US Senate & House Create YouTube Channels 199
eldavojohn writes "Following an election in which online videos played an important role, the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate have opened YouTube channels (or 'hubs') advertised to be a 'backstage pass to your government.' Ideally this will bring transparency to citizens and inform them of their senators' & representatives' positions and ideas."
Re:oh goodie (Score:5, Interesting)
Even more unfortunate is that I cannot download these videos, at least not without violating the TOS, and so I cannot store my own copies of those proceedings.
Re:oh goodie (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Why hasn't anyone posted Pelosi's video? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:oh goodie (Score:2, Interesting)
What I believe would be a good idea would be a mandatory maximum lifetime for any law. Say 10 years max. After that, if they are not reinstated, they fall away. Problem being is nobody would agree on a lifetime, nor would that want to let any not that important laws go away. Spending too much time keeping up with all the laws etc when it should be getting easier.
Re:oh goodie (Score:4, Interesting)
The first improvement would be removing the "Write the tax code by hand" requirement.
Why? Maybe it would give them an idea of just how ridicious the tax code really is. According to this [usnews.com] the Federal tax code consists of 3.7 million words. By contrast, all seven Harry Potter novels [answers.com] only clock in at around 1.1 million words.
What's wrong with that picture? It really requires that much complexity to fund the Federal Government?
How to get the tax code rewritten (Score:2, Interesting)
1. No more withholding. Everyone has to pay their full taxes to the IRS by check or plastic.
2. Change the tax due date from April 15th to the first Monday in November.
Re:oh goodie (Score:1, Interesting)
How about forcing them to actually pay attention to the vote? Last time I watched c-span half the people were standing around talking to each other, while the voting was on-going.
It is like once your vote is placed you are free to hang-out with your friends. They don't even seem to care which way the vote goes.
Re:Why hasn't anyone posted Pelosi's video? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah ... I saw a link to it in one of the earlier posts and I have to ask two things:
1) Is anyone else cheesed that she feels this is a useful use of her time to reach the public?
2) Did they actually get the rights to the song/video, or are they infringing on its copyright?
Re:oh goodie (Score:3, Interesting)
Wasn't it a few years ago that some lady senator got into a fight with a guard and started hitting him? I think it caused her not to get re-elected.
Stuff like that would be fun to have on Youtube...