If you blame the media (television news in particular) for the sad state of political discourse in this country, you might be on the right track. Television news personalities, coupled with the public’s attraction to the shallow and/or stupid, have done great harm to the content of our national screaming match.

Take a look at this Meet the Press interview of Sen. Barack Obama. Tim Russert is supposed to be one of the more sane among his cohort. Well, even in the level-toned rhythms of Russerts supposedly intellectually high brow morning show, it took a full 22 minutes to get to a single issue other than Reverend Wright and inside baseball questions about political gamesmanship. If this is the crud we get at 8am, one can only imagine the hogwash spewed during prime time.

This is our coverage of elections. And our coverage of subjects such as the economy and war and peace isn’t much different (I will not waste the lines of html required to provide the all too obvious examples).

Next week, Sunday morning, it’s cartoons.

More on Obama-Russert from everywhere.

This is the first big story since I launched Addictomatic a couple days ago. It’s pretty fun to watch the buzz about Microsoft and Yahoo as it rolls in from various sources.

I Inhaled: Introducing Addictomatic

I am pleased to introduce Addictomatic: Inhale the Web. I’ve been working on the site for a few months and so far, people seem to be getting a bit addicted. A bit more detail below the robot:

Addictomatic – Inhale the Web

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up and what’s now.

Search. Personalize. Bookmark.

After you search, you can personalize your results dashboard by moving around the source boxes. When you’re done, bookmark the page and keep coming back to your personaized results dashboard for that search.

Newsfix

Our newsfix pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more. You get all the feeds from the best sources in each category. And like your search results dashboard, you can personalize the layout of the headline boxes, delete ones you don’t like and bookmark your personalized page.

I couldn’t have launched the site without the great development work by Alex King and his crew over at Crowd Favorite. Excellent work by the entire team over there. Alex does a great job explaining the service on his blog. Hat tip also to Bryan Bell. I’ve been wanting to work with him for awhile and he did an incredible job designing the logo and the site.

Go ahead. Inhale.

The links between food and fuel are growing tighter. How can that be anything but terrible, especially at a moment when much of the world is faced with shortages of both?

Across the country, ethanol plants are swallowing more and more of the nation’s corn crop. This year, about a quarter of U.S. corn will go to feeding ethanol plants instead of poultry or livestock. That has helped farmers like Johnson, but it has boosted demand—and prices—for corn at the same time global grain demand is growing.

And it has linked food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records, pulling up the price of anything that can be poured into a gasoline tank. “The price of grain is now directly tied to the price of oil,” says Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they’re beginning to fuse.”

McCain is pushing the idea that Hamas wants Obama to win.

Did the smears by the Bush campaign in 2000 make him determined to run a more noble campaign or just teach him the tricks of the trade?

The media loves Obama. Plenty of very smart people have said that Obama is the most exciting political voice in a generation. In the past two weeks, Hillary’s negatives have gone way up. Bill has been wildly ineffective. There is (or was) an extreme perception that this thing is over and Clinton should just end the pain. Even the best math minds in the country are having a hard time figuring out how Hillary pieces together a nomination. The Clinton campaign is generally viewed as being terrible and its upheavals have only worsened lately. Obama has all the dough and is outspending Clinton by at least three to one.

And still, Hillary is winning big in big states.

Something is going on. Could be race. Could be an inability by Obama to connect with certain voters. Could be a lot of things.

But with a Republican opponent whose brand is all about being an independent maverick, it really couldn’t be much worse.