[hughprime]

The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would get brought to the surface eventually, and at least some of those should get amended away.

[tptacek]

The average SnR on bills on OpenCongress is terrible. Most bills require expertise to really analyze; the people with expertise and the will to apply it are already chiming in on bills. I don't want to sound apathetic, but I'm not convinced about the wonderful powers of public peer review on legislation.

Roger Ebert's blog is amazing, and one of the reasons is that he generates amazingly thoughtful comments. He even managed to do a debate on creationism, in the context of Ben Stein's movie! Here's what happens when he does something overtly political. Note the comments.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/10/the_anger_of_the_fes...

(Something to notice: 1200+ comments later, and he is still responding to comments. The guy is a machine.)