#AskObama Twitter town hall ignores flood of marijuana legalization questions

from The Raw Story

Republicans were not the only ones flooding President Barack Obama with questions during his "#AskObama" Twitter town hall; the event also generated a huge response from those opposed to the war on drugs.

Data gathered by TwitSprout showed the most retweeted question for Obama was about the legalization of marijuana.

"Would you consider legalizing marijuana to increase revenue and save tax dollars by freeing up crowded prisons, court rooms?" was retweeted 4911 times, according to the analytics service.

A question about letting the Bush tax cuts expire came in second place, with only 1800 retweets.

Although marijuana legalization was an overwhelmingly popular question with Twitter users, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who moderated the online town hall, focused on questions pertaining to the economy, education and space exploration.

"#AskObama why they will answer Rep. Boehner's question, but won't talk about #CannabisJobs! Legalize it, start a new job creating industry," the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws complained in tweet, which was itself retweeted more than 100 times.

During his YouTube Q&A in January, Obama was asked what his plan was to help alleviate the detrimental effects of America's drug war.

He responded by saying that while he's not in favor of legalization, he did see room for adjusting the drug war to focus less on incarceration and enforcement and more on medical treatment and other forms of interdiction.

The position expressed by President Obama was largely unchanged from 2009, when he told a community driven Q&A that he did not believe legalizing marijuana was a good strategy to grow the economy. He did not, however, crack a joke about the question, calling the debate over drug policy "legitimate."

With prior reporting by Stephen C. Webster

YouTube censors pot questions

Reposted from Toke of the Town

Yes, questions about marijuana were the most popular in the CitizenTube voting Monday afternoon.

But YouTube, in a gutless move, decided at the last minute not to present the highest ranked questions to the President.

Initial reports that the President had ignored the marijuana questions were inaccurate; YouTube took pot, the top vote getter, out of the running.

President Obama never even got an opportunity to answer the most popular question of all.

Wait, what?

"We'll let you vote, but don't expect it to actually MEAN anything"
​ If they were going to ignore the questions that got the most votes, then why, exactly, did YouTube ask viewers to go to the trouble of voting? And why did they go through the motions of counting those votes, if they were good for bupkis, nada, zilch?

Here's a more likely scenario:

YouTube blanched when they saw marijuana had once again proved itself to be a popular, mainstream issue by topping the vote.

So they chunked all the votes, and just picked the questions they would have asked anyway.

It seems obvious now that when YouTube said "We've collected the top questions," they didn't mean the questions viewers thought were tops. They mean the questions they picked to be tops.

"It's unfortunate that YouTube would shelter the President from something that's obviously on a lot of people's minds," said Ben Morris of the Marijuana Policy Project.

As pointed out by Morris, marijuana can no longer be safely regarded as a "fringe issue."

With recent national polls showing legalization approaching majority support, the time when politicians could afford laugh off the marijuana issue is coming to a close.

Last year, when marijuana reform questions topped the "Open For Questions" forum sponsored by the White House, the President did answer them.

Unfortunately, he chose to answer them in a dismissive and condescending manner, as in "what that says about the online audience," and never addressed the substance of the questions.