Mailbox

Hi, I wanted to share some of the recent comments and email and feedback I've received from people. I have one long one I'll start with, but what he says is well after going through a lot of information, he basically says, "I don't think people have it together well enough to be able to create a decent law." And my response to that is he's absolutely right. It takes a village to change a law. So the idea is you're not doing this alone, you're doing it with lots of other people in a crowd sourced way and you create a framework, just a couple of ideas about what you want to get done. And then other people contribute or if you see other people who have laws then, or ideas for things or debates or campaigns, then you can make comments on them in the arguments or comments section. So thanks for that. And then let's just take a look at the next one. This one says, "John, old buddy, you are beginning to sound a little like a libertarian." And that's in response to, is this a crazy idea? Someone else writes, oh, I like this. Very good.

My favorite. Anyone who would believe a word...

I'm trying to think. Oh yeah. This is regarding the top five issues. So if you saw that post, anyone who believes a word coming from the Soros Open group is an effing idiot.

Thanks for that.

Another one. How do you get politicians to do what you want? And in response I have. Oh, pleasure to watch on point applies broadly to any attempt to change minds and behaviors. So we have some agreement on that one. On the petitions suck one, we have John, I politely disagree. Petitions are guaranteed and enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States constitution. So...

I know that, but I'm thinking about petitions that you sign at the market where you really don't even know what you're signing and the people are paid to collect your signature and then do something versus the idea behind what a petition was 200 years ago. But then he continues and he says, but marched on the other hand, including crossing the Delaware to fight back the British. Those definitely suck. And then this one regarding is this a crazy idea and this is the idea of can you crowd source information that goes back to the very first one, you know, are people capable of coming up with laws and figuring this out? And he says, I am not at all interested. This is a totally dumb idea. Well, it's interesting because it is a dumb idea, but there is a senator in California and they've been doing this for the last 10 years to eliciting feedback and input from their constituents.

And over the course of 10 years they've actually had citizens come forward and change laws. The contest is called, there ought to be a law and it actually has now grown and been picked up not only by other senators and assembly people in California, but by a handful of folks in Pennsylvania as well. And I've used this example before. The far range is we have an 86 year old man who actually has two bills in congress now, Chet Campanella. I've talked about him and in my book there ought to be a law, Page Flinchbaugh wrote an essay that was part of this contest in Senator Ryan Aument's district in Pennsylvania and she actually got a state law passed as well. So this is a totally dumb idea. Yeah. For some people it is a totally dumb idea, but remember, you don't have to do it alone.

You only need to have a single idea about the broad thing you want to get done and then you move forward and if you have input from other people, you can do it because in reality, are you going to get better input from more people who are more informed who have boots on the ground or just the lawmakers who come up with the ideas based on a few narrow special interests? So the idea is really simply to broaden the dialogue, open up the conversation, have more people participate and realize it could be difficult, but the more people that participate, hopefully the easier it'll become. So those are my comments. This is the mail for this week. If you want to write, feel free to leave comments below or you can, just reply to the email, but it's preferable if you leave comments on the blog because that way other people can see them too, give you feedback and we can go forward from there. So hopefully this has been helpful and thanks for watching. This is John Thibault with iLobby. And remember it does take a village to write a law.