Following President Obama’s announcement in support of marriage equality today, politicians, celebrities, and just about everyone else on Twitter broke into a firestorm of emotional, political, and sometimes hateful reactions.
We’ve compiled some of the best tweets about the President’s announcement:
Did you see any other good tweets? Let us know so we can add them to our list.
Climate Progress is poised to achieve another pair of milestones — 5,000 tweets and 20,000 twitter followers:
How tweet it is. You can help put us over the top by clicking here.
But why should you follow this blog on twitter? Four reasons:
Let me elaborate:
NEWS FLASH
Twitter Berates GOP Rep. For Skipping Obama Jobs Speech To Hold Twitter Town Hall | Despite jobs being their constituents’ number one concern, a few Republican lawmakers served up a smorgasbord of excuses for intentionally skipping President Obama’s jobs address last night — roundtables, football, and of all things, Twitter. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun (R) declared this week that he would not physically enter the House Chamber, but would instead live tweet it from his Capitol office, holding what he dubbed a “Twitter town hall.” But as Politico reports, “most of the hundreds” of Twitter followers who participated in his town hall berated him for skipping the speech. “Show some respect to the office,” one said. “Do this later.” When Broun tweeted during the speech that “this is obviously political grandstand,” followers blasted him for doing just that. “Yes, we know about your tweets…now what about the speech,” one person responded. Several participants “suggested to Broun a special jobs plan of their own: get out of Congress.” “If you resigned from office, that would create at least one opening,” said a follower. “I’m embarrassed by you.”
A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.
Climate forecasts near an upgrade
Even a century ago, scientists working out equations on paper understood that gases in the atmosphere absorbed and emitted energy, keeping Earth from being a ball of ice. Today they use supercomputers to make increasingly refined predictions about how the Earth’s climate will change.
The new efforts take the question from global to local scale. Nations, states and communities have lots of climate-related questions: Should they divert water from one area to another? Build higher sea walls? Store and manage water the way Israel does today? Plan for many more 100-degree days in future summers?
“We can’t answer those questions with the capabilities we have today. That’s why we’re using supercomputers to push the limits of what we understand and how well we can predict,” said James Kinter, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia and director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies.
US Solar PV to Double in 2011; Grow 47% a year to 2015
NEWS FLASH
#KeystoneXL #Astroturf: Tar Sands Supporters Now Polluting Twitter | The handful of right-wing supporters of TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline are resorting to Astroturf tactics to plead their case. The pipeline, if it garners President Barack Obama’s approval, will transport dangerous tarsands crude from Canada to Texas refineries. Rainforest Action Network’s Brant Olson has discovered that a Republican operative working on behalf of the Nebraska Energy Forum, a pro-tar sands front group, has created multiple Twitter profiles in order to create the illusion of grassroots support for the toxic pipeline.
Twitter Astroturfer Keith Bockmann (left).
The UK Guardian explains how you can, “Discover the key people and organisations you should be following on Twitter if you’re interested in climate change and the environment.”
They have broken down what they call the top 50 twitter climate accounts by category. Blogging is inherently solipsistic, so we start with their recommendations for “Bloggers” to follow:
Thoughts and re-tweets on climate science and politics.
2. Grist
News and retweets by this US-centric green news and comment blog.
3. TreeHugger
Chat and thoughtful tweets from the grandaddy of the green blogosphere.
Useful links for anyone interested in China and climate change.
A prolific US blogger at Mother Jones who re-tweets interesting content on energy and climate change.
Here are some more of their recommendations:
Don Blankenship, the A.T. Massey coal baron rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for buying West Virginia judges, believes that coal breeds freedom. On his personal Twitter account, Blankenship wrote today, “If you support democracy in developing countries, you must support coal“:
Blankenship has called opponents of his coalocratic worldview “communists,” “atheists,” and “greeniacs.” In reality, dependence on coal breeds the same kind of economic instability and injustice seen in petrodictatorships. Fossil fuels, requiring capital-intensive extraction and rewarding centralized control of distribution, reward oligarchic power structures that are profoundly anti-democratic. Furthermore, when the costs of pollution are borne by society instead of the coal and oil corporations, the divide between the economic costs and benefits grows wider.
The coal-dominated economy of West Virginia is a troubling example of the cruelty of coalocracy. Despite $118 million in coal-mining annual income, West Virginia has the nation’s lowest median household income, worst educational services, worst social assistance, the highest population with disabilities, and nearly a quarter of West Virginia children in poverty. A recent study by West Virginia University found that the “human cost of the Appalachian coal mining economy outweighs its economic benefits”:
The coal industry generates a little more than $8 billion a year in economic benefits for the Appalachian region. But, they put the value of premature deaths attributable to the mining industry across the Appalachian coalfields at — by a most conservative estimate — $42 billion.
If Blankenship, who sits on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also tweeted that a cap and trade system is a “Ponzi scheme.” If Blankenship truly believed in the power of the free market and cheap energy to lift up democracies, he would support closing coal pollution loopholes — putting a true value on the majesty and diversity of Appalachia’s mountains instead of blowing them up, and putting a price on the carbon pollution that is destabilizing our climate. Instead, he and his fellow right-wing coalocrats are the Charles Ponzis of the entire planet.
Reader J.S. writes “I thought you may not have seen this but I know you are a big twitterer so you may see this differently.” This is an article making the case that Twitter should be eager to accept a purchase offer since ultimately there’s no revenue stream behind it:
The blogosphere was all atwitter over the weekend with news that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is close to offering a lot of money for Twitter. I know I’m going to get dinged for saying it, but I think the company’s founders should take the offer, whatever the price. [...] And, when matched against the potentially cosmic implications of ubiquitous social/search, Twitter might be only one mechanism in search of an issue (or issues) to resolve. Sure, it’s immediate and quick, but what exactly does Twitter really own?
That seems entirely reasonable to me. I think that the true essence of the “new economy” of the digital era is that there will be lots of activity going on that people enjoy and find useful, but that has very little in the way of economic value that’s captured by profit-making firms. The quintessential enterprises of this era are things like Wikipedia, which may no money, or CraigsList which makes a very modest sum of money, even while they both revolutionize certain spheres of endeavor. Certainly the revenues associated with CraigsList are tiny compared with the revenues that used to exist in the rapidly-dying newspaper classified ad market.
Twitter seems like something that could become extremely widespread, and that lots of people could receive a small-but-real amount of daily enjoyment from, all without ever generating much money. And I think that will be pretty typical of the digital realm. The fact that Google itself is a very successful company sometimes serves to obscure the fact that the total amount of money being made off the internet is pretty small considering how ubiquitous internet use has become. Ultimately, I think understanding this growing de-linkage between value and monetizability, or perhaps between “use value” and “exchange value” as Marx would say, is important to understanding the world we’re increasingly living in.
I think the conservative political establishment’s embrace of Twitter is going to lead to a lot of great blog fodder. For example, Newt Gingrich ten minutes ago:
Bobby jindal got a good national launch out of last night. His story is compelling.his values appeal to most americans
Wonder what a bad launch would have looked like.
Incumbent RNC Chairman Mike Duncan tries to hold onto his job and explain the future of conservatism:
“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today,” Duncan ventured.
“Let me just say that I have 4,000 friends on Facebook,” contributed Blackwell, putting his hand on Dawson’s and Anuzis’s knees. “That’s probably more than these two guys put together, but who’s counting, you know?” Acknowledged Saltsman: “I’m not sure all of us combined Twitter as much as Saul.”
Not only is this, as Steve Benen says, weirdly inadequate to the size of the conservative predicament, it just doesn’t make any sense. I love Twitter. I have two Twitter feeds. I manage one with Twitterific and another with Twitterfox. And of course there’s my iPhone interfaces, too. Twitter’s neat, it’s fun, I enjoy it. But you can’t do political persuasion on Twitter and anyone who’s at all familiar with either Twitter or political persuasion could tell you that. It’s important for political movements to embrace new technologies, but part of embracing new technologies is understanding them and actually respecting what they’re for and Twitter is never going to be anything other than an incidental sideshow to political activism.
Powered by NewsWhip
Have a hot news tip? We'd love to hear from you. Use the form below to send us the latest.
About ThinkProgress | Contact Us | Donate
