Saturday, November 5, 2011

White House Responds to Petitions

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petition-tool/responses

The white house has begun responding to the petitions that had the requisite signatures.  I was pretty cynical about what the responses would be.  However, I must say the responses surprised me. That is, I was surprised at how condescending, circular, and filled with bald faced lies they are.  Perhaps I'm too insulated from politicians' day to day lies.  

Also, I suspected that there would be petitions about not taking petitions seriously.  However I expected this would take a few months.  However, literally the day after the first responses were posted there were already multiple petitions to take the petitions seriously.  Here are some of my favorites:

Actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening

Offer a response to marijuana legalization petitions that isn't written by someone legally required to oppose them.

We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.


One silver lining is that they did respond to the petition demanding they acknowledge aliens. In their response they mentioned the various ways we're looking for signs of alien life.  Interestingly the first one, SETI, has been shut down since April 2011 due to lack of funding.  It requires $5 million in funding, ie, less than 0.0005% the cost of the Iraq War.

And since I've been watching these videos nonstop, I'll link this one about SETI here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHuve33yOVY

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