News Nuggets: 22 July 2009

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PRIMETIME FACEBOOK PRESSER: Obama is talking to journos Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper about health care right now from a podium inside Facebook. It’s the first-ever White House Facebook health-care press conference. The comments of the White House Facebook friends are streaming alongside the video. Friends are trying to answer friends with their status updates. Skip Ploss: “We have become a country based on greed.” Cameron Dean Nichols: “Leaglize WEED OBAMA free up some LOOT.” Larry Lozon: “i hope POTUS, WH, and COTUS read this FB transcript.”

Obama is semi-answering a question now about his record on transparency. Where is the C-Span video of the White House meetings with health industry leaders? “Yeah well… there were photographers and I understand a full list of them is being released.” White House FB friend Karen Hansen: “Warren Buffet said ‘its not between the Democrats and the Republicans, its between the rich and the poor and the poor lost a long time ago.'” Does the White House Facebook page continue after Obama leaves office? Of course it does. Right this minute, though, it’s hard to imagine anyone else’s face in the Facebook video box with the Facebook status updates whirling beside it like American-public teleprompter poetry.

BINGO: Senate Republicans designed a health-care press-conference-viewing game. You can use it for any presser ever, though. It’s a pretty good game.

THE POPE: As part of a settlement with three media organizations including the Colorado Independent, CSU released a more-full tape of the illegal closed-door deliberations that led to the selection of Joe Blake as chancellor in May. It’s chock full o’ gems. The new bits concern mostly comparisons between the two top candidates and concerns about perceptions of cronyism among lawmakers, the public, faculty and the press. One of the board calls these perceptions and the expressions they were engendering “unChristian.” A personal favorite, though, appeared on the original release. It’s about a quarter of the way in, which is when we get this: “When you’re in a room of movers and shakers in Denver… and Joe Blake walks in, it’s like the Pope walked in!”

MAYBE NOT: The state budget crisis is forcing municipalities to come up with creative ways to raise cash. Some ideas are better than others. Colorado Springs, for example, is experiencing imaginative fail: “Selling firearms no longer needed as evidence is expected to generate $10,000 this year, an amount the president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police said may not be worth the effort or the possibility of a future tragedy.”

Written and compiled with David O Williams.

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