Sequestration Hashtags and the White House on Vine
By
Joseph Marks
GOP leaders are blaming the president for FAA furloughs with #ObamaFlightDelay.
It’s a popular trope that sequestration is too complex and abstract for the average citizen to pay much attention.
That complexity hasn’t stopped both parties from trying to communicate about the slate of automatic, across-the-board federal spending cuts in that simplest of all mediums: the Twitter hashtag.
House Republican leaders spent much of Monday tweeting with the hashtag #Obamaflightdelays. They argued that the president chose to furlough air traffic controllers and thus cause flight delays rather than cut other parts of the Federal Aviation Administration budget that wouldn’t affect air travel.
The furloughs were causing delays of up to three hours Monday morning.
Earlier sequestration hashtags include the president’s #jobsnotcuts and GOP leaders’ #obamaquester.
In other political social media news, the White House posted its first six-second Vine video Monday. The video, taken at the White House science fair, featured Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
The General Services Administration inked federal-friendly terms of service with the Twitter-owned Vine earlier this month and agencies have been testing out the site ever since.