Last summer MoveOn's Eli Pariser decided to have a little fun with web video, and with the help of Brave New Films got some folks together to post "Stop the Falsiness," in part to poke fun at themselves and to also take advantage of Pariser's being on the Colbert Report to advance their campaign against right-wing news programs. Their video went up on YouTube, and in the first week alone got more than 40,000 views.

Do you think the "bloggers vs journalists" fight is over, as Jeff Jarvis exclaimed to me at a panel we were on together last week at the Museum of Television and Radio? I argued with Jeff then that it was far from over, and to prove my point I can point you to today's New York Times Week in Review, which has a giant 3/4 page charticle by Danny Glover of National Journal titled "New on the Web: Politics as Usual."

To my knowledge, Glover's piece is the first time the Times has looked so closely at the new phenomenon of blogging and tackled the question of blogger ethics, so -- even if we wish this debate were over -- it ain't. Unfortunately, Glover sets up a straw man--that all political bloggers are contemptuous of the political establishment, outsiders, "revolutionary" even--and then knocks it down by producing a list of bloggers who went to work in 2006 for political campaigns: Jerome Armstrong, Abraham Chernilla, Peter Daou, Jule Fanselow, Lowell Feld, Jon Henke, Aldon Hynes, Patrick Hynes, Scott Shields, Aaron Silverstein, David Sirota, Tim Tagaris and Jesse Taylor. He goes further, essentially arguing that these political bloggers are for sale, either because they took jobs with candidates they had backed on their blogs, or because they didn't disclose their ties to candidates on their blogs after the fact. Hence the "politics as usual" as the subtitle of his piece.

Want to get a look at the innards of HotSoup--the soon-to-be-launched new entry in the social-networking sweepstakes? While the site's homepage will turn you away, just go to any of these links--HotIssues, About, Press, or Contacts and you're in. They've also left open links to several of their "Opinion Drivers"--famous people from the worlds of politics, business, religion, and popular culture who presumably are going to blog brilliantly for the site, which aims to focus heavily on politics. Looking forward to the deep thoughts of cyclist Lance Armstrong, lobbyist Ed Gillespie, veterans activist Bobby Muller, or "political diva" (that's her online handle on the site) Donna Brazile? You can check them out too.

The misuse of the word "hack" has reached untenable levels. Lately it seems that whenever a politician is attacked using technology, it's the result of a "hack."

By now most of you know about the flap involving Governor Schwarzenegger and unprotected files on his campaign server. If not, a recap: staffers working for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides discovered an audio file on Schwarzenegger's campaign web site that features Arnie saying some inappropriate things about Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

The Angelides team turned the file over to the Los Angeles Times and a controversy ensued.

The Governor's camp quickly leveled accusations at Angelides' campaign. "It's wrong, it's unethical, and it's a very big deal," said campaign manager Steve Schmidt. "The treasurer should denounce the unethical actions taken on his behalf," said Katie Levinson, communications director of Californians for Schwarzenegger. And then, the Sacramento Bee dropped the H-bomb: "Angelides camp denies hacking" read yesterday's headline.

The Washington Post continues to out-do The New York Times in its coverage of the intersection of technology and politics. Two recent examples of smart reporting from the Post: Jeffrey Birnbaum's piece on "Targeting Likely Advocates With Web Ads," and William Booth's piece on Robert Greenwald's net-centric approach to financing and distributing his political documentaries, "His Fans Greenlight His Films."

Birnbaum's story gives us a fresh take on how some well-heeled players are using technology to better game the system, i.e., to empower themselves in a top-down way. Want to build a list of citizens who will help your cause? Fine-tuned Internet advertising can get you folks, but it will cost you $5 per advocate, Birnbaum reports. The somewhat creepy example he gives is of a campaign run that OnPoint Advocacy of Democracy Data & Communications ran for the American Medical Association.

But do blogs dig Bush? Actually that question didn't come up, but apparently even the notoriously uninterested-in-the-media occupant of the Oval Office recognizes the power of the blogosphere. Thanks to Wizbang for the quote, which came in response to a question about how to get the "good news" about Iraq out to more Americans. Bush said:

One of the things that we have to value is that that we do have a media, free media that's able to do what they want to do and I - you ask me to say something in front of all the camera here [laughter]. Help over there will ya? I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there's blogs, there's internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate which is literally changing the way people get their information and so if you're concerned I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that got internet sites and just keep the word moving.

There's one small problem with this idea, Mr. President. See here.

Live, from Politics Online at George Washington University, here are my semi-verbatim notes (i.e. these are not perfect direct quotes but my best paraphrasing) on a lively morning plenary called "The Changing Media Landscape," with David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor, Alex Jones and moderated by Chris Nolan. My random editorial comments are in italics. (I'd be blogging more from here but the wifi connection is really spotty.)

Nolan: What's changed in the last year?

-Weinberger: Editorial authority has shifted. Bloggers are recommendation engines, instead of a bunch of middle-aged white guys deciding what's important. We're constructing our own front pages more on what friends recommend to us. [Indeed.]

-Jones: My opinion is different because I don't use the internet in the same way that Dave does. Neither do young people use it the same way. What's happening now is sites are separating themselves, in a sort of organic process, in terms of what they will and won't do. For example, I'm interested in what bloggers will do in response to today's New York Times story about Edelman's using bloggers to help promote Wal-mart. In the blogosphere generally, the "anything goes" mentality is getting more refined. This is part of "growing up." [Why put it in such a condescending way, Mr. Jones?] I also see newspapers figuring out how to adapt, acting in a collective self-preservation mode, to the blogosphere, in many cases with local sites.

The live Senate hearings on Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court could transfix the nation...or people may decide that they're more interested in the new season of American Idol. It's too soon to say.

But some bloggers are out ahead of the curve in attempt to live-blog the hearings, including the group-written SCOTUSblog and liberal firebrand Firedoglake. Others are blogging it closely, though not trying to semi-transcribe the play-by-play, the essence of live-blogging. They include the Redstate.org-connected ConfirmThem group blog, and Planned Parenthood's SaveRoe blog.

The Washington Post and the New York Times are both also providing blog-like coverage of the hearings, though--amazingly enough--it appears that they have figured out how to make sure their blogging is as stilted and boring as their regular news pages. C'mon, guys, loosen up! Give us some color!

Joe Dante's Showtime political-horror parable "Homecoming" showed war veteran zombies rising from the grave to vote against the president who sent them to die for a lie, while, according to Variety, "a Karl Rove-like presidential adviser and Ann Coulter-like pundit (the names have been changed, but just barely) manipulate a talk circuit where gaseous windbags presume to speak for the military’s fallen."

Scriptwriter Sam Hamm granted an interview with Corrente's Victor Shystee in which he discussed the influence of blogs on the development of the moive:

It does have sort of an "Atrios's Greatest Hits" quality, doesn't it? But that’s the air we breathe. We’re in the midst of one of the most genuinely grotesque administrations in American history, one that will be long remembered for its corruption, mendacity and malfeasance. In Washington D.C. you cannot swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a crime or a scandal or a national disgrace. So it was no great feat for us to cram a bunch of hot-button issues into the margins of our story. The big trick was deciding what to ignore.

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There's been a lot of buzz of late about what the big telecom mergers just approved by the FCC (Verizon-MCI and AT&T-SBC), combined with recent FCC rulings giving broadband providers a lot more monopoly powers, might do to the innovative and freewheeling nature of the Internet. The single best piece of analysis I've seen so far was by David Coursey, a columnist for eWeek.com. He starts with SBC CEO Ed Whitacre's comments on BusinessWeek's website, which poured fuel on the fire:

BW: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?

Whitacre: "How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

Coursey then writes: