Alright, some business travel and an office move got me off track on my blogging efforts, but I’m back now and committed to getting posts done on a much more frequent and regular basis.
It took the government to inspire me to get back to writing.
Going through a bunch of old articles and blog posts I had saved for review, I noticed this article that did not appear to get much coverage at all, but I really think it deserves more attention: Finding Fault With Logic of Congress’s E-Mail Plan.
In a nutshell, some representatives are now adding a challenge-response question as a required step before you can send an email to them.
"Lawmakers still bellyache that the torrent of e-mails they get every day is more than their staffs can handle" and "the new barrier is a good way to block millions of cookie-cutter lobby letters " are the types of justifications being made for this step. However, if I sign my name to an email that expresses my feelings on an issue, I do not want my elected government representative to ignore my voice just because I decided to send it via an organization I support or because they feel like they are overloaded with email – join the rest of us, most of whom don’t have staffs to go through the emails first!
Perhaps I’m being overly idealistic here, but I sure would like to see government officials invest in ways to actually intelligently deal with incoming communications from their constituencies as opposed to just trying to turn off the switch.