Playing with hashtags

I'm taking Jill's idea of using hashtags to see if they generate any response. Here's what I'm throwing out now, and I'll see what else I come up with after work:

@GovWalker didn't you tell us a tale,

that no good #jobs would be created by rail?

http://t.co/MdLp232

@reppaulryan why does your budget give us the feeling

that slashing #Medicaid is just economic "faith healing"

If they won't listen sober to #GOP voices,

remember that booze leads to poor choices. http://huff.to/h76fiI

A new twitter experiment

So Jill was kind enough to suggest embedding hash tags in my twitter posts, so I'm going to give that a shot. I'll come up with a series of couplets tomorrow while I'm at work, and toss them out there. If there's some government or corporate entity you want prodded, let me know. I do requests.

Greg suggested hitting up celebs, and I like the idea as well, but I think I want to approach them from another angle. Most of the celebs I'm interested in talking to are people that I ultimately have some respect for, and don't really want to tweak them. I think my general theory is that while Charlie Sheen's been all the rage for the past few months, he's ultimately a distraction from the things that really matter.

Twitter: An Echo Chamber?

So I tried doing a little experiment on Twitter, to see if I could prod at politicians and get some sort of response. The idea was that twitter is about as close as you can come to a form of modern, standardized poetry, if people chose to use it in a poetic sense. Everyone gets 140 characters to compose a little message that gets blasted off for the world to see. Especially "high power" people like politicians who use the service as well. It's got potential, right?

No dice. It seems that people in power are just using the service as a sort of bullhorn. Shout through it, ignore anything that shouts back.

I'll be puttering around with it a little more over the next few weeks. Ideas are welcome.

The Angry Arab News Service

As’ad AbuKhalil isn't a poet himself, but he runs a site over at http://angryarab.net that is a clearinghouse for news and opinions that are rarely ever presented in US owned media. During the uprisings last month in Egypt, he posted extensively on the anti-Mubarak crowd's use of short poetry and song as a tool in their fight against a dictatorial regime.

At the moment, he's covering the current goings-on on Bahrain, Libya, and pretty much the rest of the Middle East, where (often) Western Backed regimes are busily trying to hold onto power, the populace is trying to take power for themselves, and the West is desperately trying to act like they never knew anything about arms shipments or off-shore bank accounts.

It's a good read of news you probably won't get anywhere else with a healthy dose of skepticism and criticism for all sides of the story.