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Newsmaker Breakfast with Saul Anuzis

By J. Peter Freire on 12.8.08 @ 2:17PM

Following my report on Michigan state GOP chair Saul Anuzis's campaign to chair the RNC, the man himself has agreed to do a newsmaker breakfast with us. Our publisher, Al Regnery, will be moderating. For some background on Saul, here's the article I wrote when he announced his candidacy. It's critical, but we're thankful that Saul had the wherewithal to still agree to do this with us -- a big problem for Republicans has been the refusal to confront critics.

Since Saul is big on technology, we figured this would be an appropriate time to encourage you to send us questions via Twitter. Our handle is @AmSpec. We'll ask the questions, then blog the answers later for you. Perhaps it would work best if we used a hashtag, so please use #TASNewsmaker.

Speaking of Twitter, we've been following with interest the use of Top Conservatives on Twitter. While it's not immediately clear this can be an effective way of politically dominating, there is something to be said about creating a community of conservatives who can speak to eachother only 140 characters at a time. I have a feeling that there may be fewer flare-ups in an environment where there's a strict word limit.

For the uninitiated, I highly recommend it. It's basically a blog that forces you to write very brief posts. Others follow you, finding you through common interests, etc. You can also find others you like, including entire news organizations. For one thing, it encourages good behavior -- if someone is annoying, they'll see that fewer people are following them. And people who actually interact with those who criticize them get more people to follow them.

The real trick to Twitter is that it's really just an ongoing discussion. We like that approach, so feel free to send messages to @AmSpec about news you'd like to see or comments you have on articles.