Wow. - Just

it is true, do you homework, nm - miller

BTW, look up Monsanto Protection Act, most of their stuff is GMO.nm - miller

Wow - Roseanne

the gullibility has run amok - Roseanne

Obama signs Monsanto Protection Act... see link - miller

The whole government is involved - Empirelady

Amen. If you have Netflix, watch a show called House of Cards, sm - miller

Netflix is another company that forces you to - sm

not the poster you responded to... - sm

I totally agree with you regarding the difference. - sm

Obama signs - Roseanne

.....only if he takes Obama with him. - Both guilty as sin.

Blunt needs to go AND policy rider reform is needed. - sm

Some may remember me posting this before; pardon the redundancy, but I think it bears repeating. 

Policy Riders: Bringing Transparency to a Shadowy Legislative Process

 5/30/2012

Schoolhouse Rock was only partly correct: getting a bill through Congress is just one way to turn proposals into law. Another way to write your policy demands into law is to hide them in the funding bills Congress passes every year to keep the government running. These “policy riders” in appropriations bills are temporary, but they establish new policies just like normal laws. Their use effectively shuts the public out of important policy discussions, and they undermine the openness of the legislative process. To remedy this practice, Congress can take some lessons learned from its reforms of the earmarking process.   ....

....  Banning riders outright is not a practical solution, since in certain limited circumstances, they are an appropriate tool for Congress to use to guide agency actions. However, increasing transparency could mitigate policy rider abuse, as those inside and outside of Congress would have a greater opportunity to track and understand their implications.

Before it forswore earmarks in the current session, Congress made a concerted effort to bring this hidden aspect of appropriations bills into the light. Several of the steps Congress took to make earmarks more visible to the public could also be used for policy riders.

The most important reform would be to create a central list of all the riders in a bill, as both House and Senate rules required for earmarks. This list should be created by the Appropriations Committee staff and be made available to the public in advance of any vote on an appropriations bill, either in committee or on the floor of either house. The list should be more than a simple enumeration of riders; it should include a section describing the purpose and intent of each provision. Forcing members of Congress to clearly spell out the anticipated impact of their proposed riders would help the public understand just what their representatives are voting on and would bring a great deal of transparency to riders.

Additionally, the list of riders should be made machine-readable, which would facilitate rapid distribution of the list to citizens and interested parties via the web. Making the list available in THOMAS, the legislative database where many people inside and outside of Congress get information on bills, would also help raise awareness of the policy changes contained in riders.

Moreover, the riders should be highlighted in the text of the bills themselves. Currently, riders are often buried deep within the text of appropriations bills, which can stretch hundreds of pages, and if users do not know about the full list, they would find it difficult to find the hidden riders in the legislation. Having some kind of flag for these riders would help make them easier to spot and identify. Also, flagging the riders allows users to understand the provisions in context and draws attention to issues or programs that might have an unusual number of riders targeted at them, something a simple list of riders might not help with.

Forcing Congress to highlight and list all of the policy riders in its appropriations bills will not stop harmful or controversial riders from ever passing. But the steps detailed above will ensure policy changes are not slipped into massive bills without the public or legislators fully understanding their implications, and these reforms will bring transparency to this shadowy corner of congressional policymaking.

http://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/12087

great - sm

I feel the same way, Roseanne - Empirelady

EmpireLady - Roseanne

We are not alone.  I actually had a good chat with a lady at the bank the other day about Monsanto/GMO, someone I never thought would be the least bit interested . . .

We decided to just drink beer and eat the styrofoam coolers

Vermont just passed a law that all genetically...sm - VTMT

Go Vermont! Huge thumbs up! (NM) - Empirelady

Ditto Go Vermont - Roseanne

I wish all states had VT's backbone - good going, Vermont

Without diving into pros and cons of GM plants - (which I don't really know much about)

It's getting there - Empirelady

"What kind of purely evil mind..." - sm

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It is INDEED a r/d thing. - sm

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I hope Obama didn't sign it into law because - sm