Quote of the Day, Michele Bachmann Edition

March 24, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Michele Bachmann says she would tweet more “but most of my thoughts aren’t that long.” –Andy Borowitz

Even funnier, CNN reports that she does have a longer thought–planning to form an exploratory committee for a possible presidential campaign in June, or possibly earlier.

Hopefully having her in the race will make it clear that the dominant force on the right wing is the religious right, regardless of whether they use the Tea Party name and claim to be concentrating on economic as opposed to social issues. I know it is tempting to see the Republican Party as a joke if they wind up with someone like her in the race, but to be fair there has been a long history of fringe candidates running for the nomination in both parties. The question is whether Republicans will see her candidacy as the joke that it is, or consider her a serious candidate. Many conservative blogs are reporting this as straight news, but at least some such as James Joyner sees her candidacy as something to laugh at.

Buzzfeed has a selection of top Michele Bachmann quotes.

Posted in Humor and Satire, Michele Bachmann, Republicans. Tags: , . 2 Comments »

Despite Reports They Are Gone, Newt Gingrich’s Tweets Can Still Be Found

March 24, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Vanity Fair has accused Newt Gingrich of purging his tweets from before July 22, 2010, stating they could not be found. This would lead readers to assume he wanted to hide comments which might be embarrassing to his anticipated presidential campaign. Before running with the story I did a quick search on Topsy for his old tweets. There are seventy-four web pages of his tweets captured by Topsy. Attempting to click through several of them led to messages that the page does not exist.

Gingrich’s office has not responded to questions from Vanity Fair. It is possible that Gingrich tried to get his old tweets purged, but I’ve found Twitter to be quite variable in showing old tweets when I’ve done similar searches in the past. Vanity Fair gave two examples of finding older tweets from two other politicians, but I wouldn’t be surprised if attempts to find a larger number didn’t wind up with more failures.

Regardless of whether Gingrich has tried to remove the old tweets, they are still available if anyone really thinks it is worth their time to go through them. Considering the number of controversial, and sometimes contradictory, statements which Gingrich has made during his career, I suspect that opposition researchers will find better use of their time by going through many of his statements which are longer than a tweet.

(Incidentally well over half of my old tweets are no longer available on Twitter, but in this case it is because of my account having been hacked at one point. The count started over at one when it was restored. A month or two ago it finally was going to cross one-thousand again, and then fell back to around 600. I subsequently found that lots of other users who had not had hacked accounts were also finding their tweet count to be way off.)

Posted in Blogs & Social Media, Newt Gingrich, Republicans. Tags: . 10 Comments »
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