Golly wow, Barack Obama isn’t wasting time is he? He has created a change.gov website to facilitate his transition to begin his run for 2012.
Firstly, let’s talk about the use of .gov domains. What the heck is a .gov domain and who can use one? Well, according to the GSA:
Domain Name Integrity
To maintain domain name integrity, eligibility is limited to qualified government organizations and programs. Having a managed domain name such as .gov assures your customers that they are accessing an official government site.
Since there is no official government organization or program known as the “Office of the President Elect” (OPE), and since George W. Bush is still the President of the United States till the morning of January 20th, 2009, why is a site that actually contradicts the policies of the serving administration a .gov an official government site?
Having said that, looking through the site, my impression was that it was nothing but an Obama 2012 campaign site with a .gov domain. Or what do you make of the following screenshot:
Folks, I know some of you are desperate to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, as I am, but why on earth would a government want to create a mailing list of its citizens? Why should the federal government ask me for my name, phone #, address, and private email address? There can only be two reasons, and neither one of them is good:
1) To have an offical government version of the “Obama Action Wire”. Read below to see how it functioned during the campaign:
Chicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an “Obama Action Wire” alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.
A couple weeks ago, we asked you to call into Rosenberg’s radio show when he hosted unapologetic smear artist Stanley Kurtz’ incoherent rantings about Barack and William Ayers.
And you responded. Rosenberg’s producer said the flood of calls and emails the show received was the biggest response ever for something like this.
Calling will only take a minute, and it will make a huge difference if we show that our grassroots movement can go toe-to-toe with their media smear machine.
Confront Freddoso tonight before this goes any further:
http://my.barackobama.com/WGNstandards
Please forward this email to everyone you know who can make a call tonight.
Keep fighting the good fight,
Obama Action Wire
Now imagine this happening, but only under the auspices of the actual federal government. So someone speaks out against President Obama, and a similar email goes out to the people who signed up. Pretty soon, except if a person is truly suicidal, no one would dare speak out against President Barack Obama or his administration.
Folks, it is one thing to have a candiate use trolls to silence critics during the campaign, it is quite another to have the machinery of state use trolls for the same purposes.
The former is astroturfing, the latter is blatant intimidation.
2) To have a database of citizens who might view this as a non-political initiative.
Information is power. There are going to be millions of Americans who will eventually provide their personal information to this website (or its successor). Which means, starting out the gate, Barack Obama has a humongous advantage over any of his opponents for the 2012 election. Both in terms of being the incumbent, having his campaign mailing list, and now this.
If you still haven’t realized what it is we have brought upon ourselves, now might be the time to start giving it some thought.
PUMA Pundit
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