Thursday, February 12, 2009

i will do this until i inevitably say something i regret

in the past month or so, twitter seems to have transformed from a fringe blogger thing into a national phenomenon. i'm still not totally sure how it works and my only real engagement with it is keeping up to speed on ed droste's latest antics/the status of new gbear album. this talking points memo post peaked my interest though. apparently, the republican party is trying to get in on the twitter game, ostensibly to reach out to the obama generation. as could be expected, they massively f'ed up their first foray into the new technology:

Yesterday the Virginia GOP came very close to taking control of the state Senate, nearly luring a Democratic Senator to switch parties and put them at a 20-20 tie, which would have been broken by the Republican Lt. Governor. Then Jeff Frederick, a state legislator and the party chairman, ruined it all by Twittering this:
Big news coming out of Senate: Apparently one dem is either switching or leaving the dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.
The Dems then read the message, quickly mobilized to talk the renegade out of it, and stopped the GOP coup before it could happen. We usually don't cover state-level politics, but this is just too much. Really, Mr. Frederick, you don't live-blog about ongoing secret negotiations!

historians are going to have a field day with this in the future.

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