People have been fulminating about the why the President chose Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post for the second question at today's press conference. 

 I think the President picked Pitney in order to show the level and flavor of the White House's monitoring of the ongoing tumult in Iran.  Pitney has been all over the aftermath of Iran's elections, as anyone who has been trying to follow the mess of rumours, misinformation, and stirring images that has passed for news the last week and a half knows. Someone in the Administration clearly has been following Pitney's blog, as they contacted him after he began soliciting questions from Iranians to potentially ask at today's press conference:

"Last night, after emailing with a few people about Obama's press conference and what he might say, I decided to throw it open to our readers. I received a call from White House staff saying they had seen what I'd written and thought the President might be interested in receiving a question directly from an Iranian...The White House didn't guarantee that I would be able to ask a question...They were up front about not being able to assure that a question would be asked [and] they never asked what the question would be. "

As the President himself said, the administration has noticed the citizen journalism out of Iran.  I think he wanted to assure these new-media revolutionaries (and by extension their foreign conduits) that he is listening. 

 The question Pitney asked— whether the U.S. would ever accept the election results and whether that would be tantamount to a betrayal of the protest movement— was no softball.  And while the President edged around the question, saying that with no observers on the ground and little transparency it is impossible to tell what the result of the election truly would have been, he strongly condemned the violence of Iran's ruling regime and sided with the Iranian people's right to peaceful, unmolested protest.

The President and his staff have been and need to continue to be cautious and conservative in their comments on Iran's recent upheaval. Nonetheless, the President signaled unambiguously that he is watching and listening to the Iranian people very closely and is sympathetic to their cause.