In the wake of a new report out over alleged Apple sweatshops in China, CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield spoke with chief business correspondent Ali Velshi about what Apple knew and when they knew it. “Steve Jobs — he seems like the kind of guy who never, when he was alive, would have allowed any of this to go on,” Banfield observed. “Did he know? Did he not know? Did he not care? Do we know?”

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) is taking some ribbing in the blogosphere for a rant against the job-killing iPad on the floor of the House, in contrast to his effusive praise of another Apple device as a jobs engine just last month. However, if you listen to a fuller context of his remarks, he’s actually not slamming the iPad or the iPod, but our consumer economy for not retaining a manufacturing base.

This should be fun. In a commencement address at Virginia’s Hampton University yesterday, President Obama fed meme-hungry media types the kind of quote they can really sink their teeth several millimeters into. The NY Post already has the President “declaring war on technology,” and Fox News says he “Warns Grads of iPad Peril.” The combination of über-pop-buzzword “iPad” and lightning-rod POTUS is almost irresistible, with even the Huffington Post missing the point of what Obama was really saying.

The “athletes being bad” story du jour is a report that Santonio Holmes, troubled receiver for the New York Jets, was escorted off of a flight from Newark to Pittsburgh by police. Numerous outlets are saying that Holmes was asked to turn off his iPod at the end of the flight, failed to do so, and was then “forcefully removed” by police. According to the Allegheny Police Department, however, that’s not entirely accurate.

2010 will be the year when we begin to consume media in a whole new way. The so-called iTablet may revolutionize how we experience magazines, and Boxee stands to do the same for web-to-TV convergence. You know how the iPod changed how we consumed and paid for music? Right. Like that.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times is calling this economic decade ‘The Big Zero ,’ saying “It was a decade in which nothing good happened.” Paul and I smoke insanely different tobacco. As an entrepreneur that has managed a hedge fund now for 11 plus years through bubbles and crashes, I almost take offense.

The decade got off to such a nice start, didn’t it? At the stroke of midnight, as the nines turned into zeroes, our millennial fears were allayed by magnums of champagne and an army of Silicon Alley wizards. Cities around the globe twinkled with the light of an infinity of camera flashes. It was all [...]