Attention, American public: The White House has seen your petitions about building a Death Star, investigating the feasibility of building the Enterprise, and giving each state an official Pokémon. In one case they even responded in a particularly awesome way. But now they have another message for you: Cut it out, guys. It’s getting tired.
To that end, We the People—whitehouse.gov’s official petition site–is upping the number of signatures required for an official White House response from 25,000 to 100,000.
Writes Macon Phillips, President Obama‘s Director of Digital Strategy:
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.
As of this writing the “most popular petitions” involve legally recognizing Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group and revoking their tax exempt status, supporting mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food, repealing Obamacare, and requiring free Internet access to scientific journal articles that exist because of taxpayer-funded research. Not a Pokémon in sight.
I think this is a good move—25,000 signatures has always seemed a bit low to me, and though the government’s Death Star response was awesome in that it addressed actual scientific advances, I imagine there’d be a lot of facepalming around Washington if they had to issue an official response to “ban hammers and baseball bats” and “officially recognize the Sasquatch as an indigenous species and have them lawfully protected by laws banning any hunting.”
(via: The Daily Dot)
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