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How To Build a Web 2.0 Government?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Nov 16, 2008 11:35 AM
from the voting-is-just-crowd-sourced-decision-making dept.
from the voting-is-just-crowd-sourced-decision-making dept.
UltraAyla writes "With the announcement that President-Elect Obama will record his weekly address as a YouTube video to be posted at Change.gov, questions arise as to how an Internet-fueled candidacy based in part on a platform of government openness can begin to use technology to make government transparent. Aside from popular Slashdot policies, such as Net Neutrality, how do you think government (either in the United States or elsewhere) can best utilize technology to engage the public and make government more transparent and accessible?"
Reader Rick Zeman points out a related New York Times story about how Obama will have to give up some of his communications gadgets because of the Presidential Records Act. Despite that, he apparently hopes to be the first US president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office.
Related Stories
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Your Rights Online: Net Neutrality Vets Join Obama FCC Transition Team 179 comments
circleid writes "The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team. Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, member of the board of directors of ICANN, and OneWebDay founder, as well as Kevin Werbach, former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC. 'Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.' The choice of the duo strongly signals an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policy-making that's characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC."
Reuters has a related story about Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who plans to introduce net neutrality legislation in January.
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The medium is NOT the message (Score:5, Interesting)
If by accessible, you mean dumbing down the work of government to cartoon-form, with nothing more than a series of 5-second sound-bites, then good luck. But that's not government in action, it's a soap-opera.
Re:The medium is NOT the message (Score:4, Insightful)
But the laws aren't actually made there, either, except in a few rare cases. The laws are written by lobbyists and decided upon in behind the scenes deals; the committee meetings usually just ratify the deals already made. And in those rare cases, the committee meets in closed session.
Parent
Re:The medium is NOT the message (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've always heard it called 'television news'.
We can do better - visualization (Score:3, Insightful)
How about we include people under the CTO office that are specialized in data visualization. Very dry, tedious data can be made both more accessible and more interesting if we had a few people in the government who knew how to make useful graphics. For example, a graphic illustrating the size of "earmarks" in government vs. the size of the 850 billion dollar bailout we just passed, the Iraq war, or just about any other pick-your-favorite-wasteful-spending demon, would have very quickly ended discussion ab
Re:We can do better - visualization (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I just thought of another one: how about a visualization of the ways Congress and the President are spending their time. Group the time spent in various ways ("Bookkeeping", "military issues", "energy policy", "inappropriately texting interns"...) and allow us input on how the group as a whole spends its time. They work for us, goddammit, and we should get a say in what they focus on. I'm a boss at work, and when I think one of my engineers is spending too much time on a particular trivial task, I'll let them know what I think they should work on instead.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Graphics are actually one very heavily used thing in congress. Nearly every senator puts one up when they're talking about something and the reps like to put one up and hoot in front of it while throwing shit at each other. One of these days I hope a representative decides to put up a picture of Goatse.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent. Point is, folks use graphs to prove their point all the time in government. Doesn't change the fact that nobody cares.
Re:The medium is NOT the message (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The medium is NOT the message (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it like source code. Have I personally read the kernel code? Nope. Have other people? Yes. Did I gain a benefit from that? Yes.
Not everyone has to be able to sit through every committee meeting. But all it takes is one person pointing out the interesting point for everyone to tune in to.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely. The beauty of the community model is that there is always a small number of people willing to digest, integrate, and increase the availability of valuable information. Like Wikipedia, 90% of the contributions come from 10% of the participants, but the 90% still reap the benefit. That's known as the power law.
It's off-topic, but let me just say that this is why I want academic journals opened up. I know there's a case to be made against it, and we'll have to deal with those concerns. But I w
Re:The medium is NOT the message (Score:4, Funny)
You must be new here. Good metaphors only have cars in them.
Parent
That is soooooo... 2006 (Score:5, Funny)
What we need is a cloud computing government on a morph best-of-breed solutions platform to exploit efficient initiatives to envisioneer synergistic opportunistic public-private partnership solutions to national and global issues.
Let's for a joint public-private-faith based coalition to design a mutual framework and pray that it works.
Re:That is soooooo... 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
You jest, but Government really is a legacy system, written ~230 years ago by developers who have long since moved on. The people who came after them have been generally fearful of making any substantive changes, opting instead for minor revisions and, when new features became necessary, generally attempting to follow the techniques in the original framework without really understanding why those development strategies were used in the first place.
So what we have now is a maintenance nightmare. It was bad in 2000, but over the last 8 years, the government has relied almost entirely on contractors who have generally ignored any existing infrastructure and have re-written many things from scratch in languages that they've basically made up as they've felt the needed to. They've done this without any regard for stability, performance or maintenance going forward. They knew they'd be gone by 2009 and the problems they were leaving behind would have to be solved by other developers. As a result, we have one of the most resource hungry governments in the world, and the performance is pretty crappy. For example, there's a job that's been running for 6 years and still hasn't completed yet. No one is really sure what the job is supposed to do, but so far it seems that the only thing it's done is used a ton of resources to hack into another system and try to install another copy of our system in its place. The newly hired lead developer has indicated that he's planning to kill that job, albeit without the necessary '-9' flag, so that's hopefully going to free up some much needed resources.
It's at this point that the managers in charge should start looking at best-of-breed solutions from the rest of the world and trying to implement them. There are much more efficient ways to get things done that what we currently have, and we should begin by choosing a much more proven, stable and performant platform on which to build our government. And we should shift our security focus partially away from the external threats that have so far been our main focus. Instead, we should look at trying to eliminate at least some of the viruses running in our current system.
We need to face the fact that we've got the Windows Vista of governments. We had the Windows XP of governments before the last administration tried to entirely re-build our systems. They placed a priority on DRM and the appearance of security and generally built a system that requires more resources to run than we have. They've made cosmetic changes to distract people from realizing that the underlying infrastructure is pretty crappy. It may look current and modern, but at its core, it was written for an entirely different time and for an entirely different target audience. And its fundamentally unable to deal with the viruses that exist today (*cough*lobbyists*cough*).
We should be looking at ways to run Socialism (the OS X of governments...very user-centric, less gets done but people are generally happier, though it's hard to figure out exactly why that is considering how much they're paying for it) or Libertarianism (the Linux of governments...almost nothing is done for you, but if you're determined enough, you can make it exactly what you'd like and have a lot more resources left over for doing the things you want to do). Both of those platforms hold more promise going forward.
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Re:That is soooooo... 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got the right general idea, but the wrong analogy.
The proper analogy is that the original government was like Unix -- small, elegant, efficient, and decentralized. As society has gotten more complex, we've grafted on more and more onto the basic framework, making it far more complex. But at the core, it's still the right way to do things.
Windows Vista is Socialism -- an attempt to "cast off the past legacy of Unix" (analogous to Capitalism) and rewrite things to be all things to all users. And what you get is a gigantic resource hog that barely functions, but convinces people through pretty, shiny colors and pretty, shiny marketing that you have total freedom (e.g., "life without walls" or whatever their propaganda slogan is this month). And through ever increasing processing CPU power (/ever increasing debt spending), people believe that it works.
OS/X is the freedom of Unix, but with an attempt to add a user friendliness to the process -- kind of like Obama (though the jury is out on how much he actually believes in freedom, but let's go with it). Linux is more like a Libertarian government -- total freedom, but total responsibility as well, and only a geek's view of taste and beauty (in other words, little taste at all).
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Re:That is soooooo... 2006 (Score:5, Insightful)
The proper analogy is that the original government was like Unix
Wrong still. The original platform was formed by committee, with compromises over features, scope and departmental subsystems roles (i.e. state's rights). It was based on compromises and feature creep. 10 new features, called the bill of rights, were added at the last minute when some user balked at adopting the platform as not user friendly enough. Since original deployment, the platform has been modified an number of times with features being officially added and removed. Other features have been extended, added or deprecated in often creative ways by super users (often referred to as "presidents" or SCOTUS). See previously mentioned bill of rights. There has been a growing tendency for the super user to have root access without sharing the password other power users, even though the original program called for decentralization of roles.
HTH
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong still. The original platform was formed by committee, with compromises over features, scope and departmental subsystems roles (i.e. state's rights). It was based on compromises and feature creep.
You think Unix wasn't? Unix had plenty of compromises and plenty of modifications over the years to fix various things that weren't done right at the beginning. But at it's core, it had the right *philosophy*, which was what was guiding and influencing the features that were added.
Re:That is soooooo... 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to see some good version control. If you look at the congressional record, it's full of crap like "Strike out the sixth sentence of chapter 12, paragraph 348, replacing with: 'b. except where already addressed under USC 90.01.23'"
WTF? I would like something like Trac where you can click on ANY statement in the US Code and see instantly:
What changes have been made, over time
Who sponsored the changes
Who voted for, against, present
Links to related code, as needed
Public opinion related to the law
Press releases by public offices/personel about the law
All with a nice Google timeline kindof interface.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Executive Privilege (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't realize, until reading this article, that law is what forced the presidents to remain unwired. I just always assumed they were out of touch with the technological curve.
Still, that makes the president the only American citizen completely immune to spam, phishing, and those annoying e-mails laden with photos of dogs dressed up like superheroes.
That's some pretty hearty executive privilege.
Re:Executive Privilege (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Executive Privilege (Score:5, Informative)
I'm frankly surprised that that is the case and I wonder if it isn't the law per se as much as a somewhat hidebound cya interpretation of the law.
Obviously, we can't have the president using some goofy webmail account loaded with cross site vulnerabilities and hosted god-knows-where, nor can we have him using the RNC mailserver, beyond the reach of document retention laws*cough*. That said, though, email security and retention are not exactly rocket surgery. Strong crypto is a consumer level technology at this point, and virtually every corporation of any size already has experience with massive email retention. If anything, it is easier to build a retention system for electronic documents than it is to build one for paper documents in equivalent volume.
You're missing the point--it's not that they can'tbuild a retention system, it's that they don't want one. They don't want every word or thought (or lobbyist/Abramoff buying them off) captured for posterity.
Plus, the NSA would probably shit a brick if the Pres had a Blackberry since every BES packet flows through a foreign country.
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government open source efforts would be nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Tools for gov. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikis for pending legislation.
Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top.
Use an issue tracker for existing legislation. Have a problem with a law? File a bug. It may be marked as trivial or may get fast tracked as a patch. Either way you know it's status and can organize to get that status changed if enough people agree with you.
Use RSS feeds to distribute Congressional hearing notes, comittee transcripts, and legislative votes.
Re:Tools for gov. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikis for pending legislation. Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top
I've thought of this before. Though, I wonder about the value of any of it.
/. has a pretty good moderation system, or at least it seems to me. But while it works a lot of the time, it also sucks a lot of the time. Comments that sound right, or that people want to be true, are modded up, regardless of whether they are actually true. Comments on legal matters are probably one of the best examples of this.
Of course, from time to time you'll have a trusted source say something (think NYCL), but there are many instances when I've seen factually incorrect information modded to +5 Informative and stay that way.*
Furthermore, I get the feeling we'll be more likely to see something like this: http://obamacto.org/ [obamacto.org] than a more complex moderation system. Note that at the time of posting, "repeal the DMCA" is the third ranked suggestion. Of course we all know the problems with the DMCA (anti-circumvention provisions come to mind first), but repealing it would also get rid of safe-harbor provisions. How many people who clicked "vote for" thought of that?
In any case, it's not as if legislators are just going to look at the top five things on the list and implement them. At least, one hopes not.
Where a moderation system would work well is in the thousands of public comments that are submitted to, say, the FCC when they ask for public comment. That way instead of a flood of inane commentary, then can see some highly ranked ideas first.
*If my own comment becomes an example of this, here is a disclaimer :-)
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Re:Tools for gov. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A real how-to (Score:5, Interesting)
This is really simple: provide data feeds to the public -- from various government collection sources.
End of story. We don't need the government to spend months, or years even, building websites which dumb data down for us. Give us the raw data feeds and let us create mashups, interactive content and let people make their own judgment based on it. Sure, some sites might need heavy design (such as educational loan repayment sites, etc).
A prime example of this data feed is something like DC's http://data.octo.dc.gov/ [dc.gov]
And what can people do with that? Well, something like this:
Drunken sailor map [baltimoresun2.com]
Hogwash (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Whatever. If the government cannot explain to us what the hell is causing this economic crisis in terms we understand, what makes you think they understand it either? If they cannot explain it to us, who will? The media?
The government should be *forced* to making things easy for us to understand. For if it is *not* easy to understand, it makes corruption easy.
"Dumbing data down
a request (Score:4, Interesting)
change.gov [change.gov] seemed 48 hours after Obama was elected to have (under the title agenda) a detailed policy list. This however disappeared quite quickly. Another [barackobama.com] site however seems to have all his policy details but is by a group called Obama for America, who are they, please post if you have any detail.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Obama for America" is (was?) the legal name of his Presidential campaign.
Re:a request (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't removed, just re-arranged. In fact it's still under "Agenda", the fifth tab in from the right and under the "Change.gov" logo at the top. From there you can click on any particular policy you want to know about.
Or just go to: http://www.change.gov/agenda/ [change.gov]
This was his campaign website during the elections. Pretty sure a lot of the policy stuff is the same, here.
HTH,
Bill
Parent
How To Build a Web 2.0 Government? (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean one that values appearance over substance, is full of malware and bugs, crashes a lot, and isn't even compatible with itself? That's the usual kind. We've already got one. Worldwide, we've got hundreds.
Government 2.0?! (Score:3, Funny)
The death of the sound bite (Score:4, Interesting)
For too long the public policy of the US has been weighed and measured in three second clips cherry picked by the media to push their own agenda. Presidents have given addresses, but unless you block out the time to listen to the whole message at the time it was given then the republication and further dissemination were prohibited by copyright. What was left were tiny snippets chosen, perhaps to educate and inform but more often chosen to catch attention and spark a fire for pundits to fan into a heated argument between commercials. This doesn't serve the intent of the policy makers at all, and does nothing to improve public policy.
There is an opportunity here for the President Elect to circumvent the established media and get his message out in a way that preserves the whole message and conveys more substance than can be carried by a sound bite. This is a risk - policies as a whole can be unloved - but at least people will discuss them as whole policies and not be as swayed by a single implementation detail.
Getting more public information into the hands of the people is also a good thing. The government of the US collects, stores and transmits huge volumes of information. They pay for research, they study trends, they map and photograph, illustrate and write code and generate a lot of other content. Putting more of this online in open formats is a great way to allow the people to share in the progress and become more informed if they choose. It's also an opportunity for the people to take advantage of the information to cross-correlate, rethink and discover what gems might be in the tailings of this information mine, since publications of the US government generally aren't covered by copyright. This could promote a great deal of progress.
Government agencies at all levels are more and more making their services - information, permitting, licensing, and so on - accessible over the Internet. This makes interacting with government much easier and less prone to error. It makes government more accessible to the handicapped and the poor. The Internet doesn't "close", so people can interact with the government at times of day that are available to them. Accelerating this trend would be a good thing, but we need to be aware of a potential issue: if the Internet is a face of government, then access to that interaction must be preserved and protected. If the Internet becomes the road to City Hall then local broadband monopolies cannot continue to be the gatekeepers, choosing which region is deserving of bandwidth and which is not.
Direct democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now we don't have a "real" democracy in the same way the ancient Greeks practiced it... the U.S. has a representative democracy where we elect a few people to make all of our decisions for us. I don't think this is a bad idea considering the scalability issues. However, the Web 2.0 age could allow people to have more direct input and metrics in the decisions they really care about, and not just give up their choice to whatever their elected representative feels on that one particular issue.
The easiest way to give the control back to the people would be to give them some control over how their taxes are allocated. Right now, we pay a certain percentage of our income in taxes, and the government decides how much to budget for each department. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually "earmark" your tax dollars? Don't want to support the war in Iraq? Want a certain percentage of your taxes to go support the Dept. of Education or NASA space exploration instead? This would be a great way of directly measuring people's priorities, and give people the sense that the work they do to make money does not go towards what they consider "waste".
Right now, we sort of have an indirect way of controlling where our tax money goes... you can make tax-deductible contributions to certain charities, or at best you can feed up to $2500 or so to a Political Action Committee to lobby your elected representatives for you. Both of those methods strike me as rather inefficient.
The government can start small... giving people control over a small percentage of their taxes and gradually increase it as the new balance of power is worked out. Also, maybe they could limit it to a fixed amount per capita, so the people who pay lots of tax don't get a disproportionate amount of control.
Anyway, I'd like to have more control over where my tax dollars go, and increase competitiveness within the government organizations to show that they put the money to good use.
Very Difficult To Do - And too easy to undo (Score:5, Interesting)
I was the lead developer at the Rhode Island Secretary of state for several years. The administration I came in under was very pro-technology and allowed the IT department to explore Open Source, web services, REST APIs, RSS Feeds, etc. The later administration was very technology leary, felt that the IT department had too much power, and refused to provide real leadership. All the hard work that made the department a leader in technology and openness evaporated in period of months.
The Open Source technologies were done away with, the developers and system guys all left, and the IT department collapsed.
It is now all outsourced with no plans to expand their offerings, and have had to scale back on existing services.
I loved it till I hated it.
-CF
Obama's Laptop - New Age of Slacking Off At Work (Score:3, Funny)
Mr Obama will also be the first President to have a "SWF" button on his desktop so when he is killing time on games like Paper Physics or Line rider, he can immediately switch over to some spreadsheet looking thing when the Chief of Staff comes in to make sure he is still working.
Ahhh slacking off with style.
Securing email (Score:3, Interesting)
Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.
"They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked," said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. "The nature of the president's job is that others can use e-mail for him."
What's wrong with PGP? Surely they could bring a consultant in from the NSA or something to advise in this. I have a hard time believing that I can send secure emails and yet they aren't able to do so presidential level.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Psh, if you want to quibble over semantics, why not just say: If Obama puts his laptop on his desk, does it become a desktop, or is it still a laptop?
(Or is that just what Web 2.0 is? Everyone uses crappy laptops instead of desktops now?)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
comm theory (Score:3, Insightful)
to add a little comm theory to your point...
technology doesn't fundamentally change communication (whether it be words, pictures, video, or audio). It may change the style and method of delivery (the 'channel' and 'code') but the content of what is being communicated does not change.
'web 2.0' is a nothing term. some try to pin it down with a technical definition that is usually along the lines of 'web pages that automatically refresh' or somesuch, but the fact is, its usage is so broad that any effort to
Re:comm theory (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:comm theory (Score:5, Insightful)
I just call it more then one site I need to allow on noscipt.
Web 2.0, where websites insist on you loading over 10 websites worth of javascript crap.
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Re:comm theory (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but the medium fundamentally changes the message. One example among legions: a hand written thank you note on a good card that you took the time to mail after a job interview sends a completely different message than an email - even if the words used in both are identical.
Spend some time thinking about the last time complex emotions were conveyed using television. Try listening to this interview [bobedwardsradio.com] with Neil Gaiman that has a brief discussion about A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where something works over radio that doesn't work over television or in a movie.
Style and method of delivery are part of the content.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're confusing "communication between" with "communication at."
Do you really want a chief executive who has to wade through millions of messages sent to him? Or want, as a taxpayer, to pay for a staff of thousands who will sit there all day and distill down what they think are messages he should see or surf to? Come now. Saying that he'll use different mechanisms to broadcast his though
Re:comm theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Check with Congress. The president can't spend a dime that the congress doesn't collect as taxes and authorize as a budget item. And, presuming you're talking about Iraq (or were you talking about Bill Clinton's use of the military in, say, Kosovo - no war declared there, either), the president didn't use force there, either, until congress specifically authorized it.
deliberately sabotage attempts of the majority
Which majority are you referring to, exactly? If you mean that the party with more seats in congress doesn't always get its way when it can't muster a super majority of votes in the senate, but seem to think that this has only been true while the current administration has been in the executive branch, then you are really being myopic about it. Were you not around while Dems were filbustering the Republican majority in the legislature? Or when the party in the majority had its agenda "sabotaged" by Bill Clinton? What makes your particular, contemporary dislike for the centuries-old system of checks and balances worth a second glance? It's not new, not even close.
And lest you think that a particular idealogy is somehow moving into a sweet spot of sweeping unamimous authority and some large mandate come January, remember that Obama only won by 6% of the people that voted, and that as usual, close to half of the people who could have voted did not bother to do so. And of the seats gained by the democrats in congress and the senate, many of those newly won seats are now occupied by very conservative dems who are not at all of the Pelosi/Reid stripe. But even if they were, would you really expect their political opponents to cease to vote on behalf of those who re-elected them? Should the democrats, when they were most recently in the minority, have given up their own principles and not voted according to their own values? Why? Do you really think that whoever owns the most legislative seats should expect to be able to steamroll the wishes of the other half of the country?
If one party as a very good case for something, they should have no trouble getting a majority of the votes to back them. It happens when it needs to. And it doesn't happen when the sponsor of the legislation is weak on the issue - and that's exactly how it should be.
ignore the constitution when it's convenient
Specifically?
That the President isn't actually running an undeclared war
Against who? The Taliban wasn't a nation-state. It was a brutal movement of armed thugs from other countries that was occupying Afghanistan's meager civic roles and marketplaces and harboring another group that had been carrying out terrorist attacks around the world for years. The constitution's language surrounding war declaration doesn't even fit that situation. Would you have just sat on your hands, then? And what of Saddam Hussein? The hostilities he started when he invaded Kuwait never ended. The UN's sanctions against his regime were never relieved because he never complied with the terms of his withdrawl from that nation, and never stopped shooting at coalition aircraft. For years. So, should a declaration of war have been used to aid Kuwait? How about Somalia? How about in Kosovo? Should one be issued before we could aid peacekeepers in Darfur? Why?
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Re:rm -rf (Score:4, Insightful)
done.
Done like dinner, you mean.
I don't know that I've ever seen a more (inadvertantly) astute summary of the 'small government' argument. Using rm as a tool to remove the operating system that makes its own existence and purpose possible is directly analogous to the argument that we should use government to shrink itself.
Logically, it can only end in disaster. The moment government cedes its ability to operate in a particular area (and in this example, it's /bin), it ceases to be effective.
We all know that the libertarian approach wants simply to reduce waste and reduce the government 'footprint'. BUT... that's not practicable. As we've seen from all of the small-government proponents who took office, the effect is the inverse to what voters intended - deregulation becomes license for special interests (most often corporate leaders) to run rampant in pursuit of short-term interests. And that is precisely what regulation was supposed to avoid.
And still, government grows.
It grows because those very same interests who laud deregulation in some areas actually want and require regulation in others - again, to protect their own short-term interests.
The issue of what role government should play and the question of what constitutes (heh) an appropriate size are critically important to a healthy democracy, and in that sense, libertarianism provides a healthy, skeptical check on the desire of some to govern everything, all the time. But the discussion has to begin with the premise that some regulation and legislation must exist in order to protect the long-term health of the government and the people.
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Re:Step 1 - Get the MORONS out of government.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are in for a crushing disappointment (unless you are a True Believer). While Obama does not appear to be a moron himself there will be plenty in his administration.
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Re:The question everyone wants to know... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, not Linux, but his laptop is a Mac, so he is running a form of Unix, at least.
I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned so far!
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