Tea Party 2.0? Impressive List Of Bloggers Call For Obama ‘Question Time’

by Glynnis MacNicol | 8:33 am, February 3rd, 2010

» 3 comments

The Founding Bloggers? Or an Internet tea party? Take your pick. This morning news broke that a group of “politically diverse group of [high profile] bloggers” were so impressed with last week’s question and answer session between President Obama and the house Republicans that they have banded together to call on the president and the Congress to make it a regular thing. Sort of takes the term ‘Internet Presidency’ to a whole new level.

America could use more of this — an unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives. So we call on President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner to hold these sessions regularly — and allow them to be broadcast and webcast live and without commercial interruption, sponsorship or intermediaries.

The group, whose steering committee is made up of Micah Sifry, David Corn, Mike Moffo, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds, is calling themselves “Demand Question Time” has already launched a website and collected 50 signatures. You can sign the petition here if you like. According to Politico the “original endorsers” include: Grover Norquist and Eli Pariser, Joe Trippi and Mark McKinnon, Markos Moulitsas and Ed Morrissey…Ari Melber, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ana Marie Cox and Nate Silver.”

It will be interesting to see who they manage to attract: the Baltimore session was hailed from both sides of the aisle as a great success, so much so, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called for the SOTU address to be returned to its original written form and replaced by just this sort of back and forth exchange. It will also be interesting to see whether the strong presence of well known online folks such as Ana Marie Cox (she has 1.5 million followers) can translate into actual names on a list. In the meantime, you can read the full call to action here.

disgusted

I was watching the BBC “special” during his ‘state’ of the disjuncture! ACTUALLY – the BBC was informative/interesting – it showed EX-pres Zalaya being escorted from the Brazilian embassy to the airport (Toncontin) for his flight into ‘exile’ – in DomRep!
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

It’s a nice idea and I’m sure it will get all of the participating bloggers some degree of publicity, as a few of them make the rounds. But, why would the Republican caucus agree to participate and because they have no legal authority to compel, why would their members choose to attend?
outlawpundit

I think it’s hilarious that suddenly conservatives openly embrace a European concept. I”m surprised there hasn’t been a movement to call it “Freedom Time”. Isn’t it nice how eager they are to have open bi-partisan dialog?

You know, I lived in the UK for the majority of the Bush presidency and my British friends used to openly laugh at the concept of Question Time with President Bush. Indeed, it was suggested in the past, but what Republican would have been stupid enough to put him in such a spot.

Back in ’03, Dean Hartwell put together a fantastic parody of Question Time with President Bush on his blog. I think this is a great idea. But we should openly acknowledge the fiction of this idea as an “Innovative conservative concept”.