A really interesting article in the Sunday New York Times today by Jim Rutenberg out of Culver City, California on how so-called “political freelancers” are using the Internet to mount attacks on the presidential candidates without having to spend a lot of money or getting the approval of network television ad departments. And, he points out, these Internet offenses happen so quickly that it leaves those attacked little time to respond.

“Four years ago, the Internet was a Wild West that caused the occasional headache for the campaigns but for the most part remained segregated from them,” Rutenberg writes. “This year, the development of cheap new editing programs and fast video distribution through sites like YouTube has broken down the barriers, empowering a new generation of largely unregulated political warriors who can affect the campaign dialogue faster and with more impact than the traditional opposition research shops.”

“It’s politics at the speed of Internet,” the Times quotes Dan Carol, who works for the Barack Obama campaign, as saying.

Indeed.

And, the danger is that once these video/Internet attacks are launched, it is proving difficult at best to counter them. The original mudslinging tends to stay in the public’s mind.

More important, perhaps, is that the speed at which these attacks can happen force campaigns and candidates to spend more time than they probably should defending themselves against what are often silly charges or outright false accusations. Giving them less time to think about the things that REALLY matter in a presidential campaign.

Remember Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when they trashed each other, when each accused the other of hypocrisy, of dishonesty, of being a second-rate candidate for president? That’s ancient history.

Now they love each other.

“She rocks, she rocks,” declared Obama. And he rolled.

Their June 27 rapprochement in Unity, N.Y. was a blatently contrived-for-the-cameras lovefest that was so full of baloney that it was almost comical: These newsly conjoined former bitter foes did everything but join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” But this partisan phoniness did not stop Fox, CNN and MSNBC from carrying the media event live in its one-hour entirety, another example of 24-hour news operations doing anything they can to feed the bottomless, ever-ravenous news hole they call “the beast.”

It was certainly news that Obama and Clinton were engaging in a public display of affection to whip up the Democratic masses and promote party unity heading toward the presidential election. But about five minutes worth of news at best. All of the excess was free advertising for the Dems that did not belong in a newscast.

The sound you hear? “The beast” is belching.

The day gun control advocates dreaded and opponents wished for has finally arrived. For the very first time since the United States was created, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a ruling on the right of individual Americans to own guns. The court said, YES, they do have this right under the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

This 5-4 decision is by any measure a landmark, not only because of what the ruling’s impact will be, but also because of how long it took the court to finally get around to deciding the issue.

The argument the court rejected was the argument that said basically, the second amendment means the right to bear arms as part of a state militia. Not so, says the court.

The court says the second admendment actually protects individuals who want to own guns for such things as defending their homes and their families living inside these homes.

Of course, this being America and the legal system being what it is, don’t believe for a second this issue is finally over. And, now that the door has been open wide, it is not likely the court will take as much time to think about gun control cases in the future as it did with this case now in its past.

While our book is about not having enough time to think, what with the blurring speed of modern communications, there are times when there may be too much time to think!

Such seems to be the case with the White House which, after years of insisting it had the goods on those alleged terrorists being held in Cuba, now apparently wants to call the re-write guys in to alter the evidence it claimed it always had, according to an Associated Press dispatch.

What gives?

The plan all along was to try these prisoners before a secret military tribunal set up by the Bush administration…But the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t exactly see eye to eye with the president and ruled that the  “suspects” have a right to have their cases reviewed by a civilian federal judge in a civilian federal court!

Well, that has apparently caused reflux in the White House which no doubt fears its “evidence” won’t stand up before a real, live, civilian judge. Thus, the proposed re-writing of evidence.

Some of the detainees probably are bad guys, but probably most are not. Maybe a federal judge can bring about an end to a shameful period of American history that Congress was unable, or unwilling, to do?

Time.

We talk about it incessantly. The book Howard Rosenberg and I have written, No Time To Think, is, at its very heart, a tome about time—in this case, the speed at which news now is communicated to the public and the lack of adequate time for the public to process and understand the inflowing information.

What is amazing, though, is that not all that long ago, time was not only relative, it practically had no meaning!

Before the railways realized they needed to standardize their time schedules or else chaos would ensue, the time of day could actually be different from one community to the next. I am not talking about one state of the union to the next…I am talking about one village or county to the next.

It could be 1pm in one small portion of a state, but 2pm only a few miles down the road.

When time had such little meaning, we all weren’t in such a hurry to do things. The fact that it took sometimes weeks or even months for news from the east coast of the United States to reach the west coast of the United States, probably didn’t bother all that many people. After all, what was time anyway?

Then the clock started ticking

Once, however, time became something well defined, agreed upon and even printed on countless rail schedules, the world, and its relationship to time, changed dramatically.

All of a sudden, stop watches and pocket watches became increasingly important.People began a race with time that has gotten faster and faster it seems with each passing day.

Now, we are, all of us, slaves to time. Uniformed time, which began as a way to serve our transportation needs, is now being served by all of us.

And, as that song goes—-time keeps on ticking into the future.

As downtown Des Moines, sections of Cedar Rapids and other parts of Iowa were being evacuated because of raging flood waters Friday, the 24-hour news networks spent the afternoon talking about Tim Russert.

Even as parts of Iowa were under water, imperiling many thousands in what could become an epic crisis, CNN, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC had Russert walking on water. And they weren’t alone.

The New York Times reported that Russert died of a heart attack in an on-line flash, calling him “a towering figure of American journalism.” It later changed the text under a photo of Russert to read “a prominent figure…,” but kept “towering” in the story about him. Calmer heads were to prevail, for in it’s next-day coverage in its print edition, ”towering” did not appear in any reference to Russert

It was the right move, for the only thing towering had been the hyperbole of the coverage.

That included ABC, CBS and NBC each making Russert’s death the lead story of its Friday evening newscasts. On “NBC Nightly News,” in fact, Russert was the only story.

Not one mention of anything else, even though Brian William anchored the newscast from Afghanistan (where a reported 1,500 Taliban prisoners had escaped in a prison break that day), which probably baffled viewers who didn’t know he’d been there all week. Add to that NBC’s prime time special on Russert that evening, Sunday’s “Meet the Press” memorial and MSNBC spending the entire weekend memorializing him, and you have the most extravagant tribute for a news figure in the history of television.

In no way am I making light of the death of Russert, the long-time Washington bureau chief for NBC News and host and managing editor of its Sunday morning “Meet the Press” program. His high profile on NBC and as a commentator on MSNBC made him a prominent, even important figure in journalism, especially this marathon election season. He was widely respected inside the Beltway, and I take at face value testimony from his NBC colleagues and other who knew him well that he was a terrific guy with many admirable qualities beyond his skills as a journalist. The praise was surely sincere and heart felt.

However, part of being a journalist is having the discipline to put events in their proper perspective and understand that what affects you personally may not merit the banner headline you’d like to give it. Russert hardly ”changed the face of journalism,” as several people contended Friday, for example. Nor was he arguably a “giant” of journalism, as someone else had anointed him.

Of course, mere mortality is rarely sufficient when eulogies come into play. Flaws? What flaws? So Russert, like so many before him (including David Bloom, the NBC News correspondent who died of an aneurysm while covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq), has been eulogized straight into the heavens. He’s now right up there with Zeus.

You can give MSNBC a little bit of a pass for its chauvinism. After all, Russert was its guy, which made his death more of a story to its viewers than to those of CNN and Fox, although you’d hardly have thought so based on the coverage. All three virtually ignored Iowa and the rest of the planet for several hours Friday afternoon, as if Russert’s death eclipsed all else.

With all the attention to Russert, practically overlooked was an earlier announcement by Fox that it had hired former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee as a commentator, giving free exposure to someone who is said to be under consideration to be Sen. John McCain’s running mate. If McCain does pick him, thanks to Fox Huckabee will have benefited from a lot of TV time that would make him even more familiar to a segment of the electorate than he was previously. And McCain would be his co-beneficiary.

Meanwhile, as if a head of state had died, perfunctory tributes poured in from politicians everywhere, from George Bush and the Clintons to McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, who declared that he was “grief stricken” over Russert’s death. Grief stricken? Pardon my skepticism.

In fact, gratuitous grief was wall to wall on TV, much of it seeming not to ring true. “He was our inner conscience,” said Fox’s Neil Cavuto. “And now our inner conscience (pause for dramatic effect) is gone.” It was embarrassing to watch.

If Cavuto was referring to his own network, everyone knows that Fox has no “inner conscience.” If he was referring to the entire nation, how overblown was that? If Russert was the man everyone said he was, he would have been embarrassed, too.

The speed of the Internet and the impact of 24/7 cable news are forcing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to rethink some of its media policy.

Spreading like wildfire the past few weeks, with no substantiation, is the rumor that Michelle Obama had once used the word “whitey” during a speech she reportedly made from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

From conservative blogs to conservative radio talk show hosts, this rumor, which Obama has labeled false, has seemingly taken on a life of its own.

Deciding to fight fire with fire, the Obama campaign has created its own website specifically geared toward debunking rumors about Obama and his family.

The site, reports the Associated Press, refutes claims that there is an actual video of Mrs. Obama using the “whitey” word. “No such tape exists,” says the new Obama website.

The A.P.’s Nedra Pickler is correct when she writes, “The site is a response to the realities of a brave new world, where information travels 24 hours a day on blogs and voters are increasingly turning to the Internet for information.”

When will they ever learn? Apparently, never.

I am talking about this past weekend’s grand finish to the Hillary for President campaign. The big speech. The long (or short?) good-bye. The end of the road. Well, you get the idea.

The 24/7 news nets began their “special coverage” (translation: more boring than usual) what seemed like days before Clinton actually spoke. And, of course, needed to fill lots and lots of air time.

So, what did they do?

They decided to talk about what Clinton might say in her farewell speech! And, get this, they even had panels of “experts” discussing the ramifications of what she may say in her speech. What she MAY say!!!

How it turned out

Wouldn’t you know it. When it came time for Clinton to actually deliver her speech, she failed to say some of the things some of the experts said she would say. So, what did they do? You guessed it (I hope)–they berated her for not saying what they thought she would say but didn’t.

Couldn’t they have waited for her to just deliver the speech?

But it gets even worse. I know, hard to believe, right?

The day after The Speech, Hillary and Barack ( I’m sure they won’t mind me calling them by their first names) held a “secret” meeting that everyone seemed to know about.

However, no one knew what they talked about. Her debt? His Veep choice? A good place to grab a slice of pizza in D.C.?

Did that stop the pundits and anchors and reporters and experts and whomever?

Is John McCain a Republican?

They all went right on talking about what Clinton and Obama might have said, could have said, probably said, should have said, had to have said, shouldn’t have said.

The only thing missing is what they actually said. Because no one, except Obama and Clinton knew.