Now that Saturday is over here on the east coast, I couldn’t resist taking another look at the viral explosion of Senator Chuck Grassley on Twitter today after he called the President “Stupid”.  Let’s start with how many Tweets mentioned him:

Click on image to enlarge

His tweet went out at 11:51:22.  Prior to that moment, there had been 104 tweets mentioning him since the start of the day.  In the next 8 minutes or so (by noon), there had been 160 more tweets about him, and then the numbers skyrocketed after that.  There were over 1000 tweets between noon and 1pm!  Then things settled down until another spike that happened during the 6pm hour.

During the noon time burst, about half of the tweets were retweets, but it wasn’t it wasn’t a big retweet landslide where one or two tweets take over (like we’ve seen with huge spikes like, for example, as awareness of Travon Martin hit twitter).  The most retweeted tweets were from Grassley himself, and Chris Hayes’ calling Grassley out only got 20 retweets.  People were expressing organic outrage.

During the 5 to 7 o’clock burst (the second spike), the most retweeted message  was from David Axelrod.  At the end of the day, David Axelrod’s message got the biggest boost from retweeting, with 320 retweets and another 120 or so mentions.

It’s never a good day when your opponents get to tell the story about you…