Television has never been unimportant in politics – beginning with Nixon’s “Checkers” speech in the 1952 campaign and progressing into JFK’s victory over Nixon in the first televised Presidential debates in 1960. But, more recently, lots of people — including me — have been talking about how Barack Obama in 2008 and Republicans in 2010 won by mastering social media – or, what I call “new new media”. Paul Saffo even coined a new term – “cybergenic” – to describe Obama in 2008, an evolution of JFK and Reagan being telegenic.

Entertainment Weekly released the results of a survey Tuesday that compares the viewing habits of Democrats and Republicans. The study, conducted by Experian-Simmons exclusively for the magazine, revealed some interesting likes and dislikes for the left-and-right leaners.

As the times keep a-changing, so must the technology of yesterday fall by the wayside. Cell phones have made landlines irrelevant. Twitter has replaced personal blogs that consist of more than two sentences. And the iPad has completely revolutionized the way we do…whatever it is the iPad does. Now though, the New York Post is reporting that the next big relic to fall is the very act of paying for TV.

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what’s to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there’s a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I’ve assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what’s supposedly in store for the near future:

There were several disappointments at Thursday’s Crasher-gate hearing, but chief among them were Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan‘s continued insistence that the now-famous security breach posed no threat to the President, and the committee’s focus on Social Secretary Desiree Rogers‘ role in said breach. This is absurd on two counts.

During House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Crashergate, the Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan spent the morning on the hot seat for his agency’s failure to repel uninvited guests Michaele and Tareq Salahi from last Tuesday’s White House state dinner. Among the revelations this morning is the embarrassing fact that, according to Sullivan, the Secret Service learned of the breach on Facebook.

As a Congressional hearing gets underway to drill down on how the uninvited Salahi couple managed to breach White House security, the White House has removed any and all doubt as to whether the Secret Service might have had a legitimate excuse for letting the couple past the first checkpoint.

The saga of would-be reality stars and accused White House Party Crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi continues to unroll slowly, as NBC fortuitously scores scoop after scoop. The latest: The Salahis’ attorney provided The Today Show with copies of their emails with Defense Department White House Liaison Michele Jones. If this is the bombshell evidence they promised to bring Matt Lauer in their meager Today interview Monday, they’re in trouble. These emails are all smoke, no gun

At the heart of the story of Michaele and Tareq Salahi’s big adventure at last week’s state dinner is a security breach so unbelievable, I actually don’t believe it. However, the President would do well to heed the alarm being sounded by Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and “In the President’s Secret Service” author Ronald Kessler in this clip from yesterday’s “Today Show.” King calls Obama our “most threatened President ever,” and Kessler says “it’s only a matter of time before there’s an assassination.”

The latest development in the saga of the polo-playing, dove-throwing socialites who crashed the first state dinner of the Obama administration is something that we suggested yesterday: Michaele and Tareq Salahi may have had help from the inside.

How does a pair of socialite reality-show wannabes crash their way into the most exclusive event in the nation — in the same room as senators, celebrities, and the President? Tareq and Michaele Salahi somehow managed to brazen their way past the Secret Service and into the White House without a hitch, leaving the news to break on their Facebook page. How did they do it?