Barack Obama, using the kerfuffle over his association with Jeremiah Wright to discuss racial issues in the United States:

At 35+ minutes, it’s longer than the average 2-minute YouTube clip, but watch the whole thing. Thus far in the campaign, Obama has demonstrated an impressive ability to swat down the typical manufactured outrage the plagues contemporary political discourse.

I would argue that he continues that trend here. The average candidate would have thrown Wright to the dogs, disavowing any association with him. Obama refuses to do so, instead using the ginned-up controversy as an opportunity to move the conversation about racial relations in this country to a level of complexity seldom seen in presidential politics.

From an article in yesterday’s Ottowa Citizen:

Compulsive e-mailing and text messaging could soon become classified as an official brain illness.

An editorial in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry says Internet addiction — including “excessive gaming, sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging” — is a common compulsive-impulsive disorder that should be added to psychiatry’s official guidebook of mental disorders.

In other news, ZOMG!!! The sky is FALLING!!!

I’m tired of reading this kind of story. It’s been making the rounds in one form or the other for at least the last five years, maybe longer—”The internets are bad and scary and filled with perverts and criminals and anyone who spends more than five minutes a day on them is some sort of deviant.”

While we occasionally see stories about the amount of time people spend sitting in front of the TV, where is the hand-wringing coverage of sports addiction? What about all those poor phone-addicted souls? And the countless families destroyed by magazine and newspaper subscriptions? It’s the silent epidemic that’s tearing our society apart!

My point is that, while there may very well be some small percentage of web users who spend 23 hours a day doing one thing, stories like this one completely mischaracterize Internet usage. The web is an information and communication medium, and as such, it is can encompass many disparate activities that have traditionally required separate media. You spend time reading the paper, I get my news via the web. You talk on the phone with friends and coworkers, I use IM, email, IRC, and Skype. You watch the ballgame on the TV, I play World of Warcraft. You sit down in front of television and flip through 289 channels, I watch the show I like on my computer.

You look at me and say, “I do all this different stuff, but you just sit in front of your computer.” I call bullshit—it’s just two different means of doing the same stuff.

…Ford/Chevy symbols, sports team logos, etc. They should be banned.

That is all.

The New York Times’ “The Lede” blog has a post today by Sheryl Gay Stolberg about George W. Bush’s song-and-dance routine from last weekend’s Gridiron Club dinner getting leaked to YouTube.

Here’s the clip itself (probably best viewed on an empty stomach):

Stolberg does at least acknowledge that since making it to the Internets, the President’s performance has not met with the universally rave reviews he got from the reporters in the room:

Not everyone thought it was funny. Chris Matthews, the host of the MSNBC program “Hardball,” lambasted reporters the other night for yukking it up with Mr. Bush.

“Nothing funny about a war fought for bad intelligence and a top aide, Scooter Libby, who committed perjury and obstruction of justice to cover it up,’’ Mr. Matthews said. “Nothing funny about a president who commuted that sentence to keep the cover-up protected. Otherwise, I’m sure it was an enjoyable get-together between journalists and the people they’re charged with covering.’’

It’s a rare day that I agree with something Chris Matthews says, but this is one of them. Also in the “not everyone” category, apparently, are a good number of reader, given the nearly unanimous negative reaction among the 50+ commenters on Stolberg’s post.

According to the Internets, NBC/FOX’s Hulu.com is officially open for business, so I figured I should check it out.

At this point, the expectations for online offering from any major content company are so low that anything would be an improvement. Taken in that light, Hulu doesn’t disappoint.

Make no mistake—the site is frustrating. Navigation borders on appalling, and the overall effect is one of spinning a roulette wheel. For arcane marketing reasons, what’s available and what isn’t seems entirely random. For some shows, the entire run is available, for other, just a season or two. Yet other shows have just a few episodes online and an assortment of clips.

On the bright side, in the “better than nothing” category, the shows that are available are in Flash, and play just fine even on Linux. They can be played fullscreen, or in a pop-out window, and I have yet to run across any inline advertisements. The videos are streaming-only, but the bandwidth seems adequate, and I haven’t encountered any problems with playback.

On the whole, Hulu isn’t terrible, assuming that all you’re looking to do is catch the most recent episode of series shortly after it aired. There’s also a reasonable assortment of back-catalog titles available, the first season or two of older shows. Will it stop people from downloading shows from BitTorrent or ripping DVD’s? Unlikely, but when I take off my nerd hat for a few minutes, I can see how it could have some mass-market appeal.

Besides, how can I really argue with two whole seasons of “Emergency!”? That was my favorite show when I was five.

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

Read the whole article, and then explain to me exactly what safeguards are going to keep innocent people from getting swept in these dragnets. With this volume of data, and the number of people affected, it is simply beyond belief that an overzealous law-enforcement employee isn’t going to look at something s/he has no business looking at, or that some of this stuff isn’t going to get misused.

And tha’s before we get to the discussion of by whom and what process the hypothetical person in Detroit is “suspected of terrorist connections.”

If the allegations that he [ahem] engaged the services of a prostitute are true, then Spitzer is an idiot and deserves to go down. However, a couple of questions come to mind:

1. If Spitzer was “Client 9″, who were Clients 1-8? With fees in the range of $1,000 to $5,500 an hour, that has to be a pretty interesting list.
2. Is it a coincidence that a federal investigation has managed to ensnare a top Democratic governor and possible future presidential candidate? Normally I’d say “yes,” but given the Bush administration’s routine use of the Justice Department for partisan political gain, I’m disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

UPDATE: A bit more from Digby on Question #2.

UPDATE 2: And Harper’s as well.

I know I’ve been on something of a binge with the McCain posts the last few days, but seriously, what the HELL is this?

Let’s be clear, this is not some fan-created remix, ala the hippie-dippy “Yes We Can” clips making the rounds of Obama supporters. Republicans don’t believe in that sort of thing. This video was created by the McCain campaign, and is currently featured prominently on the main page of their official website.

The Churchill/Teddy Roosevelt clips are pretty standard-fare conservative ancestor worship, although it’s rather amusing that they have to point their jingoistic patriotism at someone who is, well, not American. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to admit that the guy that got the country through World War II was a Democrat, I guess.

The “whizzing through galaxies” part, though, and the New Age-y synthesizer music—it’s unclear to me where these elements fit in. Clearly, the war footage is intended to make me go all weak-kneed with flag-waving, terrorist-ass-kicking fervor. So why throw in the trippiness? Maybe the ad originally featured footage of John “Man in the Arena” McCain fighting Arabs and other scary people, but there was concern that it wasn’t “inspirational” enough.

Whatever the reasons for it, this ad is possibly even more confused than McCain’s policy positions.

We finally get a Democrat back in the Governor’s office, and are within one seat of taking back the state Senate, and jackass has to go and do this crap:

ALBANY – Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He scheduled an announcement for 2:15 after inquiries from the Times.

Seriously. Why the hell do you even get into politics if there are skeletons like this in your closet? It’s not like they’re not going to come tumbling out, probably at the most politically inopportune time possible.

So long, Tucker:

Insiders tell TVNewser Tucker Carlson’s 6pmET show Tucker is getting the axe, but Carlson stays on as a political contributor to all MSNBC shows at least through the 2008 election. The official announcement, expected tomorrow, will include details about who will replace Tucker at 6pmET as well as other political programming additions. Sources say the network is going to beef up its schedule with more NBC News talent.

I would have preferred that the “stays on as a political contributor” had been dropped, but axing his crappy show is a good start.

While he has at least dropped his stupid bow-tie schtick, Carlson remains one of the more odious characters who manages to pass as a legitimate pundit (as opposed to just being an attention-grabbing freakshow like Glenn Beck or Joe Scarborough). Unfortunately, it sounds like he’ll continue to float to the surface of MSNBC’s panel discussions, in the manner of fellow traveller Pat Buchanan.