Looks like all the hoopla over Michael Arrington’s decision to dump his iPhone has crashed the TechCrunch.com web site:

I have been trying to get back to the site for about 2 hours now…

Maybe the overlords at Apple are sending Michael a message?

Update – The site is back up at 1:33 EDT.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch.com is saying goodbye to the iPhone. But not for the usual reasons:

“What finally put me over the edge? It wasn’t the routinely dropped calls, something you can only truly understand once you have owned an iPhone (and which drove my friend Om Malik to bail). I’ve lived with that for two years. It’s not the lack of AT&T coverage at home. I’ve lived with that for two years, too. It certainly isn’t the lack of a physical keyboard, that has never bothered me. No, what finally put me over the edge is the Google Voice debacle.”

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I too had the opportunity to switch to an iPhone. My company offered to supply me with a 3GS, buy out my existing contract, unlimited voice and data, for $30 a month. I was salivating. But after much research, and some prior experience with Cinqular (AT&T’s predecessor in my area), I chose to upgrade to a Blackberry and stay with Verizon (and get a reimbursement from my company, not quite cost neutral, but close enough). My reasons:

1) Terrible coverage for AT&T where I live. I know that may not be the case nationally, but hey, I live where I live.
2) Reputation for dropped calls. Brings back such “fond” memories from the Cinqular days. That was the main reason we switched to Verizon in the 1st place.

Now that I find that Apple/AT&T are blocking Google Voice (which I am really starting to love, and the Blackberry Google Voice app rocks), I am even more convinced in my decision.

To paraphrase an oft used election mantra:
It’s the app, stupid!

Donna Brazile has an interesting take on the Gates/Crowley affair. I wish more people could take her approach on this, and calmly, rationally discuss the issue without turning on the flame thrower. Her comment that “My experience, however, tells me that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle” is right on.

She goes on to say that “I do know, however, that being a black person has shaped many of my experiences, both joyous and horrific, as an American citizen and has helped shape my outlook.” I couldn’t agree more. And if you remove the word “black” form that sentence, that’s where we need to be as a country, and as individuals. We all are shaped by our experiences, and those experiences differ among us all. Perceptions are what need to be dealt with. I think we have come far enough to realize that African Americans are not our enemy…

Bob Greene has more here…

Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana addressed the remark by Republican George Voinovich Wednesday, saying the GOP’s problems stem from the fact that it is “being taken over by Southerners,” Vitter also called the Ohio senator “a moderate, really wishy-washy.”

Wow…those are strong words from Sen. Vitter.

This was in response to Sen. Voinovich saying in Monday’s Columbus Dispatch :

“We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns, It’s the Southerners….”

“They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr . . .’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re Southerners,’” he said. “The party’s being taken over by Southerners. What the hell have they got to do with Ohio?”

Well nothing really. Ohio is in the North, and the South is in the South. And the North won the war, so what are you complaining about really? End of story, wait, sorry, the South doesn’t have rust problems except at the coast, and hey when you’re at the beach, who cares about a little rust when it’s 80 degrees, sunny and a nice breeze is blowing. And the South doesn’t get 500 feet of snow a year.

This is “gloves off” fighting at its worst. Next round, one of these senators is going to say something about the others mother, then we will be talking bloodshed.

C’mon guys, get a life. We have way more important things to deal with.

Well, looks like the onion is being peeled back on this one. When CNN reports that a “source with knowledge of the investigation confirm…”, you can usually bank on it.

So it appears that the good doctor caved in to Jackson’s demands/requests/habits, and “treated” his insomnia with Diprivan. Couple that with narcotic/addictive pain relievers, and, hold on, haven’t we been here before? I guess a $150K per month paycheck loosens the rules a bit.

So when you have (unlimited) resources, influence, a personal physician and misguided motivation, and if there is no one around who really has your back, well, I guess the conclusion is obvious.

Just sad, really. But, for the good doctor, maybe criminal as well.

Keep tuned in here…

Well, it’s Tea Time, sorry, good ole’ American beer slugging at the White House this Thursday. Well, astute readers of  FUDReport.com will remember that’s just what I suggested days ago. Well, maybe not have a beer in the White House, but reconcile nonetheless.

It didn’t have to come to this if President Obama had shown a little more restraint during the press conference. But, mistakes sometimes have a funny way of opening other doors. Maybe that’s what will happen here. No doubt that Professor Gates was reacting to his prior experiences, and the same can probably be said of Officer Crowley. Getting those two together “post event” (and supervised by the president no less) in a non-threatening environment has the capability of bringing some good out of the experience. Given the high profile of Professor Gates, he truly has the “teaching moment” opportunity. I hope he will be able to shine the light on both sides of the situation. People can be reasonable, and once they understand the other side of the debate,   agree or not, gives both sides the chance to at least be empathetic.

Check out more here…

Sarah Palin’s final day as governor came yesterday, and she went out listing her accomplishments, as well as bashing the media. Still, she went out, early as it were, and did leave the job unfinished. She reminds me of Ross Perot in a way. He sure stirred things up, and made his mark as potential presidential material in 1992. Then he flamed out, make some “unusual” decisions about being in/out (stating the reason for quitting was that he received threats that digitally altered photos would be released by the Bush campaign to sabotage his daughter’s wedding), then tried to come back, but of course to no avail. The extent of the impact of Perot dropping out of the race will never be fully known. Some argue that he might have ended up winning the race.

Will Palin end up in the same boat? Only time will tell. She has surely fired up the Republican base, and no one can doubt her star power on stage. The real question is, will she run out of people to blame for critiquing her style/message/competency, or will she ultimately prove that she does have the right stuff?

She is not going away anytime soon…

Candy Crowley report this…

The embattled Cambridge police sergeant is speaking out about the fervor surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I must say, in my  opinion, having the President weigh in on this in the manner he did, without all of the facts as the president stated, was premature at the least. Granted, racial profiling by some police departments is well documented, and is wrong. That should not lead to wholesale indictment of a police department by the president.

“I was a little surprised and disappointed that the president, who didn’t have all of the facts by his own admission, then weighed in on the events of that night and made a comment that really offended not just officers in the Cambridge Police Department but officers around the country,” Sgt. James Crowley told CNN affiliate WHDH-TV in Boston.

The Cambridge city council should appoint an independent oversight committee to review this incident and either clear the officer, or find that he did not follow appropriate policy/procedure. Arresting the professor seems to be a mistake, given that the officer finally did determine that Mr. Gates did indeed live there. I would hope that neither Mr. Gates nor Sgt. Crowley intended for this to become a national focal point, but it is, and it needs to be dealt with. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail. Maybe it ends up that the police and Mr. Gates can agree to disagree, and then take steps to reconcile.

Read more about this here…

And actor Jeffrey Wright has an interesting read here…

And Newsweek has an interesting article here.

And even more from CNN here…

Well, that’s a shock. But in fairness, I really do wish we had end-to-end video of the whole affair. I heard part of the officer’s interview, and on the face of it, it sounded like he was a reasonable person. Not being there though leaves us with two sides of the story unless we get some eyewitness accounts.

As I noted in the previous post, when a cop is sent out to a “breaking and entering” call,  his/her first reaction is to assess the situation. If a person they find on scene is cooperative, then it usually ends with exchanging pleasantries (after they verify who the person is, of course). If the person starts ranting right away, all that does is set off the officer’s radar, and it usually goes downhill pretty fast from there. And it went downhill fast in this case.

IMHO, President Obama should not have said the officer’s acted “stupidly”. He qualified that by saying he did not have all the facts, but still, he could have made a broad statement leaving this up to the local officials. For the President to basically indict the police on this out of the gate I think was a mistake.

Here is the police report…

“That’s just my opinion, and I might be wrong.”

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Read more at CNN.com.

And here too…

So, just when you think race relations are improving, here comes law enforcement to arrest “the black guy”.

Now, I am not an African American, therefore I have not experienced racial profiling in that manner. But, in working with law enforcement personnel in the past (as a consumer of their off-duty services), I can tell that one thing they don’t like is push-back right out of the gate (aka “attitude”, in their parlance) from anyone – black, white, Latino, etc..  It would be really interesting to see video of this from start to finish.

A cop is sent out to a “breaking and entering” call. His/her first reaction is to assess the situation. If a person they find on scene is cooperative, then it usually ends with exchanging pleasantries (after they verify who the person is, of course). If the person starts ranting right away, all that does is set off the officer’s radar, and it usually goes downhill pretty fast from there, and it did in this case as the report outlines:

The officer asked Gates to “step out onto the porch and speak with me,” the report says. “[Gates] replied, ‘No, I will not.’ He then demanded to know who I was. I told him that I was ‘Sgt. Crowley from the Cambridge Police’ and that I was ‘investigating a report of a break in progress’ at the residence.

“While I was making this statement, Gates opened the front door and exclaimed, ‘Why, because I’m a black man in America?’ “

According to the report, Gates initially refused to show the officer his identification, instead asking for the officer’s ID. But Gates eventually did show the officer his identification that included his home address.

Racial profiling is wrong, and as a country, we have moved positively with respect to race. Any individual (or local department for that matter) can seem to set us back. I still would be very interested to see that start-to-finish video. My sense tells me this incident may lie somewhere in the middle of the “who’s to blame game.”

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Read more here at CNN…