And Baby Makes Three

Today I got the following email from the America Speaking Out project. It thanks me for participating, lauds the importance of that participation, talks about how the website is getting a new feature, and encourages me to “keep speaking out.”

One little problem? The Website Is Still Down. It has been down, as far as I can tell (and I’ve been checking), for two weeks.

Is this how the House Republicans are going to deal with unexpected results? They’re just going to shut down the website and pretend like it’s still going strong? If so, this speaks volumes to how connected the GOP is with the American people and how populist it’s willing to be. If the people disagree with the party, the party will ignore them — while pretending that they’re listening.

A little while ago, I wrote a post asking what the GOP would do with the unexpected results on their “America Speaking Out” website. Today, I received the following email. It appears they’re going with the “cherry picking” option that was, really, always the inevitable result.

A few notes:

• Note that “300,000 Americans have visited” the site. No mention of how many people actually registered an account or materially participated. Given that there was only 16% more votes than visits, and I personally have voted on over a hundred ideas (the interface is built for this sort of down-the-list click-yes-or-no voting), we can assume that their participant pool is rather small, perhaps smaller than 5,000.
• Their flagship idea is for a Balanced Budget, the “top” idea in the “Fiscal Accountability — Spending” category. It’s not clear if this idea has the most votes “for” it, the most discussion on it, or even the most votes pro and con. It’s just the “top” idea. For all we know, “top” may be defined as “the one we liked best.” Also note that it’s not even the top idea in Fiscal Accountability, the top-level category, but in a subcategory thereof. One wonders what the top idea is in all of Fiscal Accountability.
• No mention about anything that conflicts with conservative assumptions. Unsurprising, especially in the first salvo of emails, but will we ever see the builders of this site say, “You surprised us with your opinions on this issue?” If not, it underscores the real purpose of this site — a noise machine — rather than the populist appeal to citizens’ opinions that it masquerades as.
• I’d do some fact-checking, but the site seems to be down. Are they the target of an actual, malicious attack, or did they just not plan for the deluge of traffic that their email would generate?

A week ago, House Republicans launched a shiny website called America Speaking Out that would, they thought, throttle their populism into overdrive and allow the American People a forum in which to voice what was really bothering them. From the page:

From their topics — American Prosperity, Fiscal Accountability, American Values, and National Security — and the subtopics (too myriad to list here, but “Strengthening Families” and “American Competitiveness” are my two favorites), they seemed to assume that they would get a resounding ratification of neocon principles. Inside their little bubble, of course, the whole nation was behind them in opposing the creeping socialism and rampant immorality being forwarded by the Other Party.

Was it naive for these Republicans to assume that the internet would welcome them, participate positively and genuinely, and well, not mock them mercilessly? Yes. Yes it was. The day that the website launched, America Speaking Out was deluged with joke and prank posts. The servers groaned under the weight; most links came up with a “too many Americans are speaking out right now” error messages. The website did not find its intended audience — the legions of angry populists the House Republicans were assured were out there. Instead, it found the internet.

However, something interesting happened after the yuks have died down. The ideas submitted on the sensible side of ridiculous started picking up more responses and votes. Some of the folks who hit up the site for laughs stuck around to air their actual beliefs. After a few days, America Speaking Out miraculously transformed into what it was intended to be: a forum for the proposal and discussion of ideas about United States Government. The only problem? The people on that forum are still not the target audience.

With over 1,700 votes, the most popular ideas, with Yea votes profoundly overpowering the Nay votes, are to legalize same-sex marriage and marijuana. Other ideas get even more aggressive, denouncing the idea that the U.S. is a Christian nation and calling for churches to lose their tax-exempt status. Subsidies to farmers should be eliminated, others propose, and the military cut by half. One assumes, at least, that the people proposing and voting for these measures are not the people that the site’s builders were expecting to hear from.

Of course there are a handful issues that you might expect from an ostensibly conservative forum. Illegal Immigration gets a lot of torches and pitchforks waved around (tempered by ideas to make legal immigration actually feasible); there are some popular anti-earmark topics (because government spending in your district is pork; government spending in my district is necessary and innovative). However, even these subjects with broad cross-spectrum appeal are pulling in 600 votes or less. The big votes are for the topics that do not and have never appeared on the GOP’s agenda or platform.

Which raises the question: will the GOP, or at least the House Republicans who built this site, act on any of the ideas proposed on this site?

The most cynical answer is that the builders never intended to take the results of the site as direction; the site was always intended as yet another way to stir the pot of discontent, to imply that the current administration was so out of touch with The People that a whole website had to be created to bridge the gap. In the coming months leading to elections, we will see GOP politicians pointing at the site and claiming it provides support for their positions when in fact it overwhelmingly does not. Launching the site was showboating, and there are more opportunities for showboating on the horizon. While I’m positive that some of the builders and promoters might fall into this camp, I’m not sure I’d buy that they all do. Some of these politicians must have hoped for something to come out of this investment.

The less-cynical and probably more realistic answer is that the GOP will look over the results with a highly critical eye and a strong filter. “Hundreds of respondents support same-sex marriage? Bah, must be the liberal bias of internet hoodlums. But look at this idea about illegal immigration.” In which case we’ll see the cherry-picking of data that we’ve come to expect from Republican operatives spouting talking points. They’ll merrily cite numbers when talking about those damned illegals and just neglect to mention that whole church-and-state thing that was twice as popular. Or this experiment might be quietly killed in another five weeks; after all, for all the traffic generated, there are less than two thousand registered users. Not exactly a significant portion of the nation’s demographic.

But it’s at least amusing to consider the least-cynical answer, where one or two of the site’s builders take the feedback to heart. What happens when a modern Republican candidate starts insisting on the separation of church and state, supports same-sex couples’ right to marry, proposes deep cuts on the military, works to increase transparency on federal spending, and simultaneously strengthens border security while streamlining the citizenship process? Would they find support in their districts? Would they find that their constituents agree, that the site has miraculously found common sense proposals that win votes? Would they be able to find the sources of funding that complement those positions, and would they be able to work with anybody at all on Capitol Hill? What would that look like?

It’s a pity we’ll never find out.

As the image above rather clearly shows, Meghann has shaved her head! She’s donating the hair to Matter of Trust, which will use it to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently human hair is really good at sopping up oil.

When asked for comment, Meg said, “I needed a haircut anyway.”

Which only goes to prove the well-known axiom: any religious ceremony can benefit from the addition of pyrotechnics.

or

or

This thing? This thing is fantastic.

Prudence enjoyed this a little more than I was comfortable with:

Paraphrased from Mari our intern minister’s debut sermon:

“Faith is trust that the power of love will make the world a better place, and God is a personification of that power.”

I like this. A whole lot. Defined positively, forward-looking, self-aware, functional. I could say more, but it would be pages long.

I didn’t figure out what she was doing till like three-quarters of the way in.