Online Town Hall a Positive Step for Democracy

(NEWSER) - President Obama promised to use the Internet to give Americans a greater voice in government—but in keeping that promise, he’s given America’s fringe a chance to shout at him, the New York Times reports. When the administration asked for ideas on how to make the government more transparent, it was bombarded with messages about marijuana, UFOs, and Obama’s birth certificate. More»

(NEWSER) - President Obama held a unique “online town-hall” today, answering questions submitted and voted on at WhiteHouse.gov. An aide acted as a moderator, calling it a “new experiment in getting questions from outside Washington.” The questions ran the gamut from education to the economy to health care, with the highest vote-getters in each category being asked, the Chicago Tribune reports. More»

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama is determined to turn the legions of Facebook friends and Twitter subscribers that got him elected into an effective force for his administration, the New York Times reports. He’s already begun issuing his weekly addresses via YouTube video, rather than radio, and crafted a new group called Organizing for America to coordinate his online efforts. More»

...because he's not terribly interested in fighting it

(NEWSER) - Democrats saw the way Mitt Romney's super PAC destroyed Newt Gingrich in Iowa, and it terrified them, because President Obama's super PAC—or as Politico terms it, "not-so-super PAC"—doesn't have the muscle for anything like that. "It's like when China got the bomb," says one Democrat close to the PAC, "We thought we were the ones with cash supremacy. That's clearly not the case." Obama's Priorities USA Action has just $5 million in the bank, less than half Romney's $12 million. More»

Semi-secret assassination program has expanded greatly in his term

(NEWSER) - In the five years before President Obama took office, America’s drones launched 44 strikes, all confined to Pakistan, killing about 400 people. But during his Oval Office tenure there have been almost 240 strikes, killing at least four times as many people, and the US has built dozens of secret drone facilities, with bases in at least six countries, the Washington Post reports, in an in-depth look into what it terms Obama’s “emerging global apparatus for drone killing.” Though the technology was already developing under President George W Bush, Obama has greatly expanded its use. More»