’t contain:

• No integrated form of cloud computing. No MobileMe offering that would act as a cloud-based file manager. Every mobile device Apple sells should come with a free MobileMe account. Android essentially comes with this already (albeit for a price, your privacy). Apple should up their offering to compete.
• No revamped file management overall. Even putting MobileMe aside, it would be nice if we could use Dropbox, or Google Apps to save our documents online from any app we want. As it stands, I can open a doc from an app, but I can’t save back out to the cloud from any app. Any sort of centralized file manager would make me happy, frankly.

It could be that no announcement along these lines has been made because it’s a surprise, which would be nice. I kind of feel like the iOS3 iPad has basically been a beta product, and that fixing the file management issue would bring it out of beta and into maturity. OTOH, given how many iPads they sold, I tend to think Apple likely disagrees, and may do nothing to fix the file management shortcomings. We shall see.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this whole “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. Here’s the way I see it. What the Ground Zero imam and his cohorts are trying Tom do is akin to what the Klan does when they hold a march or rally. They are doing something which is offensive in the extreme, marching in the public square typically on some American holiday, screaming about white power, while denigrating blacks, Jews, Catholics, and whomever else is insufficiently like them. I view the Ground Zero Mosque in a similar light. Namely, while I disapprove of what they’re doing, I believe in their right to do it.

But there was something about the analogy which didn’t sit right with me. Namely, when the Ku Klux Klan or the neo Nazis stage a rally, they know they’re being controversial and offensive and they make no bones about it. But the Ground Zero Imam claims to be trying to build a bridge between the Muslim world and the west by building a mosque so close to Ground Zero. Putting aside the evidence that he’s totally disingenuous by calling for Sharia to be practiced in the United States and by seeking financial support from the Muslim Brotherhood, the guy is either an ignoramus or malevolent in insisting upon building the mosque, even after Governor David Patterson offered to give him state land to build his mosque elsewhere. Had he accepted governor Patterson’s offer, we could conclude that he never meant any offense, that he just misunderstood the sensibilities of the citizens of his host country. But he hasn’t, and so we’re left searching for an analogy to his current behavior. And we are to find it with none other than Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson, of course, was accused on multiple occasions of molesting boys who stayed at the Neverland Ranch. The reason for this was that he insisted on inviting these pre-teen boys to sleep in his bed with him, and he was unapologetic about it. His response to those who said that his behavior was abnormal and that it gave the appearance of him being a child molester was simply, “that’s just ignorant.”. The guy literally had no sense that what he was doing was inappropriate or why people would view his behavior with distain. Now Jackson may have been putting on a front, or he may have been sincere, he was simply too weird a guy to tell for sure. But what’s the Ground Zero Imam’s excuse?

He has none. And it’s preposterous for him and those who support him to go on, claiming like Michael Jackson that anyone who questions the wisdom of building the mosque of being ignorant. As with Michael Jackson, these arguments are silly on their face, and should be dismissed out of hand.