Ironic: Obama’s “Open For Questions” Feature On Change.gov Website Censoring Questions About Blago
That’s not change we can believe in.
President-elect Barack Obama’s Transition today launched “Open for Questions,” a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another’s questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.
It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama’s supporters appear to be using—and abusing—a tool allowing them to “flag” questions as “inappropriate” to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama’s website.
The Blagojevich questions—many of them polite and reasonable—can be found only by searching words in them, like “Blagojevich,” which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site.
“Given the current corruption charges involving Blagojevich, will ‘serious’ campaign finance reform that takes money completely out of politics through publicly funded elections be a priority in the first term?” asked Metteyya of Santa Cruz, California.
“This submission was removed because people believe it is inappropriate,” reads the text underneath it.
“People” believe it is inappropriate. And who speaks for the “people?”
Why, Barack Obama, that’s who.
Presumably you can still ask Obama the really tough questions. Like “What’s your favorite color” and “How does it feel to be so awesome.”
Who knew that the “change” we are all supposed to “believe in” meant Obama avoiding questions online instead of in press conferences like other Presidents.
