‘Blagojevich’ Not Found on Transition Web Site

In a Politico.com post today, Ben Smith writes about censorship of citizens’ input in a new section launched today on Barack Obama’s Transition Team web site, Change.gov:

President-elect Barack Obama’s Transition today launched “Open for Questions,” a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another’s questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.

It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama’s supporters appear to be using — and abusing — a tool allowing them to “flag” questions as “inappropriate” to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama’s website.

The Blagojevich questions — many of them polite and reasonable — can be found only by searching words in them, like “Blagojevich,” which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site.

Intrigued, I decided to check it out for myself.  After arriving at the site just before 9 p.m. CDT, I typed “Blagojevich” — minus the quotation marks — in the search box and clicked on the search button.  The result, as shown in this screenshot graphic:  “O” results for “Blagojevich.”

So much for transparency in hope-and-change politics.

-- Bob McCarty Writes

UPDATE 12/11/08 8:13 a.m. CDT: Late last night, Politico.com added a list of 7 Blago questions for Obama that are well worth reading.