Gates and Mullen talk Twittering, texting, the modern military and Iran

Here's a very good video that goes beyond the cliched old-guys-don't-know-anything-about-new-communication-technology-and-social-networking guff that we usually hear so much about.

The Ticket reported here on the Twitter and Iran phenomenon on Thursday.

But also Thursday, a reporter at a Pentagon news briefing asked both Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the effect of new personal communication technology and social networking, specifically concerning Iran.

Gates recalled the role that the Internet played in penetrating the old Iron Curtain, helping the Soviet Union to crumble and liberating Eastern Europe from Communist domination. And Gates noted, with apparent pleasure, that some unnamed countries around the world (can you say Iran and China?) can try to block these evolving communications but can no longer shut them all down.

But the questioning and conversation itself evolved into how the modern military, run by older personnel but manned and womanned by young people (average age 21) must use these new methods to both get its operational messages and philosophies out but also to get valuable feedback back.

Gates admitted he hasn't "a clue." Mullen says he's on Facebook and Twitter to be connected to the younger volunteer armed forces.

Well worth watching. And, as we so often say on The Ticket, thanks to C-SPAN.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Funny headline goes here on Utah's Mark Shurtleff Twitter gaffe

Notes for wed morn ticket item: First, talk about twitter exploding all over. millions now--oprah, sarahp, bo. Called tweets. Now even pols want to look hip and cool and use it. But ez make misteaks, Tweet something to entire world when you don't wanna or think you're only DMing someone. Like oops!

How embarrassing that'd be. etc etc.

Then into how Utah attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, on some kinda trade mission to Israel (What does a state atty gen trade with Israel anyway -- one of their laws for one of ours?)

And how he musta heard on Twitter that fellow Repub, Tim Bridgewater, is launching primary run vs that old GOP DC guy, Bob Bennett, who hasn't been in Senate as long as Joe Biden. Still pretty long time.

Bridgewater announces his bid tuesday via Twitter, like Dem Gavin Newsom for Calif gov while back. 

So Shurtleff (almost 52) musta gotten worried & starts Direct Messaging a pal about jumping into the repub primary too, how he's lined up buncha conservs and it's "Time to rock and roll!"

Except OMG! he wasn't Direct Messaging his pal.

Nope. He was sending everything to everybody on his list of followers, more than 1,600 people.

And they start sending all his msgs all over and others did too. And oh boy what an embarrassing mess that'd be if you put out something priv that wasn't ready 4 public posting. Laugh a lot @ that. Geez, can u imagine? Bonehead move.

Insert link here to Salt Lake Tribune story.

-- Andrew Malcolm byline goes here

Then here put that really cool promo thingy to sign up for The Ticket's Twitter account like everyone who's anyone is doing. Or follow   @latimestot

For God's sakes don't post this thing until its ridy, cleand up & stuf!!!

oh And get ap pic of shurtleff maybe smiling like good sport

On her new Twitter page, Sarah Palin offers a more personal look

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may not have been able to name a news publication she reads in last year's interview with Katie Couric during her unsuccessful bid as the Republican nominee for vice president.

But now we know that Sen. John McCain's 2008 running mate reads Newsweek -- at least in less-than-140-character doses on her Twitter page. Also, the Juneau Empire, the Weekly Standard, Meet the Press, blogs from Politico and Karl Rove, several prominent Republican politicians and Mark Begich, Alaska's new Democratic senator.

Also on the list of the 42 feeds she follows on her new Twitter account as of late last night are Fox News, CNN's Breaking News, the Drudge Report, Bill O'Reilly, an apparent Sean Hannity imposter (the real one is over here, Gov), George Stephanopoulos and, oh yeah, John McCain.

Whoops, looks like McCain hasn't returned the following.

But then during the campaign he was famous for professing ignorance of online and communications gadgets. His running mate, however, was regularly multi-tasking, working her twin BlackBerrys (state equipment is prohibited from political use), even while tending to baby son Trig (see photo above).

Yesterday, The Ticket reported here that Palin has signed a book contract with HarperCollins for a memoir to draw from her personal journals for publication in spring of 2010, when she'll presumably be running for re-election as Alaska's chief executive.

In the two weeks since she started twittering, Palin is, however, using the service exclusively as a one-way medium. She hasn't engaged in public conversation with any of her more than 19,000 followers.

But she does provide a more personal window into her daily life, which is sort of what Twitter is all about anyway.

Oh, and for the record, the @AKGovSarahPalin Twitter account does indeed belong to Palin, wrote spokesman William McAllister. While Palin's staff oversees account maintenance, the messages are hers, McAllister e-mails.

-- Mark Milian

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Photo credit: Associated Press (Palin campaigning in September works her 2 BlackBerrys while holding son Trig); Getty Images (bottom).

Is this the 100th day Barack Obama is not really president?

According to the folks at a place calling itself the United States Justice Foundation,today is the 100th day that Barack H. Obama maybe perhaps should not really be president of all 57 states because they still question whether he was born in the United States, as the Constitution requires of its chief executives.

The courts would seem to have settled any question about Obama's nativity. Not that many people seem to be wandering the streets in doubt. Obama's sure acting like a president; ask Rick Wagoner, whose address is no longer GM.

And, of course, Obama took the oath twice. He's been greeting championship sports teams just like a president.

He even got a puppy like any real president. And he's signed a bunch of stuff and mortgaged the nation for a considerable period of time. Which might suggest to some that the issue is moot.

Uh, no.

Gary Kreep (not kidding) is dispatching thousands of e-mails in recent hours seeking -- well, seeking money, of course. But also seeking to raise questions about Obama being "a FRAUD, a USURPER, a man with no legal authority to sit in the position that he now claims to hold."

Loyal Ticket readers will recall that we've published a few past items on this issue here. And here. And over here.

In fact, last June we even published a copy of an Obama birth certificate from Hawaii. Maybe we'll do it again here. (Click on it to enlarge.)

None of this has satisfied those who demand that the man calling himself the 44th president produce his "real" birth certificate. Kreep writes:

If Barack Hussein Obama has nothing to hide, WHY doesn't he just make his real birth certificate public? WHY has he spent a reported $800,000.00 in attorney fees to fight efforts to obtain his ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE? The more that he fights these efforts to see it, the more you have to wonder, WHY?

The Obama supporters want everyone to believe that only "fringies," the people that they now call "birthers," in other words, only people that they claim are outside of the main stream of thinking, question whether Mr. Obama is eligible to serve as President. But the truth of the matter is that more and more people, including many federal, state, and local elected officials, AND many in the military, are questioning whether Barack Hussein Obama is a "natural born citizen."

"Please know," the e-mail adds, "that we are not saying that Barack Hussein Obama is not eligible to serve as President of the United States of America. The problem is we just do not know!"

Just taking a wild guess here, but this issue, like a few others in modern American history, seems unlikely to go away -- even after 200 days.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Obama's Oprah has big Twitter week; Watch out Ashton Kutcher

It has been a week since Oprah Winfrey sent her first tweet read round the Twittersphere, and it sent many, including those in the world of politics, into a twizzy.

In the short period of time since creating her Twitter account, Winfrey has cut the lead between her number of followers and those of top Twitter users, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN (@cnnbrk), in half. After quickly amassing 561,000 followers, some bloggers are wondering how long before the TV icon takes the No. 1 spot.

Others are trying to measure what effect @Oprah has had on Twitter's growth in the last week.

While Winfrey seems to have aptly adopted the short-blogging service rather quickly, posting behind-the-scenes video footage and announcing show cancellations on her Twitter page, she has yet to fully grasp the lingo.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd points out that Winfrey incorrectly addressed the Twitter audience as "Twitters" instead of "Twitterers," the preferred term, in her first message.

Later, she called them "tweeters" -- the name of a high-frequency loudspeaker. Well, at least Winfrey is no longer tweeting in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Which is considered bad form by those who don't have much else to think about.

Others have used Twitter in unusual ways this week. On Monday, we got a collective chuckle when Meghan McCain, the daughter of ...

How to fix the entire U.S. economy faster -- and cheaper -- than Obama

There's a wondrously simple U.S. economic recovery plan bouncing its way all over the Internet this week to fix the recession, end unemployment, boost the banks, refinance the automobile industry and repair the housing crisis all in one bold stroke -- and at a fraction of the cost of the Obama administration's complex, grandiose and costly government spending plans.

Of course, this new idea plopping into and flashing out of thousands of excited e-mailboxes all over would never work politically because it wasn't designed in Washington like, say, the tax code and therefore is quite simple. Nor would it grow the size of the federal government, which would be unacceptable to many in the federal government.

Here's the idea and the math as devised by a devilishly clever, now anonymous Internet author:

Take the 40 million or so American workers over age 50 and give them each $1 million tax-free. Yup, just put that money into private hands. This seems like a wonderful idea to those whose hands are over age 50. But, of course, there's a catch. Three catches, actually.

1)  Everyone receiving $1 million must immediately quit their current job. Overnight, that opens up 40 million new positions, which takes care of unemployment and is something like 11 times better than the number of jobs the president has promised to create through government during the next couple of years.

2)  Everyone receiving $1 million would have to buy a new car, preferably American-made. Forty million new cars means an awful lot of jobs all across the nation's automobile industry and ....

"It's official! running for Gov of CA," SF Mayor Gavin Newsom Tweets

"It's official! running for Gov of CA. Wanted you to be the first to know. Need your help. Check out video:"

Gavin Newsom confirmed, via Twitter's blessedly brief format, what hasn't been a secret for months:

The mayor of San Francisco is running for the Democratic nomination to head the Golden State after what's-his-name the movie star is terminated by term limits in January 2011.

We have the mayor's much-longer full announcement text on the jump below.

As our colleague Cathleen Decker notes over on the LANow blog, Newsom is running third in a prospective Democratic field, not counting the 800-pound Democratic donkey in the room, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

She's made no discernible move to return home for a campaign and may well be happy as the big important chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Newsom's announcement tactic was successful in creating quite the buzz for a while on Twitter. But that can be a two-edged oneline medium: WilliamKelley Tweeted: "What exactly is the appeal of Gavin Newsom except that he is young, relatively handsome and has had a few affairs?"

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Internet world welcomes Obama's Oprah to Twitter (update)

(UPDATE: See below.)

Oprah Winfrey, one of the nation's most influential women (and a billionaire to boot), is now on Twitter.

The Chicago talk show host and entrepreneur is a bit late to the party, considering a bunch of Congress members have been typing away 140-character messages on their cellphones for months.

President Obama, the first presidential candidate to whom she pledged her public support, used Twitter as a tool for rallying voters.

Just a couple hours after the segment aired on her show today, Winfrey's Twitter name, @oprah, already has more than 174,000 followers,** who will hypothetically receive brief updates about her show, magazine and products in the future.

Perhaps more interestingly, after creating her account Thursday, she amassed more than 35,000 followers by last night -- without any promotion or even a single tweet on the page.

But she still has a ways to go before she catches "That 70's Show" and "Punk'd" star Ashton Kutcher. Today Winfrey interviewed ....

Most U.S. adults went online for Obama-McCain political info last election

More Americans plugged into the Internet during the election campaign last year than ever before, with 55% of voting-age citizens logging on for their political coverage, according to a Pew Research Center study.

The much-touted prowess of President Obama's campaign to use the Internet and social media to drive support and donations certainly put an exclamation point on the Web's new-found importance in the political process.

It should come as little surprise then that Barack Obama supporters were more plugged-in than those in the John McCain camp.

Obama supporters were more actively sharing political content around the Web, as is the nature of social media.

Twice as many Obama supporters signed up to receive automatic updates, according to a telephone survey of 2,254 American adults from Nov. 20 to Dec. 4, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4%. That could be attributed to his Twitter and mobile announcements -- like when he broadcast his choice for VP running mate, Joe Biden, via text message.

Though truth be told, as the Ticket reported back then, many got the news elsewhere before their text message arrived.

Online video was a major draw leading up to the election. The poll found that 45% of wired Americans watched Web video about politics or the election. The Obama administration is capitalizing on the ubiquity of Internet video with its White House YouTube channel.

Even still, Internet adoption only appears to be accelerating. Take, for example, Sen. McCain, who admitted during the election cycle to being a computer illiterate. Now, he's a Twitter fiend, sending a handful of updates per day to more than 428,000 followers.

Heck, even Larry King, maybe the oldest guy on television, is getting caught up in the Twitter craze.

-- Mark Milian

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Photo credit: quinn_anya via Flickr

Was Ron Paul, tea party re-inventor, right all along?

Ron Paul told us long ago. And so did the supporters of this one-time Libertarian presidential candidate.

Maybe you remember about 16 months ago the 11-term Texas Republican representative, who's now organized a new Campaign for Liberty, was raking in more political contributions each month than most other GOP presidential candidates, relying on his hundreds of thousands of fervent supporters staging their money bomb days of online donations and -- oh, yes – tea parties.

In many cases today’s media coverage of some 700+ tax protesting tea parties across the country ended up telling us more about the media than the rallies, which sure had some angry guests for “tea parties.”

Cable channels tended to cover and debate the events along their predictable viewership lines, with Fox News taking them seriously while acknowledging their critics, and MSNBC generally dismissing....