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Obama Citizen Briefing Book Out

By Jeralyn, Section Obama Administration
Posted on Thu May 14, 2009 at 07:31:29 PM EST
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The White House has released the first ever Citizen Briefing book (pdf), "composed of ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov."

125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area. You can tell how popular each idea was by looking at the number next to it – it represents how many people voted for the idea, with 10 points awarded for each positive vote.

The number one vote getter, by miles: Legalizing marijuana (90,000+ points, p. 26) Also high-up: Ending the war on drugs (40,000 + points) and Stop using federal resources to undermine states’ medicinal marijuana laws, (60,000+ points.)

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    Obama Citizen Briefing Book Out | 6 comments (6 topical)

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    if you'll recall, (5.00 / 0) (#2)
    by cpinva on Thu May 14, 2009 at 09:07:10 PM EST
    The number one vote getter, by miles: Legalizing marijuana (90,000+ votes, p. 26) Also high-up: Ending the war on drugs (40,000 + votes) and Stop using federal resources to undermine states' medicinal marijuana laws, (60,000+ votes.)

    pres. obama publicly stated he was less than enthused by this prospect. so far, his spinelessness (to be fair, with help from the democrats in congress) has been a sight to behold; several species of jellyfish have displayed stiffer backbones.

    were it not for the propensity of the republicans to self-destruct in glorious technicolor, i suspect mr. obama's popularity ratings would be much lower than they are right now.

    i truly hope i'm wrong about him. maybe this first few months has just been a "feeling out" period, and now he'll start banging heads together, to get a progressive agenda on the board.

    i hope.

    And on health care, #2 after marijuana... (5.00 / 1) (#5)
    by lambert on Fri May 15, 2009 at 12:39:26 AM EST
    Get the Insurance Companies out the Health Care, 55080 points

    Guess those "little single payer advocates" have been at it again.

    The people -- or at least a very great number of them -- have spoken; it's just that Obama's resolutely ignoring them.

    Plus ça "change," plus c'est la même chose...

    Wow. (none / 0) (#1)
    by EL seattle on Thu May 14, 2009 at 07:47:35 PM EST
    Just... wow.

    And they released it on a Thursday afternoon, too.

    Any restriction on voting more than once? (none / 0) (#3)
    by oculus on Thu May 14, 2009 at 10:50:16 PM EST


    And what's with the point system? (none / 0) (#4)
    by EL seattle on Thu May 14, 2009 at 11:28:45 PM EST
    It looks like 1 viote equals 10 points in the resulting "score".  (Note the way all the scores end with a "0".)  So did 92,970 people vote for legalizing marijuana, or did 9,297 people vote that way?

    One way or the other, it looks like "revoking the tax-exempt status of the Church of Scientology" issue got more than half as many people to support that issue as the marijuana prohibition repeal cause did, and it got more supporters than the "honesty and tranparency" issue.  There are some good and sincere ideas here, but to me this all seems kinda weird.

    I wonder if any of the cable shows will mention this thing at all.

    Parent

    125,000 users... (none / 0) (#6)
    by Bemused on Fri May 15, 2009 at 08:27:55 AM EST
    which is less than   0.05%  (1 out of 50,000) of the population. The "user" sample is not remotely representative of the population and can't be used for any purpose beyond than recording the "users" votes.

      Within that tiny group about 7.4% identified marijuana legalization as something they favor.

      So, we can safely assume from this worthwhile use of resources that at least 0.0037% (1 out 370,000) of the population favors legalizing marijuana.

      We've learned even less about views on other issues.

     

    Parent

    Obama Citizen Briefing Book Out | 6 comments (6 topical)

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