In case you hadn’t noticed, the week between Christmas and New Years Eve is kind of a dead zone. A lot of time it seems like those that aren’t lucky enough to be on vacation are just trying their best not to let anyone see them licking the stamps they’re using to mail it in. However, this kind of sleepy atmosphere also leads to some gloriously goofy segments like the Today Show‘s episode spent interviewing the “Internet stars of 2011″ (which basically means “people who were in viral videos”). While this sounds fairly insubstantial, it did give us a wonderful interview in which Matt Lauer squared off against the Huffmans, the lovable elderly couple whose attempt to use a webcam ended up garnering about 16 million YouTube hits.

According to Associated Press reporter Thomas Beaumont, the Republican campaigns have been much quieter than in previous election years, with no campaign having a paid staff larger than 20 members. Beaumont attributes the smaller staff sizes to how campaigns utilize technology to reach voters.

Well, that didn’t go well, did it?

Yesterday, when Rick Perry released a new ad equating the horrible prejudice undergone by poor, alienated Christian children with that of American soldiers who had to, y’know, lie about about a basic fact of who they are, it was clear that it was a terrible ad. However, one might not have expected the pure amount of anger and derision Perry and his team have incurred. And now, only a day later, YouTube is already being filled with parody videos mocking the Texas Governor.

Joe Lieberman has always been a great pioneer for internet freedom. Last year, he suggested that the United States should implement an internet kill switch in the event of a cyberattack by taking its cues from China. Now Lieberman is calling for the world’s most popular search engine to censor material that could potentially be used to spread terrorist information.

Who: Seth Meyers, John Mulaney, Marika Sawyer, Colin Jost, Erik Kenward, Bryan Tucker, Chris Kelly, moderated by Steve Gaydos
What: “Live from New York… A Discussion with the Saturday Night Live Writers”
Where: Paley Center for Media
When: November 13, 2011
Thumbs: Up

Yesterday, a truly disturbing video appeared on Reddit. The video was headlined “Family law judge (Aransas County) beats and abuses his own daughter for using the internet. She uploaded the video.” and has now reached the popular site’s front page. It’s official description claims to be of a 2004 video of Judge William Adams, a family court judge brutally beating his daughter circe 2004. Unsurprisingly given the video’s content, Redditors have rallied in their attempt to get the man behind bars.

The buzzword of Tuesday wasn’t a word at all — it was a collection of numbers and punctuation marks; more specifically: “s.978.” The measure, which is expected to be brought to Congress today, essentially extends felony charges for bootlegging DVDs and music albums into the 21st century, making it a felony to illegally stream copywritten material. The bill was introduced by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. It was then fully misinterpreted and brought to new heights by the people behind FreeBieber.com, who caused a minor panic by starting a petition to thwart the bill, saying that Justin Bieber, who rose to fame covering songs on YouTube, could be sent to jail for five years.

Conventional wisdom would have it that The Rocky Horror Picture Show made the Midnight Movie. However, while there’s some truth to that, it’s also possible that that film ruined the Midnight Movie as well. After Rocky Horror‘s unprecedented second and third run success began in the late 70s, movie studios instantly began to copy it. Suddenly, “cult movies” weren’t found, they were processed.

Thanks to YouTube, the same thing is happening today to campaign ads. When you see a politician release a crappy ad, the sad fact is that there’s a good chance he did it on purpose.

It started as just a minor “gotcha” moment–a YouTube clip of an Occupy Wall Street protester criticizing Fox News coverage of the movement to Griff Jenkins popped up on the Internet, as these things tend to do. It was later discovered that the protester was Jesse LaGreca, a Daily Kos blogger. On Sunday, LaGreca appeared on ABC’s This Week to talk about the protests, and–agree with his point of view or not–he came across as well-spoken, smart, and level-headed.

Have you ever come home from a long day of work, or perhaps taken a detour to visit parents or grandparents, and found the two struggling hopelessly in front of a computer for hours, trying to find “the internet”? Now, you can have the experience of being that very same computer that, by virtue of being inanimate, has to sit there and watch these two struggle trying to make you function. This couple got caught on camera as they tried to take a photo of themselves, and the results are endearingly hilarious.

In a spectacular act of courage, the Yemeni woman in the below video walks unflinchingly and with her arms raised in peace towards Republican Guard forces as they shoot warning shots just over her head. She is intercepted just before reaching the guards, but shaky footage of the confrontation has since caught wind on YouTube and Twitter and the woman has been hailed as a feminist and a hero.

There are, I have been led to believe, 24 hours in a day. Two days is 48 hours, and three days is… wait, don’t tell me… 72 hours. So if you watch the following video from start to finish without any pauses, it will take you over three days to finish.

The New York Daily News‘ Nina Mandell put it best: it’s a case of “naked political ambition.” Indeed. A group calling itself “Putin’s Army” seeks to show support for the Russian prime minister by showing that Vladimir Putin‘s got the sport of “beautiful, young and smart girls.” Oh, and naked. There’s that part also. Putin, who’s considering a presidential run, is not connected to the online effort, which promises stripping campaign supporters a chance not just to boost Putin’s standing in the polls, but also to win themselves an iPad 2. And so there’s that.

Okay, I know we’ll find out in a day or so it was all a hoax, but for right now, can we all just enjoy this awesome clip? Here’s your setup: filmmaker in Cannes (where they have some sort of talking movie festival) has a small video camera on the ground and rolling. The guy chuckles as a seagull walks up to check out the camera, but–TWIST!–he’s a camera-snatching gull! The bird grabs the guy’s camera and flies off, capturing some amazing aerial shots of France as he powers his way through the sky and makes a fine landing on a rooftop, squawking at his successful heist.

A series of clever yet risque promos for a British reality show about a group of London lesbians has sparked an investigation by a UK media regulator. The promos, for Candy Bar Girls, a reality show about the “lives and loves” of six lesbians living in London’s Soho neighborhood, have received at least ten complaints about their mildly racy content airing during daytime hours when kids could be watching. As the Guardian reports, “each of the on-air promos for the new reality show feature teasing close-up images that appear to be of two women engaged in sexual activity, intercut with lines such as ‘Red… hot… lesbians’ and ‘Pussy… loving… ladies’” only to pull back and reveal innocent activities, such as working out, playing chess, or petting a cat.

So much for romance. A video broadcast on Canadian television Thursday shows the web-legendary “kissing couple” from the riots in Vancouver a week ago were actually knocked to the ground by riot police just before the photo was taken, thereby squeezing the last bit of mystery out of the stunning photo that seemed at first to show an oblivious man and woman in a passionate embrace as the city went to Hell all around them (and all over hockey, no less). Well, so much for that. Thanks a lot, internet.

Much has been made of the role of social media in the revolution that has swept through North Africa and the Middle East–dubbed the “Facebook Revolution.” CNN’s Amber Lyon, in a documentary set to air Sunday night, reports that while Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly rose to political prominence this Spring, the roots run far deeper, tracking activists’ use of social media like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook back several years. The result is a dramatic power shift that has toppled dictators like Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak with surprising speed. It’s simply a lot harder for a dictatorship to keep things quiet and controlled when state run media’s not the only media. As one activist told Lyon, when his home was raided and father taken away, “I put it on Facebook.”

It’s official: the anti-Republican presidential glitter protest has now become a national epidemic. After a speech during today’s Right Online conference in Minnesota, a lone protester approached the stage from which Rep. Michele Bachmann was descending and shouted “you can run, but you can’t hide!” at the Republican presidential candidate while tossing some sort of paper in her general direction. It was, to say the least, anticlimactic.

Yesterday, the Internet made a horrible discovery; Rebecca Black’s infamous music video “Friday” had been removed from YouTube! How would we celebrate the coming weekend? More importantly, how would we know which days were involved in said weekend and which order they came in? Fortunately, just as it seemed today’s fun, fun, fun, fun had been lost forever, the world received a last minute reprieve. Black has returned the video to the masses after apparently removing it herself due to a financial fight with its semi-creepy producers.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper has a new talk show, Anderson, launching on local television stations September 12, and he’s eager to talk about it, using a YouTube channel to take viewers’ (or would one be better described as a Person Who Intends To Be A Viewer?) questions. When a PWITBAV tweeted the question “I know you love NY but would you ever consider moving the show to LA,” Cooper made a video spelling it all out. Short answer: no. Long answer: “I’m really pale and I don’t do well in the sun. I’m more of a dark, New York cave dweller.”

A viral video on YouTube right now is getting some pretty harsh comments. For instance, the highest rated one simply says, “you are a f**king retarded person” (minus the asterisks). What kind of video could inspire such hatred? Well, really most of them. I mean, have you read YouTube comments? But still, this video is especially provocative. It was uploaded by a woman in the Netherlands and shows the process she underwent to have the profile pictures of 152 of her Facebook friends uploaded on her arm. (Or not. Update below.)

A video posted overnight to YouTube captures a shootout on Miami Beach that left one person dead and three police officers injured. According to the Miami New Times, the shooting caught on camera from an apartment balcony was the second of two early-morning shootouts as South Beach’s annual Urban Beach Weekend ended in gunfire. “Two different police-involved shootings broke out near Collins and Washington Avenues, shattering the night with multiple rounds and leaving one dead and at least six–including three police officers–in the hospital,” reports the New Times‘ Tim Elfrink.

An already strange race for Congress in New York got even weirder Wednesday night with the release of a video that seemed to show a candidate and staffer assaulting a reporter who was questioning the candidate, Jack Davis, about his decision to drop out of a debate. Repeatedly asked by the unseen reporter “Why did you back out of the debate,” Davis answers “do you want punched out?”

What follows is a largely off-screen tussle with the reporter crying out in pain as the camera swings wildly. Wednesday night, the video went viral among politicos–some calling for assault charges against the candidate–but now a Davis spokesperson says it’s a fake. “There’s nothing going on in this video,” Curtis Ellis tells the Lockport Union-Sun and Journal. “This is the ‘Blair Witch Project’ of tracker videos,” he said. “You don’t see nothing here, but they try to make it seem scary.”

Miss USA 2003 Susie Castillo had an experience passing through the airport in Dallas that adds her to the list of people who say TSA agents are going too far in their “intrusive” pat downs. According to an interview she gave moments after the incident–she’s clearly emotional in the video–the pageant winner says a female TSA agent touched her inappropriately “at least four times,” leading her to ask “what have I done to deserve this treatment as an upstanding, law-abiding American citizen?” Am I a threat to US security? I was Miss USA, for Pete’s sake!”

Castillo, who describes the pat down in clinical terms that some may find graphic, considers what happened to her to be an assault:

I guess it’s Things Not To Do In Front of Children Day here at Mediaite. This story, however, is even stranger. 21-year-old Evan Emory of Michigan has been sentenced to two months jail time after filming and posting a video featuring him singing a sexually explicit song to elementary school students. The only thing is, Emory never did that. He actually sang an appropriate (and apparently well-received) song to the kids and edited in the other song (which the kids never heard) later for a comedy video.