Eric Schmidt

Hours after Bloomberg News revealed Google's billion dollar scheme to avoid corporate taxes, President Obama spoke at a Democrat fundraiser held at the home of one of the Internet giant's executives.

From what I can tell, only the Washington Examiner's Byron York thought the timing of this event was at all odd (h/t Seton Motley):

As it continues its exponential expansion to cellphones, mobile advertising, television sets and book publishing internet giant Google has been simultaneously expanding its presence in the U.S. political scene, adding lobbyists, DC-based employees, and ramping up its campaign donations.

Writing for Politico on Friday, Kim Hart provides some details on how the company is becoming much more politicized than ever before:

Google boss Eric Schmidt is one of the nation’s most politically active business leaders — a man who uses the cachet of the company he leads, as well as his own charisma, to build strategic alliances in the Obama administration and on Capitol Hill.

Schmidt, 55, grew up in Washington and returns frequently to visit his mother, who still lives in Northern Virginia. Those trips often double as chances to meet with President Barack Obama, chat with staffers at the Federal Communications Commission and meet with top lawmakers.

YouTube is assisting Al "Eco-Prophet" Gore throw a Hail Mary pass to the growing segment of Americans who are "deniers" of the earth's "climate crisis."

This time, Gore and his organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection, has issued a call-to-arms for young hipsters to make a video about climate change for a YouTube Video Volunteer contest.

"[A]s we celebrate our 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, we need action on all fronts," Gore said on the weekend YouTube sermon. "We need to build on our individual and family commitments and use this historic moment facing our nation to make a difference in changing our laws and creating a better world for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren."

Gore's message was the same - humans cannot wait another minute preventing the doomsday catastrophe of global warming, and thus America's youth must demand a drastic and immediate overhaul of the entire U.S. economy. 

One of the hottest Internet videos during the mortgage and banking crisis has been a YouTube clip titled "Burning Down the House," which outlines the untold story of how liberal Democrats pressured banks and lenders to throw standards out the window and give money to people who couldn't pay it back.

Try watching it now, however, and you won't be able to, thanks to the growing problem of "flag spam," the practice of abusing online filter systems to squelch political speech with which one disagrees.

We've all seen spammers at work in our e-mail inboxes. Experts estimate that 90 percent of all e-mail messages nowadays are spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Luckily for most of us, the majority of it gets filtered out. That's caused the more sophisticated spammers to change course and target a more vulnerable part of the Internet - the hugely popular Web sites like YouTube, Digg and the blogosphere, where anyone can join the discussion by posting videos, essays, reviews and other content.

When interviewed by Eyeblast.tv last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by his company, is "pretty serious" about removing the "strange" videos that keep popping up on the site, especially videos "that can be used to incite bad outcomes." Apparently videos designed to incite Catholics don't fall into that category.

A YouTube user who goes by the moniker "fsmdude" has posted more than 30 videos under the title "Eucharist Desecration." Each video features an attack on a symbol that Catholics consider sacred -- by blow gun, nail gun, boiling, sword and cigarette in a few recent episodes.

The creator of the videos isn't subtle about his intent. He was angered by reports of a college student allegedly receiving e-mail threats from "fanatical Catholics" after the student snatched a wafer at mass, so "fsmdude" decided to repeatedly profane the Eucharist on camera for all to see.