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Open Gov Tracker Reveals Best US Open Government Ideas
jonverve writes "In May of 2009, the White House launched an Ideascale site to gather ideas from citizens to identify ways to 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.' The digital letdown was when many of the top ideas generated by the process were to legalize marijuana, solve tax issues and to reinvestigate Obama's birth origins. Fast forward to February 6 and the same process has been repeated with individual federal agencies as the subject. This time the idea generation has been much more productive, with ideas such as establishing clear benchmarks on humanitarian progress in Sudan to the State Department, funding for open source text books and materials to the Department of Education, making it easier to access previously FOIAed documents to the Department of Justice, and creating a Wiki for NASA to share its data and to engage the public. Hackers from NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform have created a site that aggregates 23 of these idea sites to give a quick peek into the best rated contributions in each category. Programmed in Python and using the MongoDB and Tornado web server, the Open Gov Tracker was highlighted by the open government blog Govfresh this past week as well. Jessy Cowan-Sharp, one of the creators, explained their motivation: 'We thought that a single access point would give a sense of the participation on all the different sites, a window into the discussions happening, build some excitement, and inspire people to participate.' The process closes on March 19th, so go and visit the site to contribute your ideas and vote!"
Or maybe that's because it's a worthwhile and viable policy objective.
So, in other words, they didn't get the answers they wanted to hear. What a "letdown."
And "productive" means now they are.
Liberty in your lifetime
The Obama birth record bs I can understand... but why are "legalize marijuana, solve tax issues" big letdowns?
legalize marijuana: It could not only reduce the cost of law enforcement by tens or even hundreds of billions but provide valuable new jobs and revenue streams for taxation.
1) Reduces prison population -> reduces Government budget/deficit
2) Introduces new tax revenue -> increases government revenues & reduces deficit
3) Reduces crime rate - small-time marijuana dealers no longer have any customers as it's more convenient for smokers to buy from regulated sources, so small-time marijuana dealers move onto other things (some will move to harder drugs, but many who would move are already dealing those)
4) Whoever moves to legalize it first gains many votes from the millions of adults who regularly smoke it
Actually, there is a right/wrong to be considered.
Either the Founding Fathers meant what they wrote when they agreed to the Constitution, or the idea behind the entire American system of government has absolutely no basis.
Either Congress has absolute authority to do whatever we let them get away with (which is pretty much what the Supreme Court has given them over the centuries), or those men in Philadelphia (what other people have later considered "the greatest collection of brilliant minds ever assembled"...more or less..I forget the source and probably have the quote wrong) when they decided things like, for example, they would not allow a central bank.
You'd have to have a mind as convoluted as a lawyer's to argue that anyone in the Federal government actually had the authority to start this whole stupid "war on drugs" thing in the first place. Especially since it took a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit alcohol.
Every time the Federal government takes another step down the road to tyranny, we all lose. Even if you don't happen to have a dog in that particular fight.
No, one of the top ideas was NOT to "legalize marijuana"! The third most popular item was to remove marijuana from Schedule 1, where its placement violates federal law, the DEA's own internal regulations, and peer-reviewed science!
Click on the "marijuana link" in the summary and read the item for yourself.
This is a simple matter of paying attention to science and obeying the law as written.
The rules for Schedule I are:
A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
The best available scientific and medical evidence and opinion clearly shows that criteria B and C do not apply. The only way one can claim A applies is via a circular argument: all cannabis use DEFINED as abuse, therefore it has a high potential for abuse.
The logic of scheduling Cannabis at no higher than IV, and most accurately at Schedule V, is further shown by the DEA itself - by scheduling pure 100% THC at Schedule III!
Clearly a preparation that is only about 10% as potent should have a lower ranking. One should note that Schedule V consists ENTIRELY of drugs with higher rankings (from I down to III) in reduced potency preparations. This the reason that this low scheduling category exists.
If the rules of classification are objectively and scientifically applied the it would rank no higher than Schedule V, the lowest and least restrictive.
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