Yesterday the White House sent me its promised response to my letter. (See Friday, July 18, 2003 entry in the archive.)

Recall that I noted the new White House webmail system requires conformity to a series of menus that control the topics discussed. I identified my letter as "supportive" of the president because I felt admonishing him about his lying is as supportive as one can get. It is quite biblical, in fact. (See Chapter 18 of the Book of Matthew.) Since there was no topic about lying in office, I chose "Prayer in Schools" because it was the closest thing I could find relevant to what I wanted discuss with W.

As I suspected, the use of the menus allows an automated response and, no doubt, creates a data bank that has noted me as contacting the White House to support W's stance on prayer in schools. That was confirmed by the letter I received.

What is scary is that the response also controls what I can do with the message. The pdf file is scrubbed of all tools and when I open the file in Acrobat, it remains "untouchable." As a result, I couldn't copy and paste it here for you to read in html. This necessitates that I post it on my page, and make a link to it, but you won't be able to do any more than use my link.

So, I learned that that the White House now spurns all messages that are not received via the "convenient" webmail system. If you haven't read my entry for July 18, stop now and take a guess at the URL for the system. If you guessed something like webmail.whitehouse.gov (a seemingly likely address) guess again. No, don't bother, here it is:
https://sawho14.eop.gov/PERSdata/intro.htm Is it close to your first guess? Such an inuitive address clearly shows the desire of the Bush administration to really hear the people.

Take a look at the webmail system, but if you want your message to have a chance of being seen by a human being, send it by snail mail (President Bush, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20502) or fax (202-456-2461).
to our compassionate president. The man of the people. Boo yeah!!!