Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was questioned earlier this week about her views and how they compare/contrast with President Clinton’s views during a visit to the Congo. (The student meant to say President “Obama.” Right.)

Many pundits and bloggers poked fun at her response.

Women the world over are constantly asked about their husband’s point of view, opinion, and judgment. Even when it shouldn’t matter.

If I had a dime every time someone asked what my husband thought of my writing, pictures, ass…

When was the last time a man held a press conference and someone asked what the little lady thought? A man is rarely made to believe he needs his wife’s blessing when it comes to performance at work.

Could Clinton have answered the question better? With humor and a bit of serenity? Absolutely. She should expect such misogynistic and idiotic questions, especially in a place where women are treated so poorly. An answer at the ready, said with a sly wink, could have really hit home – internationally.

She had every right to be frustrated and angry with the suggestion that her views should mirror her husband’s. Bill Clinton is *not* Secretary of State, goddamn it.

She just should have ranted in private.

But I don’t blame her.

Not one bit.

Either way, the shadowy 527 group Don’t Bank on Sink has released an Internet ad mocking CFO and governor candidate Alex Sink’s use of state airplanes.

Watch the entire ad and learn more about who’s behind the group after the jump.

According to the Palm Beach Post, the 527 political group has a frontman, former Alachua County Republican chairman Stafford Jones. The group has not disclosed its financing, and its address is a mail drop in a Publix Shopping Center in Gainesville.

Expect more of this as Sink likely will also be slimed about her time as a top-ranking Bank of America exec, of course long before the subprime crisis and economic meltdown but that won’t stop opponents from trying to link her to the incredibly bad feelings that people have about bankers today.

Jones’ group has a second version of the ad up as well, and here it is:

Cross-posted from The Farm Report

I noticed it 30 years ago, when I began teaching. In my history class, students seemed to have little interest in the cast of characters until photography came along. Pictures changed the way we looked at history. We were never as interested in George Washington as were in Abraham Lincoln. It was because of those portraits of Lincoln, where we could look into his haunted eyes.

You can’t hide from pictures. The horrific video of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, bleeding out on a Tehran street not only makes the political upheaval in Iran more tangible, it also shows the power of new media. We don’t turn to television, toward any immaculately dressed network news anchor, to see these images. We click on YouTube and get handheld cell phone video from a helpless bystander.

The photographer was a doctor, not a journalist. But the new media have changed the way we regard journalism and changed the very nature of the game. That journalists are bitching about this is somewhat hypocritical. Journalists have always bowed and scraped before the gods of competition. We believe that competitive journalism is better journalism. And as newspapers folded or were gobbled up by chains, we lamented at the cost of competition. If you wanted to create a competitor in a one-newspaper town, you were out of luck unless you have a couple billion for start-up cash.

Now all it takes is a kid with a keyboard or a bystander with a cell phone. The citizen journalist is all around us. It’s taken us back to the days of colonial journalism in America when a kid with a printing press could make a difference. So why should we – i.e., journalists – bitch about this?

Because we can. As Morley Safer said this week, “I would trust a citizen journalist as much as I would trust a citizen surgeon.” Agreed, big guy.

There are still a number of questions to be raised about how new media have democratized journalism. I go into detail about this in my new piece for The Florida Engineer. In the piece, I chat with Tom Wolfe about his concerns about how new media and all of our cool new time-saving toys are eating all of the precious hours from our too-brief lives on this planet.

But if we raise issues about any of this, we’re put down as Luddite assholes for even asking questions. (Odd … that would seem to make them the small-minded ones.)

Certainly, information posted on The New York Times website carries with it the credibility of that magnificent franchise. Maybe JoeBobsDailyNews.com can’t complete with that. (Don’t Google that. To the best of my knowledge, there is no JoeBobsDailyNews.com.)

The arrogance of now – whatever generation sits in the throne room – is that what we have achieved is it. But we need to see that we are always in transition. The over-used buzz phrase on campuses these days is that “change is the only constant.” Like all clichés, it suffers from truth.

Newspapers and news organizations are evolving. The public now has tools to rival a reporter’s toys. We’re coming together and something new is emerging. It’s fun to watch and it’s scary. We teeter on the precipice of trivialization. If you don’t believe me, ponder the media attention this week given to Perez Hilton’s face cut and resulting rant.

Yet on the other side of the precipice is a new world order of information sharing. It continues to make this — despite the media saturation of “Jon and Kate Plus 8” — a fascinating time to be a media watcher.

Sometimes, my friends in the newspaper business tell me they’re baffled that our journalism enrollments are through the roof at the University of Florida. We are more than 100 students above our enrollment cap in journalism. Despite bad news in the news business, students still  line up to petition to get into our program.

“Don’t they read newspapers?” my friends ask. “Don’t they realize what’s happening to our business?”

Of course they do. But I have some good news.  The best of today’s students still have the same convictions about public service and the people’s right to know as any newspaper journalist. They are committed to strong and accurate storytelling.

They’re just not so sure that these functions require newsprint.

I tell my friends that today’s journalism students have “faith in the function, if not the form” of journalism. No matter how it’s delivered, there will always be a demand for news and information.

“Some politicians support trillions in reckless spending…” is one of the attack lines from the Marco Rubio campaign as it launches a full spread of phaser and photon torpedoes (yes, we’re staying with the Star Trek theme until the movie drops below $10m a week at the box office) at Charlie Crist just minutes after the governor declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

The ad, predictably, ties Crist at the hip with President Barack Obama.

Watch the full video after the jump.