+1 reason the Republican Party looks quite moronic right now

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has for me yet again summarized why the Republican Party is in such disarray today. In this video she launches a not so subtle attack on Al Gore's character by inferring that his promotion of climate change legislation was for economic profit. Wow.

Couple of questions:
0 - Who was the aide in charge of researching this before she launched her mis-guided political gambit? Marsha clearly was not in command of the facts around Mr. Gore's business before she starts this endeavor.
1 - Who in the Republican Party blessed this junior congresswoman's assault on Al Gore? She might have been flying rogue, but it makes the whole party look bad. If, and I'm not saying you should, want to attack Al Gore's moral character, you'd better send a veteran into the fight, not a rookie.
2 - Since when did the Republican party go anti-capitalism and anti-business?! When Al Gore is using the economic system and venture capital to confront Global Warming and the Republicans are attacking that, the world has gone topsy-turvsy.

Ill-advised, ill-researched, and ill-orchestrated political maneuvering yet again backfires on the Republican Party. How did a party with near complete control of the American legislative, executive, and judicial branches just a few years back fall into such disarray?

Time for a reboot, Republicans. The Democratic Party can take a vacation from politics and the Republican Party would still lose mindshare and votes right now. The problems are internal. Purge and reboot. This is embarrassing. For all Americans.

blurring the lines

This advertisement blurs the lines between media player and web page, and more importantly to me, at least, is a harbinger of the future of on-line advertising. This required coordination between the hosting company and the advertiser, but in the future it will not.

http://vimeo.com/4281939

Smart(er) Address Books

Is it just me, or did earlier versions of Palm Desktop and Microsoft Outlook represent the high water mark of innovation for address books?

Here's a simple example of "intelligence" I would have expected to be standard in a modern Address Book book. Auto fill for address fields. My browser can do it, but my Address Book (Apple Address Book) can not. As I enter or modify contacts working at the same company, the Address Book has enough context to know that there is a high likelihood that all the employees will have the same address. In fact, they'll share many common characteristics like work domain name (email), area code prefix for office #s, etc.

A modern address book should intelligently see the common elements between contacts and both copy and normalize information between contacts with similar contexts. I shouldn't have to re-enter the work address of contacts who all work at the same company. Even if the work address is different between contacts at the same company (which occurs with increasing frequency at large companies with multiple sites), the % times that context doesn't yield the right answer is lower than the times it is right.

Normalization is my second request. Ever "lose" a contact during a search because of a simple misspelling of the company name, etc. Why wouldn't a modern address book normalize contact information across contacts sharing a context (aka company name)?

Another minor peeve. While Salutations are used less frequently, why not default to assigning male names "Mr."? Men don't have a married and unmarried state to navigate salutation wise?

My final idea is a bit harder to implement, but seems obvious to me. Is there is root address book in the cloud, at least for companies? An internet white pages, of sorts. If so, if I could soft match entered Address Book information like company name and allow the user to create a specific match based on additional information on the paper business card I'm entering. Once a explicit match is created, remaining contact fields could be filled immediately from the cloud. Even cooler would be a soft link to this contact info (pointer) ala Plaxo, so as companies moved, etc., I'd have the latest contact information for all my contacts with the same context.

I'm sure CRM apps do some of this, but this level of intelligence isn't processor intensive or particularly hard to develop. What personal or business Address Book has these and the hundreds of additional innovations that one might expect to see in a network connected 2009 Address Book?