We The People Petition Signature Requirement Bumped To 100,000 337
New submitter schneidafunk writes with news that the White House is raising the signature requirement for petitions from 25,000 to 100,000. From the source: "When we first raised the threshold — from 5,000 to 25,000 — we called it 'a good problem to have.' Turns out that 'good problem' is only getting better, so we're making another adjustment to ensure we’re able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve. ... In the first 10 months of 2012, it took an average of 18 days for a new petition to cross the 25,000-signature threshold. In the last two months of the year, that average time was cut in half to just 9 days, and most petitions that crossed the threshold collected 25,000 signatures within five days of their creation. More than 60 percent of the petitions to cross threshold in all of 2012 did so in the last two months of the year."
Re:Time to sign the Aaron Swartz prosecutor petiti (Score:5, Informative)
Crap, broken link. This one should work. [whitehouse.gov]
Re:Thanks to the jokesters (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up. I came here to say the same thing. Once they demonstrated that they weren't going to give meaningful answers to serious questions, it turned into "well, we may as well use this to entertain ourselves."
Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... (Score:5, Informative)
In a democracy
This isn't a democracy - it's a Constitutional Republic with democratically elected Representation. Worlds of difference.
While I might not agree with the Death Star petition, nor the Sharia for USA petition, it doesn't mean that people shouldn't have the chance to put anything to their fellow citizens and have the White House consider them without raising the threshold to un-democratically restrictive levels.
Caveat - I completely agree.
However, you don't need democracy for that - the Constitution guarantees your right, as an individual, to petition the government for redress of grievances. [wikipedia.org] Group participation is not a requirement.
Re:Thanks to the jokesters (Score:5, Informative)
Kudos to the White House for changing the URLs so that Google searches return bad links, and no search on the petition page.
Oddly, searching for "Neill Franklin" the author of a petition, returns no results. His petition is discussed here [huffingtonpost.com]
Searching the White House petition page for "TSA" also returns zero results, despite it having been open for voting [boingboing.net].
I find it astonishing that anyone with an IQ over 120 supports this administration.
Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... (Score:5, Informative)
Especially the one about the TSA. They didn't even try to make it seem as if they actually care in that case.
Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... (Score:5, Informative)
I get canned replies/propaganda from a congresswoman, you insensitive clod!
A woman can be a congressman (or freshman or ombudsman) too. All women are men; mankind comprises both sexes, despite what the PC brigade and redstockings want you to believe. Sometimes women manhandle people and commit manslaughter, and have their manservant drop the body down a manhole. Or shoot a minuteman rocket over no-man's-land with showmanship.
A woman is human, not huwoman.
It's men that are discriminated against by language - we don't have the counterpart word to woman that excludes females and children. If I said "werman", no man would understand what I meant.
I know I'm fighting a losing battle, but I think it's important to let "man" continue to mean "person" for as long as possible, and where it's natural to do so.
And a person's gender shouldn't matter anyhow unless you're sexist.
Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that what defines a republic is representation.
A republic is a state where The People are sovereign; a "people's thing", res publica. In contrast to one in which, say, The Crown is sovereign. In either case, how the government (the administration of the state) operates, who constitutes it and how it passes laws, is a separate question.
The US and the UK are a great pair to highlight this difference. Both are representative democracies: both have governments composed of representatives elected by the people and accountable to them, who in turn legislate by voting among those representatives. But the parliament of the UK acts in the name of The Crown, and is in theory exercising The Crown's power; while the congress of the US acts in the name of The People, and is in theory exercising The People's power.
It's a much more subtle, theoretical and less practical distinction than that between a democracy and, say, an autocracy, but that's what it means. It has nothing to do with whether anybody is representing anybody.