Matt Drudge Ponders The Big Issues.

Conservative Blogger Advocates Barack Obama's Assassination.

Solomon "Solly" Forrell is his name, and he thinks the President of the United States should be shot and killed.

I think Solly Forrell should be locked up.

From Jezebel.com:

According to his Google profile, Forell is the author of a blog titled Barack Obama Was An American Electorate Mistake, which centers around Forell's disappointment in Obama's presidency. This disappointment spills over into Forell's other blogs, including Anybody But Barack Obama 2012, and The Audacity of Hype, which both touch upon Forrell's disgust with the "cult" of Obama, "a man who has done little with his life, but has written about his achievements as ifhe had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth."

Forell may think he's protected by the First Amendment when it comes to his tweets, but the law begs to differ, specifically 18 USC Sec. 871:

Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

You'll note however, that there's nothing specified about electronic threats. Perhaps that's why, as of now, Forell's Twitter account does not appear to be suspended; the tweet threatening the President's life was posted (earlier Sunday) and has not yet been removed (as of 3PM Eastern.)

Twitter Goes Dark; World Temporarily Spared Useless Inanities.

From the AP:

A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter, and Facebook also said it was looking into possible site problems.

Twitter said in its status blog Thursday that it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack," in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

The Twitter outage began at about 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), said Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at Web performance monitoring company AlertSite.

The site still had lingering access problems midday (local time), though both Twitter and Facebook seemed to be functioning at least intermittently, giving cubicle-bound social media addicts a collective sigh of relief.

On a related note, those same social media addicts had absolutely no idea how to interact with their co-workers, as they'd never actually spoken to them before.

This Twitter Moment Is Brought To You By The 'GOP Council On Sexual Hypocrisy.'

My suggestion for a new Republican campaign slogan: "Oops! I Did It Again!"

The Revolution Is Being Twittered.

The events in Iran are unfolding at the speed of tweets and downloaded YouTube videos.

Nico Pitney on HuffPo is doing yeoman's work and live-blogging history in the making.

Be sure to check out Nico here.

More here.

Unreal.

From CNN:

Ashton Kutcher -- Twitter's top tweeter -- warned he may pull the plug on his tweeting if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show.

"It's all fun and games until somebody gets stalked," Kutcher wrote in a Twitter posting late Monday.

Variety magazine reported Monday that San Francisco-based Twitter.com had partnered with TV producers Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment on an unscripted show that would be "putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said there was "no official Twitter TV show" in the works, but "we have a lightweight, non-exclusive, agreement with the producers which helps them move forward more freely."

Kutcher used Twitter to post a link to a news report about the partnership along with this message: "Wow I hope this isn't true. I really don't like being sold out. May have to take a twitter hiatus."

Stone, who started Twitter just three years ago with co-founder Jack Dorsey, published a blog Monday saying that Twitter is "very open" and that "openness is not limited to the Web or even to mobile phones."

And, he wrote, "Twitter's open approach might have the power to transform television -- the dominant communications receiver worldwide. We're very excited to see where these experiments take us."

A Twitter reality TV show is actually the logical extension of that insipid genre. Let me guess the pitch: a cinéma vérité-style, jangly series of  quick-cut vignettes with OCD/ADD-addled fuckwads who tweet about tweeting with lots of "OMG's!" and "LOL's!"

Ashton Kutcher doesn't like the reality TV idea and might stop tweeting in protest. That's a real loss to the culture.

Is Kutcher the real-life Joey from Friends? I mean, he's the dumb one, right?

No, I Don't Want To Follow You On Twitter.

Disconnect.

I blogged about texting and Twittering on Friday. I am not a fan.

Writer Stinson Carter expresses similar reservations here.

Why I Twied Twitter.

     I don't text. Why would I tweet on Twitter?

     But I signed up anyway.

     Go figure.

     But first, the texting.

     A couple of years ago I worked with texters. I have the most basic of cellphones; no camera, no music and a screen so small that I have to squint really hard just to screen my calls. And forget trying to see what time it is.

     At first, I couldn't figure out why my phone would buzz and vibrate and nobody would ever talk when I answered it. When I started being asked why I never returned texts, I slowly started piecing things together. 

     I'm analytical that way.

     I managed to fire off a few texts for a while. At first, I spelled out numbers because I didn't know how to send them the right way. Everybody thought that was funny, but it took me a long time to text a phone number, especially having to include the area code first.

     Alas, I didn't stick with it.

     Fast-forward a few months, and I'm living at the Pacific Plaza Hotel in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, in the Russian Far East. I was there on a project, and a driver was assigned to cart me around. Kiril was a great kid, except for the texting. 

     There is little more aggravating than a company cellphone humming on the nightstand at 3AM, with a message from a drunk Russian kid, apologizing for running out of gas a couple of days earlier.

     Kiril and I communicated pretty well verbally, but text messages sent in broken English slang are murder.

     But back to Twitter.

     I love writing and playing around with this blog. Most who write or paint or play the cello do what they do and usually want other people to like it, too. I knew that Twitter was being billed as a "micro-blog," and I thought I'd give it a try to see if it would drive traffic to JackRabbit Café.  I searched around through the dizzying array of widgets and badges until I found one that actually worked. Of course, it had that washed-out aqua Twitter logo with the high-schoolish font, which reminds me of the lettering on late '70s/early '80s-era softball uniforms.  

     My intention was not to blast off inane "tweets"; believe me, the Tweet-O-Sphere is awash in those already. I simply wanted more visitors here.

     After a few days of a flooded e-mail inbox--fellow Tweeters (Twitterers?) "following" me and wanting reciprocity (and no appreciable increase in Twitter-driven traffic), I'm done.

     I've concluded that Twitter is a wasteland of lonely, gadget-addicted people who spend many hours each day speaking to strangers in short bursts of abbreviated nonsense. I wasn't trying to sell anybody anything; I was only looking for eyes. But there are tons of sales schemes on Twitter, from self-defined self-help gurus to get-rich-quick Ralph Kramdens to come-to-Jesus, tax-revolt right-wingers. 

     It's all just time-gobbling texting. I just want to write. 

     Goodbye to all that. They can take their widget back and my followers are now free to find another Manson. 

     But I'm keeping the Facebook page.