H/T to our pal Michael Scherer over at Brand X, this video makes your Gaggler's day. John Harwood's commentary is priceless, though did President Obama really smash that thing with his hand? No offense, Mr. President, but yuck.

The revolution won't be televised - it will be twittered, apparently. NBC's Libby Leist is reporting that the State Department has asked Twitter not to shut down for regular maintenance because tweets have proved useful in monitoring the situation in Iran. From Leist:

The official said that Web sites and cell phones had been shut down and journalists were being kicked out, so the U.S. wanted "to highlight to [Twitter] that this was an important means of communication -- not with us -- but horizontally in Iran." It was a lower-level official who called Twitter -- not the Secretary of State, the official stressed. "I don't want to convey the impression that the State Department picked up the hotline, told them not to do it and it’s because of our intervention that it didn't happen," he added.

I've previously noted my disdain for Twitter and refusal to Tweet, but the idea that it is helping information circulate during this turbulent time in Iran is actually making me rethink my stance. Despite many conversations with fervent Twitter converts (I'm looking at you, psuedo-arch-enemy Michael Scherer), this the first time I've seen a genuinely useful and politically meaningful role for the service. Bravo, I say.

I just read a White House pool report that I found quite poignant, so I wanted to share it with you, dear Gaggle Readers. The report is from Mike Riley who covers the Washington for Denver Post. Here it is in full:

With most of the president’s afternoon schedule closed to the press, it was former Reagan press secretary and gunshot victim James Brady who stole the show when, along with his wife Sarah, he dropped by the revamped James S. Brady press briefing room. Dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit, Brady was in a wheelchair, holding a cane in his left hand, his injuries the result of a gunshot wound to the head inflicted by John Hinckley Jr. during a botched assassination attempt against Brady’s boss in 1981. Brady was at the White House to pay his respects to Robert Gibbs, the man who now holds his former job. Brady’s speech is sometimes slurred, but he took a few minutes for an exchange of quips with the reporters who now work in briefing room dedicated to Brady in February, 2000. Telling a story about Helen Thomas, Brady recounted how she used knock on the glass of his office early in morning, before he had had his tea. “I would say, ‘Woman, have you no shame?  The answer was, ‘No, do you think I would have gotten so far in a male-dominated world if I had any shame,’” Brady recounted.

Ann Compton, the veteran White House correspondent for ABC News, ask Brady how he would rate the current crop of correspondents. “I would give you a high grade,” Brady said, then quipped, “Was that the right answer?”

His wife Sarah stood at his side as Brady answered questions, sometimes helping to amplify or clarify his speech. She said this was the first visit to the briefing room after it had been rededicated in her husband’s honor, and wondered aloud over the size of the White House press corps’ digs even now. “They’re still tiny,” she said of the renovated press room. “I can’t imagine how anyone gets any work done.” She noted that she and her husband no longer live in Washington and now get news from the capital like most everyone else at a distance. “To think that so much of it is coming from this tiny little area,” she said.

After just over ten minutes, Brady was wheeled out towards the West wing driveway.

Bowing to pressure from President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a major speech over the weekend that he’d accept a Palestinian state, as long as it was demilitarized and recognized Israel as a Jewish state. Now Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is on a 10-day tour to gauge the international reaction. Yesterday, he met with the European Union and is expected to land tonight in Washington, where he’ll meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and various members of Congress. (No meeting with Obama--not yet, anyway.) NEWSWEEK’s Rebecca Shabad spoke with Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, former U.S. - Middle East negotiator and author of The Much Too Promised Land to preview the foreign minister’s visit. Excerpts:

The Jerusalem Post reported a diplomatic source called this visit to the U.S. Lieberman’s “most diplomatic challenge yet.” Why?
[Lieberman is] a tough-minded Israeli leader representing a very tough-minded party. He has proposed a plan by which part of the areas in the Galilee, the Israeli north, that contains Israeli Arabs, where citizens of the state be transferred to a Palestinian state as part of some sort of land swap. This of course has been an incredibly controversial proposal and the foreign minister has been accused by the Israeli Arabs, as well as by many Israelis, as having a super nationalistic even racist agenda with respect to this particular point. He’s way out there on the right. But the reality is he’s still the foreign minister of the state of Israel. He isn’t going to be the principle shaper, although he will be an influence on the prime minister’s policies. I’m expecting an Avigdor Lieberman who’ll seek to charm, rather than confront. He’ll be honest for sure. He seems to me the little likelihood or prospect of any sort of blowup.

Will the Obama White House make its visitor logs public? Administration officials have launched a formal review in the wake of a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a Washington ethics group that has been trying to gain access under the Freedom of Information Act to a list of those who have come to see administration officials in recent months. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, who previously sued the Bush administration for similar records, had requested names of any coal executives who have visited Obama officials during the first few months of the administration. The request was denied, as was a similar request to the administration from MSNBC, which asked for the names of everybody who had visited the White House since Inauguration Day. Asked about the logs during the press briefing today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the policy is under review by the White House Counsel's office, though he declined to say how long the review could last. Asked if the administration still seeks to be more transparent than previous White Houses—a key Obama campaign promise--Gibbs replied, “I think we ran on that.”

The logs are maintained by the Secret Service, but the Obama administration has argued, as the Bushies did, that the visitor logs have historically fallen under the Presidential Records Act. That means they would be exempt from FOIA requests and would not made public until years after a president has left office. But that argument was twice rejected by a federal judge during the Bush years. Still no White House has ever released its complete visitors list, though there have been excerpts made public. Three years ago, the Bush White House, after some pressure from Congress and federal investigators, released information about when disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates visited the White House. Meanwhile, both the Clinton and Bush administrations gave reporters details on who slept overnight in the executive mansion and at Camp David. CREW has accused the Obama White House of basically adopting Bush administration policy. (Gee, where have we heard that one before?) At the briefing today, Gibbs seemed to go out of his way to suggest that this isn’t the Obama folks’s problem, that these records have been disputed for years and that they are reviewing “previous policy.” Your Gaggler’s translation: We’re not the bad guys here. But that’s a hard argument to make when your candidate campaigned for letting the sun shine in.

Speaking to reporters at the White House this morning, President Obama went a teeeeensy bit further on Iran than he did in his remarks yesterday, saying that he had “deep concerns” about the election. (On Monday, he said he was “deeply troubled” by the violence.) Here’s what Obama said, courtesy the White House:

It was only -- let's see -- I think seven hours ago or eight hours ago when I -- I have said before that I have deep concerns about the election.  And I think that the world has deep concerns about the election.  You've seen in Iran some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.
 
Now, it's not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling -- the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections.  What I will repeat and what I said yesterday is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it's of concern to the American people.  That is not how governments should interact with their people. 
 
And my hope is, is that the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices, to express their aspirations.  I do believe that something has happened in Iran where there is a questioning of the kinds of antagonistic postures towards the international community that have taken place in the past, and that there are people who want to see greater openness and greater debate and want to see greater democracy.  How that plays out over the next several days and several weeks is something ultimately for the Iranian people to decide. But I stand strongly with the universal principle that people's voices should be heard and not suppressed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the White House has been very careful about how it responds to what is happening in Iran right now. Speaking out for the first time since Friday’s disputed election results, President Obama said late yesterday that Iranians have a right to have their votes counted, but didn’t go further—and quickly noted why. “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be, that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football,” Obama told reporters. “Having said all that, I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television.  I think that the democratic process -- free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent -- all those are universal values and need to be respected.  And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they're, rightfully, troubled.

The last thing the White House wants to see is Mahmoud Ajmadinejad accusing the United States of trying to intervene in the election, as he did with Israel in the days before the vote last week. But not everybody agrees. Speaking on the Today Show this morning, Sen. John McCain, Obama’s former GOP rival, said the president should be speaking out more forcefully about what’s happening in Iran. “He should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election and that the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights,” McCain said. “They should not be subjected to four more years of Ahmadinejad and the radical Muslim clerics.”

But as NBC’s First Read notes, Obama’s response isn’t much different than how George H.W. Bush responded to the violence in China’s Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. Should Obama get tougher? Will he? We’ll see the president several times on camera today, beginning with an Oval Office press avail with the president of South Korea. Later today, he’s doing a round of TV interviews to talk about his plan for stepped up regulation of the financial services industry. He’ll no doubt be asked about Iran. Will his language change?

After a week of outraged chatter on both sides on the debate, David Letterman has issued a full apology to Governor Palin for his unsavory joke about her daughter last week. Although he maintains that his intent was not to make inappropriate comments about a 14 year old girl, he took responsibility for the misconceptions about his motives. “I told a bad joke I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception. And since it was a joke I told, I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke,"Letterman told viewers last night. "So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future.”  The Associated Press is reporting that Palin has accepted the apology.

Our favorites this morning from around the web:

A horticultural influence?
We're not really sure if Michelle Obama influenced the Queen to install a vegetable garden at Buckingham Palace. We just think the time line is suggestive: Her majesty never had a vegetable garden, she formed a budding friendship with America's first lady who has championed vegetable gardens, and now she has a vegetable garden. (The Telegraph)

Iranian president turns a page, travels to Russia
Completely ignoring the political unrest in his country, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attends a summit of regional leaders in Russia to declare an end to empire governments. He made no mention of the protests in Iran challenging his type of government. (AFP)

In the driver's seat? A new job hunt that makes for great puns
In the last year, truck driving schools nationwide have seen a 20 percent increase in people looking to take to the open road. A signal, NPR punnily points out, that some job seekers really need to shift gears when pursuing their new job path. (NPR)

Be back in 10. Gone waste-watching.
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, a self-proclaimed waste watcher, says he can already point to $5.5 billion wasted on bad or inefficient projects among the economic-stimulus expenditures on tap. Among the holes: $3.5 million for bike-path constructed for Milford, Mass. even though the state has the money to do it itself and $2.1 million for the city of Miami to relocate an aging bus terminal. (WashTimes)