Grassroots group wants to save Clinton via the Web
ob1...@idt.net
September 25, 1998
Web posted at 11:25 AM EDT
by Maryann Thompson
(IDG) -- A new grassroots organization aims to leverage the Internet
to
ask Congress to "immediately censure President Clinton and move on to
pressing issues facing the country."
"Frankly, we have spent too much time on this already," says Joan
Blades
spokesperson for the new group, called Censure and Move On.
Blades and husband, Wes Boyd, founded the "purely volunteer effort"
and
its site, www.moveon.org, after finding themselves talking to citizens
around the country who felt that their representatives in Congress
were
not listening their desire to move past the Lewinsky incident.
As founders of Berkeley Systems, the team's technical resources
allowed
them to get the site up and running in just 3 days. Though the site
gathered only 500 names in the first 24 hours following its launch
yesterday morning, it received another 500 in the next three hours
alone.
"I'm hoping for a million, but a hundred thousand would make me
happy,"
says Blades.
But the volunteers at Move On have their work cut out for them. A
quick
search on Yahoo turns up no sites for "censure Clinton" but 20 sites
for
"impeach Clinton."
"We just delivered 60,000 petitions to Henry Hyde's office today,"
says
Scott Lauf, executive director of the Clinton Investigative Commission
and operator of the www.impeachclinton.org Web site.
Lauf's site, which launched in January 1997, also collects signatures
for its cause and has received over one million hits during the past 2
to 3 weeks alone.
"There's a lot of people frustrated at the mainstream news," says
Lauf.
"The Internet has serves as a secondary medium for people to express
themselves."
Carol