The New York Times has a piece up about the Obama Administration’s “Open for Questions” internet initiative where they accepted questions from the general public about federal policy and government. As we know, legalization of marijuana was enormously popular and shot to the top of the list of questions every time the President asked us what federal policies we’d like to see. The Times piece interviews the chief technology officer in charge of this effort, and the Times’ reporter does his best to paint us “legalizers” as some sort of tiny but loud fringe minority not worthy of serious consideration.
The White House made its first major entree into government by the people last month when it set up an online forum to ask ordinary people for their ideas on how to carry out the president’s open-government pledge. It got an earful — on legalizing marijuana, revealing U.F.O. secrets and verifying Mr. Obama’s birth certificate to prove he was really born in the United States and thus eligible to be president.
“Please, as fellow human beings of this great planet Earth, disclose all known information on space/UFO’s because the world needs to know,” wrote sprinter5160 on the site, whitehouse.gov/open, which attracted thousands of similar comments on fringe topics.
“Even for people who want to talk about U.F.O.’s or the Kennedy assassination, we have created a forum for people to have a conversation with each other, and potentially to go off and organize and develop this further,” said Beth Simone Noveck, a New York Law School professor who is Mr. Obama’s deputy chief technology officer for open government.
The visitors advanced more than 3,900 ideas, which in turn spawned 11,000 comments that received 210,000 thumb votes.
The result? Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s true place of birth.
Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University… said that government must also prevent small groups of loudmouths from hijacking the public debate.
“The first thing that happens when my mom and dad log into the system and they find it’s populated by U.F.O. people and birth-certificate people, they simply are not going to participate,” he said.
Sorry, Clay, but if you consider 22,000,000 adult pot smokers as a “small group”, then you consider Texas a “small group”, because there are more of us than Texans.
(Besides, everybody knows that aliens in UFOs landed in Dallas in 1963 to shoot Kennedy from behind the grassy knoll to create the distraction for them to hop over to Hawaii to fake Obama’s birth certificate so he could become president and legalize marijuana. Aliens can’t get enough kind earth bud; all they usually get is that brown Rigellian schwag.)
