While We Were Busy

     It seems that while most of us were busy living an active life the political folks on the Right have been busy stealing our future.

     They have been developing a two word culture that has very little real logic behind it if you are looking at the world through the eyes of having your needs fulfilled and being comfortable.  In fact, the recent “debate” in Washington D.C. about the debt ceiling makes this suddenly plain as day.  It has also been a lot like running naked through a shit storm… no part of you is going to smell like roses.

     In a recent batch facebook exchanges I was made to realize just how far gone logic has become through this two word culture wrap.  It is easy now for guys like Rush Limbaugh to tweak heads with just the mention of a “two worder” that is code for a longer idea that is floating in a detached logic field.  It turns out that when legislation is introduced these days the titles are often misdirection of the worst sort.  There will be examples given in another entry.  For now let us just say that it always takes careful reading of a bill to discern what the true intent of it would be.  That seems to be the missing piece since very few people have the time or energy any more to be informed at that level.  Even after reading the bill it likely takes some research to put a proposed bill in a historical context and follow the ideas that led to someone proposing it.  Who has time like that in this sped up world we live in?  Well, it turns out that there are a select few who can take that sort of time… lobbyists.  That is not an average sort of person.  That is a person paid to take up the effort of supporting a bill with “facts” to move it through the legislative process or kill a bill that those who pay the lobbyists.  So, there is a link of money to almost every bill that gets proposed.

     The folks with the money have, for years, been busy creating institutes to create the misleading wording of bills and titles of bills.  There is a group, ALEC, which brings mostly Republican (or Tea Party) Representatives and Senators, at both state and federal levels, together to show them fully formed, pre-written, legislation that the Representative or Senator can introduce… as is!  This is a secondary level of the link between the money and the ultimately submitted legislation.

     The other side of this is that when a misleading bill is found out it is easier to kill than to pass it.