For all you social media enthusiasts out there, POLITICO has a run-down of the top 10 Tweets and Facebook postings of 2009.
Topping the list are a couple of the conservative movement’s celebrities ? Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin:
The former GOP speaker of the House got a little ahead of himself at 9:34 a.m. on May 27, when he declared that Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor was a ?racist.?
?White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw,? Gingrich tweeted. He was incensed over Sotomayor?s comment about a ?wise Latina? being able to make a better decision than a white male because of her life experience.
But several days later, Gingrich hit the rhetorical ?delete? button. ?My initial reaction was strong and direct ? perhaps too strong and too direct,? Gingrich said in a Web posting. He regretted calling Sotomayor a racist. Gingrich had done a 180 ? within 140 characters.
SNIP
Sarah Palin?s Aug. 7 statement that her Down syndrome baby could have to stand before an Obama death panel set off an intense firestorm of controversy. Some screamed that Palin was wildly distorting the facts. Others shouted that they wanted Palin to run for president. Either way, the volume was up, and the person people were talking about was Palin. Who, incidentally, had a book to sell.
Here?s the meat of Palin?s post on Facebook: ?The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.?
The controversy didn?t scare Palin away from the topic. Palin returned to the death panel question in a tweet on Dec. 22, writing of the recently passed Senate health care bill: ?merged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?what’s punishment 4not purchasing mandated HC??
