Sarah Palin creates new Twitter acct, ditches old one 4 no apparnt reason

Sarah Palin recently started a new Twitter account to promote her new book. But what about her old one?

As Alaska's governor, @AKGovSarahPalin sent updates regularly and built a large following.

The profile has more than 152,000 followers and has made its way onto more than 1,500 lists. The latter is perhaps more impressive because that feature didn't even exist until about three months after she stopped tweeting there.

The @AKGovSarahPalin page also has the "verified account" tag, which means Twitter Inc. authorized it as a legitimate user.

But Palin has inexplicably started from scratch. The new page, @SarahPalinUSA, quickly drummed up 14,700 followers despite not having a single update or following anyone -- not even her 2008 GOP presidential partner Sen. John McCain.

But still, there's 152,000 people on that other account. Just sitting there.

On Facebook, Palin kept her old fan page, which is nearing a million fans. She simply dropped any mention of being governor from the "current office" section. Rather than promoting Alaskan legislation, it now mentions TV appearances and, uh, her new Twitter page.

Did nobody tell Palin that she can click on "settings" in Twitter and change the name of an account?

She could have easily switched the name of @AKGovSarahPalin to @SarahPalinUSA or @SarahPalinRocks or @QTPiSarahPalin or whatever she wanted.

Then, swap out the profile picture and background image, and she's set. Bonus: She gets to keep all of her followers.

Websites like Facebook and Twitter are a book publisher's dream because they let authors and promoters connect directly with fans. But they're only valuable when the pages have a lot of people paying attention to them.

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Sarah Palin breaks with GOP to endorse Conservative

-- Mark Milian

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Book jacket: HarperCollins

First peek: What's in Sarah Palin's new book

(UPDATE: An updated paragraph has been added below.)

Not that anybody even cares or clicked here on purpose or will gobble up every word because Sarah Palin isn't even Alaska's Republican governor anymore and her GOP presidential ticket lost last year big-time and critics made a lot of fun of her habits and family and her clothing and the way she talks and didn't get an abortion and then quit as Alaska's governor.

And she's got no chance of succeeding in national politics because she's a dim conservative and no one cares anything about her to the point that her book publisher, HarperCollins, only printed 1.5 million advance copies of "Going Rogue," coming out next week.

But first Monday comes an appearance on TV with Oprah, who became a media billionairess by simply boring her audience with what they didn't want to see. (BTW, that interview was taped in Chicago today and Palin reportedly did not say no when asked if she wanted to do a TV show.)

(UPDATE: 7:18 p.m. On her Facebook page tonight Palin reported that Oprah was "hospitable and gracious," the audience "warm, energized and (no doubt) curious"" and the two women enjoyed the "great conversation" so much they went over time; the extra chatter will go on Oprah.com.)

However, just in case there are one or two people out there who remain interested in the ...

Don't call me a slut, Meghan McCain demands

It's Saturday. After traveling thousands of miles and raking in millions of donor dollars, both of the country's top Democrats have taken the day off. And we should too.

But before anyone reveals that Meghan McCain has her own line of underwear coming out this fall, we have to re-express our delight at the sight -- not so much of her cleavage (which, frankly, hon, we hadn't noticed until someone else pointed it out) --  but of the refreshing spontaneous spunkiness of a young woman apparently enjoying experimenting with life so much.

We're always looking to peek behind the scenes of politics here on The Ticket, to see how the pieces interact, the process unfolds, and to have some fun whenever possible.

Most days, gotta say, the fun part is hard duty given the stuffed suits offering their prefabricated pontifications and canned talking points on reams of policies and legislation that they haven't read.

Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell may well be the funniest family members at their Thanksgiving dinner table. But stick those Senate party leaders in front of the ubiquitous microphones arrayed on Capitol Hill, and no one needs any Benadryl to doze.

Which helps explain the naked media coverage of the 24-year-old's flaunted ...

The White House words of Robert Gibbs: U.S. troops to Afghanistan

Virtually every day, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs meets with the media -- fewer of whom actually have printing presses these days -- to answer assorted serious, superficial and silly questions about the president and his administration's doings or not-doings.

These sessions are broadcast on television and radio during the day, which makes access to them problematic for Ticket readers who actually have employment still and for our many followers overseas.

As a new regular feature on The Ticket, we'll be publishing unedited excerpts from these sessions to provide at least a brief feel for the ongoing issues, discussions and relationship between the media and the White House's official talking face. As you'll notice over time, sometimes the spokesman's answers -- much of them prefabricated during daily prep -- are not really designed to clarify.

With the president holding another of his three-hour strategy meetings today on what to do with the Afghanistan mess, many questions focused on that historically turbulent land and the evolving new policies to be announced, likely before Obama's long Asian trip next month.

More troops? More troops but fewer troops than expected? How to best politically package the new and improved Afghan strategy from the less-new Afghan strategy announced last March before American casualties began to soar and poll numbers begin to dip?

Today's excerpts come in two parts, separated by a line like this ..........................

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Excerpts from the White House briefing session with Robert Gibbs

Q. The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said today that his government is ready to send 500 more troops under certain conditions.  And the BBC is reporting that the U.S. government told....

What if Obama really wants a fight over gay pajamas?

A little something to think about:

Have you too noticed that very few accidents seem to happen around Barack Obama?

Sure, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright association blew up in his face; that was just a matter of time and came not from Republicans but from fellow Democrats. One day the Harvard-educated, freshman senator from Illinois thought there were 57 states. He didn't know Canada had a prime minister, not a president. And it took some doing for the man to grudgingly give in to that stupid lapel flag pin thing.

The Geithner-Daschle-Solis back-tax deals were also messy.

But those gaffes happened early in the presidential campaign or the administration. He and his team have been touching every conceivable base at every opportunity, from tonight's Latin music fiesta at the White House to marking Leif Erikson Day to earn the Viking vote.

In fact, Obama's devoted so much time cultivating and nurturing these political niches that critics credibly suggest he might profitably invest less effort in the perpetual campaign mode -- flying off to Copenhagen to take an embarrassingly blunt public hit for the Chicago machine and chatting up that serial philanderer on the CBS late show -- and put in a lot more shirt-sleeve time in the Oval Office being the new president at the old desk.

On Saturday night before he was asked about "don't ask-don't tell" Obama told the banqueting but impatient Human Rights Campaign crowd (full text right here) all the Democratically correct things it wanted to hear before the big march for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) equality the next day.

So it was very surprising -- even jarring -- when on Sunday CNBC's John Harwood, long a respected political journalist, reported a conversation with an anonymous White....

A 'tea party' protest photo turns out to be fake

How many people showed up on Capitol Hill to protest President Obama's political agenda on Saturday?

It depends on whom you ask.

(UPDATE: Don Surber notes here that despite the disagreement over actual marchers, there can be no disagreement over who watched the tea party march on TV: More than twice as many as watched the president's Minnesota appearance on two stations combined.)

As our colleague in Washington, Joe Markman, writes today, several conservative groups behind the march say that as many as 2 million people turned out to protest everything from Obama's proposed healthcare overhaul to the legitimacy of his election.

Others, however, say the crowd was much smaller. A spokesman for the District of Columbia Fire Department made an unofficial estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 people.

Arguments about crowd estimates are, as Markman writes, "as much a part of Washington as its granite monuments."

This one took a rather scandalous turn, however, when a photo circulated among conservatives as proof of a larger crowd was revealed to be a fake.

The photo, shown at right, depicts a crowd stretching from the Capitol nearly to the Washington Monument. It was posted on several conservative blogs and Facebook pages, with notations that it was taken on Saturday. 

But if you take a closer look, you'll see that there is no way it could have been taken Saturday because the National Museum of the American Indian is not there. The museum opened in 2004 on the east side of the Mall -- which should be in the photo's upper right. It's not -- so the photo must have been taken before then.

Several bloggers who ran the photo have begrudgingly corrected their errors.

The blog Say Anything ran a correction. Another conservative blog, Power Line, removed the picture. But in a post explaining why, the site's author took a final dig at what he called the "liberal media."

"There is no doubt that Washington Democrats are well aware of how many people turned out, even as their media outlets try to downplay the event," John Hinderaker wrote.

PolitiFact, the ever-valuable fact-checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times, has much more on the photo controversy.

Meanwhile, here's a video summarizing the day's events:

-- Kate Linthicum

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Right wing’s schoolyard taunt: Obama’s a socialist and so's your mama

Just when you thought the culture wars were ancient history comes this news bulletin: Conservatives are up in arms over President Obama’s planned speech to schoolchildren Tuesday, the day millions of Americans return to work and school after the Labor Day holiday, touting the value of education.

After a summer of stoking controversy over nonexistent death panels in healthcare plans, critics on the right are now charging that the White House -- which plans to broadcast the speech live on the White House website and over C-SPAN -- is trying to indoctrinate their innocents on issues like healthcare reform and federal spending. Thanks to conservative talk radio and the right-wing blogosphere, Obama’s speech to children has been turned into a lighting rod for socialism.

 “As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education -- it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality,” said Oklahoma state Sen. Steve Russell. “This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

Even the chairman of a state Republican Party, Jim Greer in Florida, has joined the fray, warning that Obama is trying to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda."

With rumors spreading faster than a California wildfire, school districts in six states -- Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin -- have opted out and will not show the speech. Others are mulling it over.

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To be fair, the Education Department in Washington may have helped stoke the controversy by suggesting in a lesson plan to teachers that, as part of the presidential moment, they could ask students to write letters to themselves about “what they can do to help the president.” That language has now been replaced with the injunction to write about “how they can achieve their short-term and long-term goals.”

Still, this faux controversy has stirred such a fuss that the White House is now planning to release the president’s remarks Monday -- one day before Obama’s back-to-school address -- so parents and teachers can read it for themselves to determine whether they want to subject their children to his motherhood-and-apple-pie homilies.

There’s a lot of presidential precedence for this sort of address -- and political backlash.

The first President Bush, a Republican, talked to children via teleconference about the need not to do drugs. That was back in 1991. At the time, Democrats howled that he was using the children to make a campaign commercial.

The second President Bush was, memorably, in a classroom talking to students about the importance of education when he was told of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Obama, with First Lady Michelle Obama, is a fierce supporter of educational improvement. Both of them bettered their own lives by winning scholarships to the nation’s top universities.

“It’s really unfortunate that politics has been brought into this,” White House deputy Heather Higginbottom told the Associated Press. “It’s simply a plea to students to really take their learning seriously.”

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: The Obamas at a charter school in Washington on Feb. 3. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press

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Does Twitter favor conservatives?

The White House announced with some fanfare over the weekend that its Twitter account had passed the 1 million mark.

“A million followers – nice,” the White House @whitehouse wrote in a tweet sent out Sunday afternoon. “What would you like to see more of from this feed? Photos? Quotes? Cowbell? Tell us @whitehouse.”

Big deal. 

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 election, passed the 1 million mark six weeks ago. He declared that tweeting, which for him was novel, was "a phenomenal way of communicating."

Like most things that come out of Silicon Valley, Twitter was assumed to be in a purview of the left, another tool for tech-savvy liberal netroots to use as they besieged the political system in the name of progressive change, in 140-character bites.

But the left has usually used Twitter to promote ideas, according to Alan Rosenblatt, of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. "We have a lot of amazing progressives on Twitter," he told Maine's online news source, the Exception.  But, he added, there had been "nothing that brings everyone together."

By contrast, he said, the right has been using Twitter to create new pressure points in politics. Conservatives have a website, Top Conservatives on Twitter, that ranks various right-wing tweeters (former House Speaker Newt Gingrich currently rides on top), and offers pointers on how to organize.

Liberals are fighting back -- Rosenblatt has created a rival website, TopProg.org -- but it's in its infancy.

Meanwhile conservatives seem to be having more fun with Twitter.

When Republicans staged a protest last summer and refused to leave for summer recess, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi simply adjourned the session and turned out the lights, effectively turning off the C-SPAN cameras. So several GOP stalwarts started tweeting an account of what was going on from the House floor. They developed a following and prompted conservative commentator Michelle Malkin to call Twitter "the new gathering place for conservative activism.”

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: California Democratic State Senate candidate Edward Paul Reyes works with a colleague on his Twitter page recently at a Los Angeles Starbucks. Credit: Associated Press

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Gov. Sarah Palin's last day; now what for GOP's North star? [Video]

Well, today's the last day in office -- partial day, actually -- for Alaska's Republican about-to-be-ex-governor, Sarah Palin.

On Friday we wrote right here about the string of summertime farewell picnics she launched (see video above). At a third picnic, that one in Fairbanks, she'll turn over the ceremonial gubernatorial BBQ apron this afternoon to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who's got the same initials but not the celebrityness as the outgoing guv.

So is today the practical end of the political career for Palin, who turned a Wasilla town council seat and a corruption expose of her own party into a surprise upset of the long-entrenched Republican establishment ruling the nation's largest state, and then defeated a better-known returning Democratic governor in the 2006 election finals?

Or is today merely the end of the beginning for the unconventional, grass-roots-talking hockey mom who has the one thing every politician covets and very few have -- star quality, that ability to force people to pay attention simply by their presence? (See video above.) Bill Clinton has it. So does Barack Obama. Like them or not, people turn and look when they're around.

By conventional political standards, Palin's caribou is cooked.

She's quitting a powerful elected position that only 50 Americans hold, a chief executive's office in . . .

Creating jobs, once the goal, dropped as criteria for $3.4-billion Energy Department project

Remember all that talk last winter about the historic awfulness of the inherited economy and how urgently the new Obama administration needed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's economic stimulus bill to get through Congress and the president flew all the way out to Denver to sign the $787-billion bill because, well, because they didn't have an Air Force One photo shoot for New York that day?

And how it was absolutely, really, essentially important to start spending all that money ASAP so that it would create good, solid, strong, patriotic American jobs right here in America? And keep the jobless rate maybe somewhere around 8-8.5%?

Which seems really pretty good today now that it's already at 9.5% and predicted to exceed 10% for much of the next year, which takes us right up close to -- oh, oh, look out! -- the 2010 midterm elections.

In fact, back in April at one $3.4-billion spending ceremony for the media, Vice President Joe Biden, who's got a lot of private meetings to attend but was still assigned to drive the stimulus spending hard, said: "This is jobs -- jobs!" Creating or saving a gazillion-point-five jobs used to be the main goal.

Not anymore.

More change. That was April. This is July. And the spending sujet du jour has moved on to....