“During a break on the Thursday I took the chance to ask Nancy White a question – “What is a ‘healthy’ community?” In looking at these various orientations it struck me that there must be recognizable ‘patterns,’ say, of a “successful open source community,” that could help us recognize others when we see them. This is exactly right and exactly wrong; as Nancy helped me understand, exactly wrong because it locates the notion of health in some abstract standard outside the community, when the notion of health being put out here is about internal coherence and accord – is the community becoming (or at least striving to be) what it wants to be“.
By Scott Leslie, Northern Voice ‘10: …, May 11th, 2010

Emphasis mine.

embedding youtube – I know to turn off WYSIWYG but is there an easier way?

First, you can’t do embeds, JavaScript, etc if you are don’t have unfiltered_html, which only the Admin and Editor roles have.

Nancy, describe it works in “code” mode so she has sufficient permissions. So this is a big clue that the problem is how we integrated TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG or visual editor) into WordPress.

Although, if I had waited until tomorrow I would have gotten additional important details. I was about to confirm there is a bug in the latest release (2.3.3).

And it is fixed in the next major release (WordPress 2.5), further in 2.5 it will remember whether you were last using Visual or HTML editor mode, so even if the bug still existed, which it doesn’t, it would be worked around.

The bug is #5336 TinyMCE Mangles <object> tag’s and DD32 verified that it is fixed:

WordPress 2.4/2.5′s TinyMCE has a built-in flash functionality.

Heres the HTML it generates: (as seen on the published page, i’m pretty sure its identical in the edit window)

<p><object height="110" width="315" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"><param value="http://www.spiegel.de/media/0,4906,16534,00.swf" name="src" /><embed height="110" width="315" src="http://www.spiegel.de/media/0,4906,16534,00.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></p>

Appears to be fixed.

So Nancy, it sounds like you have the best work around until WordPress 2.5 which will fix the problem.