John Debay

George Packer, writing about Tuscon and today’s political discourse:

In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

And:

Is it a coincidence that threats to the President and Congress have skyrocketed over the past two years? The Secret Service doesn’t like to talk about these things, but I’ll bet that in years to come we’ll hear about a truly frightening level of threats during the Obama Presidency.

Frank Rich:

Having sold itself in 2010 as the uncompromising champion of Tea Party-fueled fiscal austerity, the enhanced G.O.P. caucus arrived in Washington in 2011 to discover that most Americans prefer compromise to confrontation and favor balanced budgets in name only.

A CNN poll this month found that just one American in five regards deficit reduction as pressing enough to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Only one in four would choose balancing the budget if it meant reducing education programs. Indeed, a new Gallup poll reveals that there’s exactly one category of government spending that a majority of voters favors slicing — foreign aid (which amounts to some 1 percent of the budget). Incredible as it sounds, even current government outlays to science, the arts, farmers and antipoverty programs still enjoy 50 percent-plus support.

I’m wondering why liberals weren’t able to figure out this obvious truth until after the election.

There’s always been a lot of guessing about Steve Jobs’s role in Apple’s product development. Does he come up with every idea himself? Does he oversee every hardware design, every software feature, every icon placement and color? Is he primarily a visionary that hands of most of the execution to others? Or is it something else?

Jobs gave a hint during his interview with Walt Mossberg at the D8 Conference last year. Mossberg asked Jobs about the genesis of the iPhone and the iPad. Jobs answered, “I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard and type on a multitouch glass display. And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display?” Here’s the clip:

The key here is that Steve Jobs uses the first-person singular pronoun “I” when describing the original idea for what became the iPad. Anyone who pays any attention to how Steve Jobs speaks knows that every word is deliberate. He would not have used the word “I” if he didn’t mean it.

That’s at least one clue that Steve Jobs personally plays a very critical and direct role in product development.

I wonder: if someone else inside Apple had come up with the idea of building a tablet with a multitouch glass display, how hard would it have been for that person to get six months invested in building prototype hardware and several weeks invested in building prototype software to validate the concept? The answer to that question may say a great deal about how Apple may change once Steve Jobs retires (which, to be clear, I believe will be a long time from now).