The quadrennial -- or biennial, now that the summer and winter games are staggered -- hypocrisy irony of the "Olympic Movement" formulation from the mouthpieces of global capital is probably not actually any more finely described by Beijing's turn on the stage than by any other ruthless global hegemon's. Hey, Mary Lou Retton was sticking vaults and selling breakfast cereal while Central America was crawling with death squads.

But China has brought renewed hand-wringing from the guardians of right-thinking about the wrongness of bringing politics into a "Movement" so palpably political from the get-go, and so explicitly marked in its most memorable moments -- Jesse Owens in Berlin, the Blood in the Water match -- by political valences.

And then, of course, there's this:

Lawrence Lessig ... speaking to a packed house at the DIA user conference keynote.

(ot) Seating nailed down at the power strip oasis. Why are there never enough outlets? airports are a special offender in this ... or, maybe i should think about a computer with more than 30 seconds of battery life.

Like most of the blogoverse, I've consented to the unsatisfying and barely compensated practice of selling myself to Google Adsense on my hobby blog, which I should add is pointedly non-partisan.

I hardly monitor religiously the stuff Google pitches my paltry readership, but you get the occasional one that makes you scratch your head and flip back to the entry to figure out how it made the match.

Other times, there's less mystery than an episode of Columbo. Like when you post about an execution in Iran, and you get ...

Our friends at Politics and Technology ran a "punditology challenge" asking readers to pick the winners of all the January presidential primaries, Republican and Democratic alike.

The winners are here, (gosh, an A-list political blogger wins ... but it wasn't all favorites this weekend).

So, here's the bullet point for that wisdom-of-the-crowds slide you need to update with fresh data:

Our collective picks scored 117 points - and were better than 96.2% of the individual punditologists.

Out of 563 entrants, "collective picks" would have tied for 20th. We saw much the same thing (in a smaller sample) for last year's Oscar pool. (Dear readers, should we reprise this?)

Many of us will probably remember, however vaguely, Robert Putnam and his famous "bowling alone" thesis about the decline of social capital in the US. Some of us remember thinking that it was more about transformation and reallocation of social capital, but to make that case right now would be kind of pointless and a distraction from the work Putnam is doing now (even if it's right, which it may not be).

Putnam has just published the results of five years of research on the effects of diversity on social capital within communities (which here means neighborhoods or something similar). The conclusion: diversity reduces social capital within the community. Most striking, and most distressing, it turns out too that members of a diverse community not only trust persons of other ethnic groups less, they also mistrust others of the same ethnic background.

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

-William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Someone could have dined well on my dime by wagering me on the proposition that this now-renowned "ObamaGirl" video would be -- well -- renowned.

I guess I'm a fogey. When I saw this thing Thursday morning it registered a big "meh." Three days later, the needle hasn't budged.

Actually, the citizen media that caught my eye that day came via the UK-based nfp2.0 blog -- a spot of guerrilla marketing.

[I know you want the SILF t-shirt]

This charismatic piece hit me as an interesting juxtaposition to last summer's viral-marketing Hindenberg, the Agency.com Subway pitch which went viral for its cover-your-eyes awfulness.

(All the original's video links seem to be pulled, but the below is the piece plus smartass subtitling.)

Despite my mixed reactions, and despite the contrasting purposes at play, there's a kinship between the first two of these videos that's wanting in the third. What is this quicksilver "genuineness" that decodes a piece's meaning and foretells its prospects as citizen media?

Congratulations to one of the earlier DIA users, Free Schuylkill River Park for doing just what their name avowed.

Every action by the group was meticulously explained on its site (www.freetheriverpark.org), and "action alerts" were sent to its growing list of subscribers any time the group needed lobbying of City Council, CSX or the company's own customers to get behind pro-access initiatives.

The response was so instant, the rebuttals so relentless, CSX just couldn't stay nimble.

A number of DIA users and friends are among scores of signatories to open letters sent to both the DNC and RNC demanding that debate footage be openly licensed to facilitate remixing, mashups, parody, commentary, and every other manner of citizen intervention free from any possible fear that some intellectual property law could be used to shut down discussion.

The letters suggest one of two solutions: place all debate footage in the public domain; or, place it under a Creative Commons license. Here's a pdf version of the letters.

That's such a damnably obvious thing to get behind that kos and Michelle Malkin are taking the same tack. And while the danger of an actual lawsuit may be scant -- "suing the anonymous person who made a YouTube skewering you during the New Hampshire primary" is a good working definition of "political suicide" -- one has to appreciate the opportunism of using the situation as a teachable moment on intellectual property for politicos.

The parties should do this, of course. But so much the better if it normalizes in some small way the idea that statues surrounding content control and distribution are not fixed on Sinai but open to discussion.

Thousands of pages of DoJ documents related to the fired attorneys thing posted on the House Judiciary Committee website have been scattered to the readership of Talking Points Memo for perusal and analysis.

Posted at 12:51 a.m. -- the middle of the night -- the request has generated as of this writing (nine hours hence) 35,900 words* of responses/comments, en route to its imminent canonization to the constellation of "network power rewrites political rules" anecdotes. (Stand by, Sunlight Foundation.) (Update -- we beat their story.)