Blue Crab Boulevard

Well, the story of the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dike to hold back the surging sea may be completely made up, but the image is useful here.  Because Barack Obama is surely trying to stem a surging tide of negative publicity about his close, personal relationship with the serial America-bashing cleric, Reverend Wright.

Officials at Sen. Barack Obama's church have taken offense at the controversy born out of the fiery statements made by their senior pastor who sermonized that black Americans should sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America."

"I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have [been] the subject of this controversy," Obama said, saying that he'd never heard any of them personally.

"One of them I had heard about after I had started running for president and I put out a statement at that time condemning them," he continued.

But more than a year ago, Obama disinvited Wright from speaking at his candidacy announcement. Wright told The New York Times then that Obama told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons. … It's best for you not to be out there in public."

Church member and University of Chicago theology professor Dwight Hopkins says Wright's message has been taken out of context.

"The whole point to Dr. Wright's sermons is to how do you make America a better America. If anything he's a true patriot," Hopkins said.

Sorry, Hopkins, I'm not buying that particular ration of rationalization. Hate against one's country is not patriotism. Nor are the increasingly ludicrous chorus of the true believers saying that Wright is no different than Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell getting any traction here. No Republican presidential hopeful that I am aware of claimed either of those two as their spiritual mentor.

The fact is that Obama has a serious problem right now. Is the Clinton campaign helping push this? Oh, heck yes. That does not make it less of a real problem. Obama has sat in this pastor's church for twenty years and cannot have been absent from every single hate-filled sermon. It does not - and should not - sit well with a lot of people.

(I've never defended Roberts or Falwell on this site, It is patently lame for the true believers to try that particular defense here. There is zero equivalence.)

The Florida Democratic party is unable to even manage to pull together a revote of their disallowed primary.

Florida Democratic chairwoman Karen Thurman sends out an angry email abandoning hope of a re-vote in the state:

Last week, the Florida Democratic Party laid out the only existing way that we can comply with DNC Rules – a statewide revote run by the Party – and asked for input.

Thousands of people responded. We spent the weekend reviewing your messages, and while your reasons vary widely, the consensus is clear: Florida doesn’t want to vote again.

So we won’t.

This is a real setback for Hillary, who could have gotten both delegates, momentum, and — crucially — a stronger chance to claim a popular vote lead out of the revote.

Thurman says they're not giving up, with the other options, in theory, being to recognize the earlier vote, to agree on a 50-50 split, or some compromise in between.

Remember the 2000 election when these same people wanted to run a mulligan on the general election? Gives you that old feeling of confidence in their competence doesn't it? Here's a thought: why not have two designated champions fight it out with swords in an arena in a winner-take-all extravaganza!

Nah, too Roman. 

Computer security experts are saying that on a typical day some 40% of the computers connected to the internet are part of a botnet. The zombies are out in force, people.

Largely unnoticed by the public, botnets have come to inundate the Internet. On a typical day, 40% of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots engaged in distributing e-mail spam, stealing sensitive data typed at banking and shopping websites, bombarding websites as part of extortionist denial-of-service attacks, and spreading fresh infections, says Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company that tracks and sells threat data.

"It's like a disease you can't even feel," Wesson says. "The mechanisms we use to protect our networks simply are not working."

The botnet problem shows no sign of easing. Security firm Damballa pinpointed 7.3 million unique instances of bots carrying out nefarious activities on an average day in January - an astronomical leap from a daily average of 333,000 in August 2006. That included botnet-delivered spam, which accounted for 91% of all e-mails in early March, up from 64% last June, says e-mail management firm Cloudmark.

The upshot of this deluge is profound, if not immediately obvious, says Adam O'Donnell, Cloudmark's director of emerging technology. Telecoms and Internet service providers must absorb the cost of carrying botnet traffic; they can be expected to pass that expense onto companies and consumers, he says. Meanwhile, tens of millions of botted computer users are experiencing degraded performance with no clue why.

If you are running a Microsoft OS and do not have up-to-date antivirus software and a solid firewall, you are part - or soon will be - of the problem. If your computer suddenly is running a lot slower than it used to, there is a substantial chance that you have a problem. If you are running Windows XP or Vista you can use the Windows Live OneCare free safety scanner to check for problems (you must use Internet Explorer for this). Trend Micro Housecall is also very powerful and is also free. 

If you are not running antivirus, you really need to get off the internet. Seriously.  

The weirdness continues in the Las Vegas ricin case. The discovery of a large amount of the deadly toxin a while ago was strange even then. Now the man who had the poison in his room and who had been in a coma has woken up. He appears to have told his brother that he did, indeed, have the ricin. But not why he had it or what he intended to do with something so deadly.

Roger Bergendorff regained consciousness on Wednesday but remains in critical condition at a Las Vegas medical center.

His younger brother, Erich Bergendorff, told The Associated Press that they spoke briefly on the telephone Sunday for the first time since the ricin was found, and said Roger claimed he had never had any intention of endangering anyone with the toxin.

"He did mention that he would have never done anything to anybody," said Erich Bergendorff. "He himself is under the impression he was contaminated by it — he did mention the ricin and seemed to say something like, 'Gee, it sure worked on me.'"

Erich Bergendorff said his brother told him the ricin was easy to make. But he added that his brother, who was on a ventilator until last week, still had a hard time speaking clearly, so it was not clear whether Roger Bergendorff made it himself or watched someone else manufacture the powder.

"He did talk as thought he just had it there, he was almost kind of casual about it," said Erich Bergendorff, who talked to his brother on the phone from his home in Escondido, Calif., north of San Diego. "It's almost as though in his own mind it wasn't that big of a deal."

Officials are still not saying much about this and the media appears less than curious about that. While they are calling the amout of ricin found "large" there still is nothing approaching an explanation of why Bergendorff had it.