Obama's Change.gov Site Undergoes Severe Scrubbing; $40/Hr. College Service Plan Remains at Another Page

November 9th, 2008 11:42 AM

Well, this is change you can really see.

Yesterday, verbiage at the "Service" Section of Barack Obama's Change.gov site (specifically the URL "http://change.gov/agenda/service/") served as source material for yesterday's post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) entitled "Obama’s 'Service in College' Program at Change.gov Promises $40 an Hour."

The page was entitled "Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan for Universal Voluntary Public Service." It contained "Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan," whose major sections included "Enable All Americans to Serve to Meet the Nation's Challenges," "Integrate Service into Learning," and "Invest in the Nonprofit Sector."

The detail of the second section (saved here at web host yesterday for fair use and discussion purposes) included this requirement (red underlining is mine):

ObamaChangeDotGov4000for100on110808

Now the page looks like this (HTs to a couple of NB e-mailers):

ObamaChangeDotGovEmpty110908.jpg

The 40-hour requirement can now be found here at a highly stripped-down version of the  "America Serves" page. Its entire content is as follows:

ObamaChangeDotGovAmericaServes110908.jpg

The $40 an hour referred to yesterday remains ($4,000 refund divided by 100 hours of service) and generally but not completely less coercive language. It appears that Obama, by "setting a goal" (usually when people set a goal, they intend to achieve it), wants all middle and high school students to get with the program for free.

Apparently, site reconstruction continues. An attempt to get to Change.gov's overall Agenda page just returned this result:

ChangeDotGovAgendaNoSuitableNode110908

True that.

It's barely worth mentioning, because it's so obvious, that if a GOP president-elect were engaging in this kind of scrubbing, it would be getting saturation Old Media coverage.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.