I was indulging in the luxury of a Reuben at my local sandwich shop when I overheard a change.org organizer's pitch when he came in to talk to the staff*. This was the key part of the conversation:
The conventional wisdom is that Bush and Cheney will slip into the night on January 20th, facing no further serious consequence for their actions. After all, it will eat up too much political capital, be too divisive, and piss off too many villagers to do anything else. Well, conventional wisdom is always right, until it's not.
Digby notes an effort spearheaded by Ari Melber to promote a key question about this on Change.gov. Here's what you do:
Voting remains open:
1. Sign in at change.gov/openforquestions 2. On the left menu, click "Additional Issues." Bob Fertik's question will appear at the top.
3. Look right for the checkbox, mouseover it so it goes from white to dark, then click to cast your vote
Similar questions are also listed, and highly ranked under "National Security" and "Foreign Policy." Go help them out.
EDIT: Forgot to add that this is cross-posted to my own blog too!
I spent some time looking through the Your Seat At the Table feature at the Obama transition team's website. YSAT is a document dump where the transition team releases copies of every letter or policy proposal sent to them by third parties during the transition. There are currently over 4000 documents here, from an open letter from the Mayor of Charleston to recommendations from the Coalition for Space Exploration to a letter from the American Bar Association.
My first impression when I saw this document dump was that it amounted to a nice symbolic gesture towards transparency, but nothing more. It's good that the transition team realizes that special interests need to face more public scrutiny, since the government is ultimately supposed to be accountable to the public and not to the special interests. So this is a good symbolic break from the practices of the Bush Administration. But of course, nobody from the public is actually going to read through thousands boring policy papers, so there won't be any actual oversight here, it's just a nice idea.
Then I looked at the comment section, and felt some of that elusive "hope" that's going around nowadays. It turns out that people are reading these papers, and commenting on them. I think the average document has about ten comments, ranging up to near 100 for contentious issues like health care. And the comments are generally pretty worthwhile.
Civic engagement! It's wonderful to see! This is just some random backwater on the Obama team's website, but it gives me hope for our country. My only suggestion would be to require the organizations that submit the documents to respond to the commenters. I recall seeing a few instances of this happening, but there's no reason why everyone who submits a policy paper to the transition team shouldn't have to discuss it with the people who elected the team as well.
