Today’s videos feature a thin ice skating, a weatherman for the kids, and a Twisted f*****g Metal ad.

No matter your stance on the debate, you have to hand it to Rep. Maureen Walsh (R). Not only did she go against the tide of her party affiliation, but she delivered the most personal, heartfelt, and powerful speech I’ve seen from a politician concerning the topic of gay marriage. With a small bit of humor as well.

When you think of Star Wars nerds, the last thing you relate them to is an Olympic tradition. However, they’re stealing one to conduct a cool charitable event. May the force be with you…as you pass out from running 10 feet (hat tip to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog for the joke). If you want more details about the event, Zach Walton has a nice write-up

Sarah Palin vs. Moon Nazis, these are the kind of ideas we need more of Hollywood.

Hey there bud, you’re skating on…thin ice. (I’ll be here all evening, folks)

One of those videos where you hate the guy in it for the first 20 seconds, then he starts to grow on you, then you laugh at his Snoop Dogg needs an umbrella for the drizzle joke at the end.

So much going wrong in this video. First, the owner didn’t have the dog vaccinated for rabies and then you have a reporter getting directly in the face of a dog she doesn’t know. However, I love the look of reporters when they cut away from a segment that goes awkwardly wrong.

She prefers the plastic worms used as lures on fishing poles to actual gummie worms. At least there’s no sugar rush.

One of the greatest sounds you’ll ever hear in nature, sounds almost unnatural.

This is Twisted Metal…you f***er (Warning: NSFW – language)

The idea was that the emails, sent from Palin’s Yahoo account during her tenure, might contain some interesting information. The thought makes sense, as the release of the emails was delayed for years following the initial request. State officials have also redacted many of the publicly released emails and held on to a couple thousand, prompting some to wonder what might be in the unseen portions of the trove.

But as it turns out, the emails aren’t proving to be a source of any new, earth-shattering information about the former Governor. Even as many major news outlets crowdsourced the investigation of the emails, nobody has been able to find anything damning or really even remotely newsworthy.

The only thing that has really made any sort of news, at least in the Twitter world was the headline that Palin writes emails at an 8th grade level. While quite easy to make a joke about that considering Palin’s history of sometimes perplexing answers to questions and her recent Paul Revere gaffe, it’s important to note that writing on an 8th grade reading level is actually pretty normal. Conciseness and brevity, both of which the analysts say Palin appears to have, can “lower” the reading level. In comparison, ‘The Gettysburg Address” was a 9.1 on the Flesch-Kincaid test and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech scored only .6 higher than the Palin samples, at an 8.8.

Two prominent Twitter users have come out against the media for their obsession with the Palin emails. Ashton Kutcher and wife Demi Moore have expressed their disdain for what Kutcher calls an “over reaching” media –

The two celebrities aren’t the only ones to weigh in on the coverage of the emails, as Twitter has interesting comments from both sides of the aisle –

In my opinion, while it’s true that transparency in government is vital, this Palin thing does feel like an obsession with a celebrity rather than a real need to find important information.

Let’s leave it with The Daily Show to do what it does best – sum everything up perfectly with comedy.

The emails were requested by many journalists during the 2008 Presidential campaign, as Palin was obviously a big player as the Republican VP candidate. The release of the emails has been delayed on multiple occasions, with Alaska officials saying they didn’t have the proper technology to accommodate the requests.

But in January, the Alaska attorney general directed that the emails should be released. And tomorrow, at 9am local time in the capital of Juneau, 24,199 emails will be made public. The emails will cover Palin’s time as Governor, spanning from the beginning of 2007 to September of 2008. Current Alaskan’s Governor Sean Parnell is keeping some 2,000 emails private.

Many of the major news outlets will have people on the ground tomorrow to begin to go through and analyze the emails for possible stories. Two organizations are requesting the help of amateur journalists to comb through the massive cache.

The Washington Post, on its blog The Fix, has a post today entitled “Help analyze the Palin emails.” They are limiting the participants to 100, who will be working in small teams to uncover any important information:

That’s a lot of e-mail for us to review so we’re looking for some help from Fix readers to analyze, contextualize, and research those e-mails right alongside Post reporters over the days following the release.

We are limiting this to just 100 spots for people who will work collaboratively in small teams to surface the most important information from the e-mails. Participants can join from anywhere with a computer and an Internet connection.

Here’s what their request form looks like:

The Washington Post has also set up a Twitter account simply for this purpose. @PalinEmails went live yesterday.

The New York Times is also getting in on the fun, asking readers to help investigate the Palin emails on their politics blog The Caucus.

We’re asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we’ll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate.

If you requested copies of the Palin emails, they will cost you three cents a page. That adds up to $725.97. They will come in five 55 pound boxes.

Palin herself has commented on the email release, saying that everything there is to know is probably already known. She does have some worries, as she told Fox News host Chris Wallace:

“A lot of those e-mails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption,” she said, and people who read them will “never truly know what the context of each one of the e-mails was.”

This story is bound to become pretty political, and fast. Judging by the comments over on Politico, there is plenty of opinions coming in from both sides regarding the release. Some say that this is an example of the liberal media continuing to hound someone they don’t like. Others say that a transparent government is essential to democracy, and if Palin has nothing to hide, she shouldn’t be worried.

Thoughts?

Palin has been on a bus tour that has drawn quite a bit of media attention. She has been visiting landmarks and historical sites all across America, hitting places like Gettysburg and the Liberty Bell. This tour has roused speculation that she may be gearing up for a Presidential run, but she has specifically said that it isn’t a campaign tour. She’s had this to say about her tour, according to Politico:

This is a bus to be able to express to America how much we appreciate our foundation and to invite more people to be interested in all that is good about America and to remind ourselves we don’t need to fundamentally transform America, we need to restore what’s good about America.

During a stop in Boston last week, an answer to a question about Paul Revere was captured on video. The video shows Palin giving a less-than-familiar history of his famous “Midnight Ride,” where he quote “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms by ringin’ those bells.” Documented history and common knowledge of the event obviously tells of Revere warning Americans that the British were coming, and the ringing of bells haven’t traditionally been part of the warning.

Check out the video below:

It appears as though some people have decided to include Palin’s history of the Midnight Ride in the Wikipedia article about Paul Revere, and have been met with some resistance. On June 5th, one user added some content to the part of the article that concerns the midnight ride. Here’s a screencap from the old revision:

The additions of the “one disputed account” suggesting that “Revere rang bells” looks to be a reference to Palin’s comments. As does the phrase beginning “most colonial residents at the time considered themselves British.” This would justify her claims that the British were warned.

The revisions begun a war on Wikipedia amongst those who attempted to insert the new information and those who believe it has no place in the article. In the Wiki Talk section, there is a funny discussion entitled “Was Revere warning the British” and a topic has been opened and closed about the edit request.

The AP clears up the history pretty well, stating that although Revere did talk to the British, it was far from giving them a message about taking away American arms. Plus the bell thing is highly suspect, according to a Revere biographer:

The colonists at the time of Revere’s ride were British subjects, with American independence still in the future. But Revere’s own writing and other historical accounts leave little doubt that secrecy was vital to his mission.

The Paul Revere House’s website says that on April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren, a patriot leader in the Boston area, instructed Revere to ride to Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

In an undated letter posted by the Massachusetts Historical Society, Revere later wrote of the need to keep his activities secret and his suspicion that a member of his tight circle of planners had become a British informant. According to the letter, believed to have been written around 1798, Revere did provide some details of the plan to the soldiers that night, but after he had notified other colonists and under questioning by the Redcoats.

“He was riding off as quickly and as quietly as possible,” Miller said. “Paul Revere did not want the Redcoats to know of his mission at all.”

The interesting thing about Wikipedia is how it is always changing, modifying in real time to support an ever-changing world. That’s why Michael Jackson’s death can be part of his article seconds after it happens. But Wikipedia’s strength is also its weakness, as anyone can edit articles and change information. Wiki’s citation procedures eliminates most questionable information from the site, but there are always little tidbits that fall through the cracks.

The Wikipedia consensus this time was that regarding the bells, Sarah Palin could not be cited as a reliable source.

This announcement announcement is not the first we’ve seen so far as the cycle of republican presidential hopefuls gear up for primary season. Earlier, former Minnesota governor and hopeful Tim Pawlenty tweeted a link to an announcement he was making live on Facebook, which turned out to be the development of an exploratory committee on running for President. He has since thrown his hat in the ring officially.

Newt GingrichI have been humbled by all the encouragement you have given me to run. Thank you for your support. Be sure to watch Hannity this Wednesday at 9pm ET/8pm CT. I will be on to talk about my run for President of the United States. 1 day ago · 1,251 likes · 346 comments

Mitt Romney, who is seen as the likely frontrunner early on in the primary race also kicked things off through social media. Back in April he announced his own exploratory committee for President on Twitter and also put out a short message on YouTube.

Is it possible that whichever hopeful best utilizes social media will be the one to emerge victorious in the Republican primary? The Republican party should be praying that the most social media friendly candidate is the one that moves on to face President Obama in the national election. We all remember how well Barack Obama used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to win his 2010 campaign. Just ask John McCain who, though active on Facebook and Twitter, looked like a Luddite in comparison to Obama’s media blitz.

And Obama is still incredibly active on the social media sites, posting daily to his millions of followers. There is strong evidence to suggest that social media will heavily influence the outcome of the 2014 race.

So that got me to thinking – how do the primary hopefuls stack up in terms of social media presence? I looked at Facebook statistics and used two different applications for determining Twitter influence (Klout and Twitalyzer). Klout factors in Facebook likes and comments into some of their ratings.

Since Newt is in the news for just recently beginning to announce, let’s start with him.

Newt has just shy of 126,000 likes on his official Facebook page. The page is active, meaning it has regular postings, photos and event notifications. The most recent 5 posts from Newt have an average of 846 likes and 144 comments.

On Twitter, Newt has 1.3 million followers. He is also fairly active on the service, tweeting almost once a day. His total Klout score is 67. According to Klout, his true reach (number of actually engaged followers) is 507K. His amplification probability (likelihood that content will be acted upon – retweets and such) is 48 and his network influence score (how influential is their engaged audience) is 71.

According to Twitalyzer, Newt’s impact score is 27.9% which puts him in the 99.1 percentile. Not bad.

Let’s look at some of the other candidates thought to be frontrunners in the primary race.

Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, has 883,000 likes on his Facebook page. It is also an active page, posting almost every day – sometimes twice a day. His most recent 5 posts average 4532 likes and 397 comments, dwarfing Gingrich.

Romney only has 40,000 followers on Twitter. His Twitalyzer impact score is 27.5%, which puts him in the 99th percentile. His total Klout score is 71, higher than Newts, most likely because it incorporates Facebook to some degree. His true reach on Twitter is 16K with an amplification score of 54 and a network influence score of 76.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has 583,000 likes on his Facebook page. His last 5 posts average 1148 likes and 230 comments.

His Twitalyzer impact score is 29.3% and his Klout score is 68 – with a true reach of 54k, and amplification score of 49 and a network influence score of 72.

Former Alaska Governor and TLC reality star Sarah Palin is like the celebrity of the party if you go by her social media prowess. She has just shy of 3 million likes on his Facebook page, with her last 5 comments averaging 19453 likes and 1983 comments. These numbers dwarf those of any other Republican who has been implicated in the 2014 race.

Palin has 513,000 twitter followers and her Twitalyzer impact score is 59.5%, putting her in the 99.8 percentile. Her Klout score is 78 with a true reach of 180K, an amplification score of 67 and a network influence score of 82.

Finally, Tim Pawlenty is the mainstream candidate with the least impressive numbers. He only has 86,000 likes on his Facebook page and is averaging 291 likes and 48 comments on his last 5 posts.

Pawlenty has 32,000 followers on Twitter and an impact score of 16.5 %. His Klout score is 67 with a 12K true reach, and amplification score of 48 and a network influence score of 72.

Out of these 5 candidates, Sarah Palin is clearly the social media star. But she has yet to actually announce her candidacy. It is just highly speculated by pundits and insiders that she is thinking about running. Of the candidates who we know are running, Mitt Romney looks like he utilizes social media better than the rest. He is a force on Facebook, garnering massive feedback when he posts. He could stand to expand his Twitter influence, however, by tweeting more frequently and engaging with his audience through replies and retweets.

People seem to respond to politicians who engage with them through social media.  There is a sense of authenticity and truth that springs from direct messages from the leaders.  Instead of speaking through a spokesman or press release, politicians can (at least feign) real involvement with the people through Facebook and Twitter.  So, in order to compete with the social savvy President in 2014, the GOP is going to have to engage with people on the interwebs with a vigor to match.

Shatner, accompanied only by stand-up bass and bongos, brought his "unique" style to the reading. Check it out for yourself below:

For your reading pleasure, below you can find all of Sarah Palin’s tweets that were mentioned in the video. Enjoy.

“The Internet” said it. It seems many people regard “the Internet” the way they regard “the paper,” as the go-to, authoritative information source, without a thought of the individual sources making it up. It’s as though “the Internet” speaks with one voice and all descriptors used apply to all parts of it rather than a discordant symphony of infinite voices singing the impossibility of one size fitting all.

Some prominent people—well, at least they are given prominent pulpits—have been really trashing “the Internet” lately, but don’t seem to really get “the Internet.” The first one on the list disappointed me the most.

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader

I respect what Ralph Nader has to say usually; I put him up there with Ron Paul as one of two guys who came the closest in the last century to being very nearly mostly right about things. Nader recently addressed a group of Washington, DC college students and implied they were too obsessed with “the Internet,” that “the Internet didn’t do a good job of motivating action,” and instead does a good job of massively trivializing communication to no truly productive end.

Guilt is a tried and true motivator, and Nader laid it thick onto the college students, asking them how the Internet generation would explain to its grandchildren what they did to prevent the ills of the future world:

"You know. The world is melting down. They’re nine years old. They’re sitting on your lap. They’ve just become aware of things that are wrong in the world: starvation, poverty, whatever. And they ask you, what were you doing when all this was happening: Grandma? Grandpa? That you were too busy updating your profile on Facebook?"

I almost thought he was right since I have curmudgeonly tendencies. Internet campaigns are most effective at saving cancelled TV shows. But “the Internet” sort of did get Barack Obama elected, too. It seems like Nader is bemoaning what all elders have bemoaned forever: the yet unrealized potential of the youth. He could just be coming down with a case of oldmanitis, growing impatient with the new batch of lazy will-be activists.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin

Besides what would be, if allegations were accurate, a blatant assault on freedom of speech and fair use, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her Attorney General’s legal threats to a Texas DJ show they don’t really understand “the Internet” either. Shoe Latif, operator of crackho.com received a cease and desist letter from the State of Alaska alleging violation of Alaskan law by using the state’s official seal on the site.

During the election, Latif says she actually just used a simple redirect to drive crackho.com traffic to Palin’s website, and never hosted any of Palin’s content, official seal included, on her servers. What came up was more like framing, kind of like what Google does with Google Images. In essence, visitors were rickrolled, which so far isn’t illegal.

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton

Michael Lynton

Before becoming CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton served as CEO of AOL Europe and president of AOL International. So it’s naturally confusing to hear him say something like this: “I am a guy who hasn’t seen any good come out of the Internet.”

Of course, Lynton is Sony’s boy now, and he gets paid a lot of money to deride the very medium upon which he built his success. His perspective now is that “the Internet” is bad for the entertainment industry—worse, apparently, than twice-baked movies, bad acting, bad scripts, formulaic, lowest-common-denominator drivel the industry floods TV, radio, magazines, theaters, video stores, news programming, and, yes, iTunes, with.

But perhaps richer than the line about nothing good coming out of the Internet is the next one about copyright law. Lynton said Washington needed new rules to protect copyrighted material rather than expanding broadband further: “Somebody has got to realize that we need some rules.”

Somebody like the cast and crew of the former US Senate, who unanimously passed sweeping, tougher copyright legislation, upping fines and penalties last year? Somebody like the Congresspersons and White House officials making international copyright treaties matters of national security so they can hide from the public and “the Internet?” Somebody like the five RIAA lawyers currently implanted in the Department of Justice?

Somebody like those guys, Lynton? How about somebody who thinks a teenager downloading songs (or his parents) shouldn’t face $150,000 fines every time he does it?

Bryan Appleyard

Bryan Appleyard

Writing for Britain’s TimesOnline, erm, an Internet site, Bryan Appleyard reduces Web 2.0 to something created and popularized by California cultists, whose creation has led to Appleyard coining a phrase sounding as close to buggery as he could muster:

“Bloggery is forming itself into big, institutionalised aggregators such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and remains utterly parasitic on the mainstream media it affects to despise. Even Twitter is already coming to be dominated by conventional, non-web-based celebrity — Oprah Winfrey in the US and Stephen Fry over here.”

Yes, “bloggery” does sound like a filthy, depraved habit. It’s one of those words requiring the speaker to turn up his nose a bit at the stench of it. The rest of the piece reads like a diatribe delivered over crumpets in a newspaper mogul’s—what would they have?—sitting room.

The Internet

The problem is not “the Internet.” It’s not the fragmentation and trivialization of communication. It’s not the rampant freedom of speech and fair use liberties. It’s not the free promotion fans offer entertainment companies. It’s not a few innovators having world-changing influence.

The problem, for the establishment, isn’t any of that. It’s that the world is changing, at all. Entrenched power and money structures need predictability and control if they are to continue to succeed. And that makes the Internet a problem for them, not for the rest of us. “The Internet” carries the only current populous hope of the people and it’s driving the powers that be absolutely crazy, save for Nader, who just thinks it’s pointless.

It isn’t lack of control that’s the problem, nor populism, nor cultists, nor fragmentation. It’s the ever-increasing desire of the few to control what has become the masses’ medium of choice. Governments, ISPs, Entertainment, Newspapers, and Others want this new Wild West reformed into something orderly, something controlled, something (immensely) profitable. The desire to lump "the Internet" under one easily understood label is only very nearly as strong.

Granted, Scarlett is much, much more interesting than Word Blizzard, but an enormously delicious famous bird seems just a little more valuable than starlet-secreted autacoid, don’t you think?

Well, what if I told you Samuel L. Jackson gave her the cold and that she blew her celebrity nose on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in front of millions last night? Does that increase the value?

Apparently you’re wrong, because the Tonight Show’s selling the tissue on eBay, stuffed into an autographed baggie. They’ll also include pictures from the show, but no Leno autographs. You’ve got about four days left to get in on that.

But be warned, the eBay listing says the seller will not accept returns on this item.
 

In case you possibly missed it, GOP VP nominee and Alaska governor Sarah Palin, while being interviewed by a local TV station following a silly turkey-pardoning Thanksgiving tradition, had to speak over the terrified gobbles of a different turkey meeting its unfortunate raison d’etre. If you hadn’t heard, join the 3.3 million viewers of the YouTube-broadcast execution.

Without its feathers, head, and feet, that turkey weighed a colossal 37.75 pounds, and has since been auctioned off to a guy named n**a on eBay, who was apparently the only one to make a bid for it. Perhaps if Triple D Farm and Hatchery had promoted it more, they might have gotten more out of it. Surely that’s worth more than a football game hot dog, right?

Here was the pitch:

This is your opportunity to gobble up a slice of Alaskan history with the world renown turkey which was featured twenty feet behind Governor Sarah Palin as she pardoned one lucky turkey from Triple D Farm in Alaska.  This is the official turkey from the video which comes with a letter of authenticity signed by the Farm’s owner who is pictured below. No doubt, for the past few weeks, you have heard about this turkey over the national news, the internet and from stand up comedians. 

Triple D insists they butcher their turkeys in the most humane, fastest and efficient way possible, and donated half the proceeds of the auction to their local Department of Veteran’s Affairs. A hundred bucks isn’t much. Oh well, maybe more people are interested in the Boner Bob/Betty Boob Hot Dog/Marshmallow Roasters.

On a side note, we tried to visit GoldenPalace.com, which often buys silly eBay items for publicity, to find examples of things they bought besides the hotdog or a Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich. However, due to the actions of a certain governor, our Kentucky-based IP address was blocked with the following apology:

We regret to inform you that we do not allow Kentucky residents to play on our system.
 

What API reported as Mrs. Obama’s words are fairly benign, but enough to get a segment of the blogosphere riled up. In an incredibly poorly spelled and punctuated post, API said she criticized them for supporting “American white racists” who had made an issue of Obama’s adoption by his Indonesian stepfather. Strangely based in Norway and publishing via WordPress, API also reported Mrs. Obama told them “not to dig that which will support evil people who are out to stop her husband from getting the presidency,” and that black people who opposed Obama did so “because of envy.”

Jake Tapper, ABC News’ Senior National Correspondent based in the network’s Washington bureau, has word from the Obama campaign that the interview API claims to have conducted is “100% bogus.”

He writes:

"This morning my inbox is filled with the ‘WHY ARENT YOU COVERING THIS?’ e-mails on the subject. The answer is: because it doesn’t appear to be in any way real."

If you think ABC News is too liberal and somehow less credible than API—established, so the blog header says, in 2006 and virtually invisible in Google search results other than the blog posts mentioning this very controversy—then maybe you’ll believe the National Review, conveying from campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, “The answer is no, it’s not real, the report is made up.  She did not speak to the organization.”

API, which seems to be in pretty tight with, or likes at least to make mention of smear-master Jerome Corsi and misspells words like “Farakhan” and “innoguration,” is sticking to its story, and says if you call them, they’ll tell you the same. They provided their phone number in an update if you’d like to verify with them.

According to a subsequent post, API says it will release audio recording of the phone call “when we are satisfied it is not intended to be misused in any way or for any gains by an group.”

Or, my guess anyway, as soon as they can create one. The better question for ABC would be why they killed a 2006 whistleblower report by former ABC investigative reproter Rebecca Abrahams about how evoting machine company Diebold rigs elections, or why nobody’s talking about Stephen Spoonamore and Mike Connell just a few short weeks before the election. And if candidate wives are going to be a big controversy, Verizon and AT&T rushing out to Sedona to install special cellular towers just for Cindy McCain should be a bigger one.