Saturday, January 31, 2015

I'm a poet and I didn't even know it

Poetweet is an interesting website that takes a Twitter handle and uses it to generate a poem based on that person's tweets.  It can make three different kinds of poems: sonnet, rondel, and indriso.  It can be quite amusing, but if you use it on the same handle more than once the same sentence fragments start to appear over and over again, so it tends to get repetitive very quickly; also, the randomness of it often comes across as just plain nonsensical rather than absurdly funny.

That being said, I found the idea of making a poem out of tweets interesting enough that I thought I'd try to piece one together manually from some of my own tweets and partial tweets.  In some places I mashed a couple tweets together or rearranged the words a bit, but it's all stuff I scraped from my timeline; I didn't add anything extra.  Anyway, here it is, in all its glory:

The King of Empty Promises
by A.J. Winkelspecht

The rich don't pay their fair share.  Let's just put our money in a big pile and split it.
The world can't be fair until we're all lying face down in the same gutter.
Pushing for policies that have failed every single time they were tried.  Same old shit.

Facts are indeed stubborn things... such a shame that so many Democrats are stubborner.
A dishonest MSM.  False and deceptive is their bread and butter.
Every street, a Folsom Street Fair.  Subsidized abortions on every corner.

That's what they want, that's why they lie.
You trying to make us laugh or cry?.

Booing God and Israel.  Washing Obama's feet and anointing him with oil.
Progressives have a king today, now it's Cloward-Piven all the way!
Forward into the beckoning chasm of debt and unemployment and tyranny.

What the hell is this?  Hope?  Change?
If Obama's explicit goal was to see America ruined and Israel destroyed, what would he be doing any differently?

That's what they want, that's why they lie.
The end is extremely fucking nigh.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

The Stupid Party strikes again

Mollie Hemingway has a great piece up at The Federalist explaining what a debacle the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act turned into in the House of Representatives.

Even if you were certain you didn't have the votes to pass it, why pull the bill?  All pulling the bill does is give people the impression that it's extreme when it's actually pretty mainstream; in fact, a virtually identical bill passed the House in 2013 without incident.  Late-term abortion bans always poll extremely well; even many folks who don't call themselves"pro-life" are still in favor of banning late-term abortion.  So why not just hold the vote on this bill regardless of whether or not you think enough votes are there to pass it, and then let whoever is extreme enough to vote against it show themselves for what they are?

Why in the world did Speaker Boehner let this happen?  I want to give the guy a chance, but this is the kind of stupid shit that keeps pushing me into the anti-Boehner camp.  Just take the easy win when you have it, Mr. Speaker!  Please stop trying so hard to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  ( I'm glad that he invited Bibi to speak to Congress and all, but I don't think it was part of some master plan of his to give Obama a nervous breakdown, so I can only give him so much credit. And, really, it should've been a no-brainer anyway. )

Many conservatives are calling for Representative Renee Ellmers to be primaried in 2016 as punishment for throwing a spanner into the works with her flip-flop on late-term abortion.  Ace even goes so far as to say that we should vote for her Democrat opponent if she somehow survives a primary challenge.  I used to think such ideas were insane, but I have to admit he makes a surprisingly persuasive argument.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Is this really as bad as it will get?

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead suggests that the left may have peaked with the Obama administration.  He makes some good points, but I'm not quite as optimistic as he seems to be.  For one thing, Obama still has two years left in office with no threat of electoral consequences to prevent him from fully embracing the darker angels of our nature, so I expect things to get much worse still before they start to get better; the GOP won big in the midterms, but if they won't stop Obama from sidestepping Congress whenever he feels like it, then how much of a victory was it, really?

Mead is also much more dismissive of Elizabeth Warren's chances than I am.  Yes, she's a leftist kook with a practically nonexistent resume and a partially fabricated bio, but so was Obama; nobody thought anything of Obama either when he ran against presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in 2008.  Mead thinks it was a unique set of circumstances (mainly Iraq and the financial crisis) that propelled Obama to the White House, but that theory doesn't really explain how Obama got reelected in 2012, does it?  I still think our problems as a country run much deeper than many of us would like to admit.

(Hat tip to @rdbrewer4 for finding Mead's article.)