Lots of drama with serious issues at stake in the heated exchanges between Piers Morgan and Touré about Trayvon Martin Friday night, on Morgan’s CNN show. Here’s a previous Mediate article about the conversation, with video of the complete interview.

So, as I’ve been saying ever since The New York Times announced its digital paywall more than a year ago, the newspaper of record today announced that it was raising the wall even higher, cutting the number of articles than can be read on its site for free from 20 to 10.

Mitt Romney outspent Rick Santorum better than ten to one in GOP primary states voting or caucusing on Super Tuesday. The result: Santorum won in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and North Dakota; Romney won in Massachussetts, Virginia, Vermont, and Idaho, and won by a whisker in Ohio. And Newt Gingrich, who also has spent much less than Romney, won big in Georgia.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio dragged out the birther fantasy yet one more time yesterday, releasing a report that found fault with Barack Obama’s birth documents. I understand that paranoia is insatiable, and if you want to believe that a birth certificate has been forged or altered, no amount of evidence to the contrary will change your mind. But I wonder if the paranoia is up to embracing time travel as part of the President’s clever deception?

The untimely death of Davy Jones raises the question of why The Monkees were and are important. They sold millions of records in the late 1960s, but beyond that -

Probably Rick Santorum’s blanket denunciation of colleges and universities as “indoctrination mills” is the least offensive of his 18th-century regressive, repressive views publicized in the past few weeks. ut that’s because his views about contraception, for example – which he opposes, even though he always says he wants to reduce teenage pregnancies – are so far gone and off the wall.

Television has never been unimportant in politics – beginning with Nixon’s “Checkers” speech in the 1952 campaign and progressing into JFK’s victory over Nixon in the first televised Presidential debates in 1960. But, more recently, lots of people — including me — have been talking about how Barack Obama in 2008 and Republicans in 2010 won by mastering social media – or, what I call “new new media”. Paul Saffo even coined a new term – “cybergenic” – to describe Obama in 2008, an evolution of JFK and Reagan being telegenic.

The New York Times reported late Monday afternoon that Wikipedia plans to go dark – shut down – this Wednesday, just for that day, joining Reddit and other online sites in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act now under consideration by Congress.