The virtual town hall meeting was on TV the other night. Here's a summary of it.
The phrase use in this article
"In a first for the White House, the president braved a public grilling from a pool of around 100,000 people who had submitted questions via the internet."
is, quite simply, false. The questions were not an ad hoc "grilling" but a carefully culled selection of questions, pre-prepared answers to which the President was able to read from his teleprompter.
I, in fact, submitted a question that I knew stood little chance of getting answered:
Would you eliminate corporate income taxes? This would provide more than $500B of stimulus and make the US the most favorable nation for doing business. You could offset $370B lost
revenue by collecting $300B in annual unpaid personal income taxes.
[Questions were limited to 250 characters. Otherwise my question would have been more detailed, along the lines of my previous blog entry.
Not only were the questions not only carefully selected to enable maximal proselytizing by Mr. Obama, even the people asking the "live" questions were actually all former Obama staffers.
BTW, the #1 submitted question, which they figured they *had* to address even if it was off-topic simply because it was by far the most asked question, was a variation on a theme: "Will you legalize marijuana?"
The answer to that was a simple no, then they moved on the the real show.
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