From the White House Briefing Book:

As a closing act for the Transition, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett requested that the Office of Public Liaison create a process by which Americans outside of Washington could come together to present ideas directly to the President – a “Citizen’s Briefing Book.”

The idea was to use the Transition website, change.gov, to create a grassroots version of the research binders that presidents receive every day. But instead of advice from top government officials, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is composed of ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov.

125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area. You can tell how popular each idea was by looking at the number next to it – it represents how many people voted for the idea, with 10 points awarded for each positive vote.

So how'd that work out for the "enthusiastic public"?

Hello, and thank you to all the members of the members of the Mighty Corrente Building for allowing me to stop by.   Read more…

I can't imagine why this would be so:

Marijuana is the top cash crop in the US, a report released on Monday says.

It says that despite intensive eradication plans, $35bn (£18bn) worth of the illegal drug is produced a year - more than corn and wheat combined.

The study was prepared by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst who advocates reform of US marijuana laws.

Using government reports, Mr Gettman estimates that 10,000 metric tons of marijuana are produced annually in the country.

So, why can't the Republicans let "the magic of the marketplace" do its work, and stop throwing all these hard-working entrepreneurs in jail?

I can still remember the change. Right after the election of 2000, there was a new barrage of ass, oops I mean ads, proclaiming pot to be "more dangerous than we thought" and other sundry bullshit. News flash: pot makes you lazy, relaxed, calm and generally not interested in any crime greater than calling the local pizza place twice in one 24hr period. Bush directed his drug enforcers to crack down on pot, over other more serious drugs, early on in his administration. Here are the results:

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report released today, marijuana arrests reached an all-time high in 2005 -- 42.5% of all drug arrests were for pot. Pot arrests have doubled since the 1990's.