{"id":6764,"date":"2003-04-25T19:21:00","date_gmt":"2003-04-26T00:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/25\/6764\/"},"modified":"2010-07-30T16:30:10","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T21:30:10","slug":"6764","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/25\/6764\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wheels of Legislature, Grinding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since I have started this blog, I have discovered things beyond the ken of normal man.  I have researched into the bowels of the Internet, and I have found shocking, eldritch things.  Such as what government does daily.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, they put it out there in plain sight, on Web sites of the .gov domain, where no one will see it.  How better to hide the time-wasting activities designed to provide legislators with a part-time job to fill the time between fundraisers and elections?<\/p>\n<p>For example, on the Missouri State Senate site, I have learned that our state senate has passed bills for the following <i><b>just on Thursday (April 24, 2003)<\/i><\/b>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.senate.state.mo.us\/03INFO\/bills\/SB202.htm\" target=\"new\">Fire department should get water during emergencies<\/a> wherein, I assume the fire department will be called to put said water on a fire.  This bill seems to specify that the fire departments should get water even if they haven&#8217;t paid their water bills.  I have to wonder if this represents an upcoming budgetary cut.\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.senate.state.mo.us\/03INFO\/bills\/SB207.htm\" target =\"top\">Car rental companies cannot charge more in damages than the replacement value of the car.<\/a>  Seems like a good idea, but it doesn&#8217;t really fit with laissez faire capitalism.  Simple publication of the fact that XYZ rental company will charge you $60,000 for a stolen Hyundai Accent would probably impact XYZ enough to make them reconsider.  More than a $1,000 fine would.  And the fine print type size can be no smaller than <b>10 point<\/b>!\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.senate.state.mo.us\/03INFO\/bills\/SB657.htm\" target=\"top\">Made it a class D Felony<\/a> to photograph or otherwise record an animal research or production facility, and to intentionally and knowingly release a pathogen therein.  So Dan Savage can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indyweek.com\/durham\/2000-02-09\/cover2.html\" target=\"new\">lick Gary Bauer&#8217;s doorknob<\/a> in Iowa, but if he coughs in a Tyson chicken plant in Missouri, he&#8217;s going to <b>jail!<\/b>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.senate.state.mo.us\/03INFO\/bills\/SB651.htm\" target=\"new\">Names the official state grape<\/a>.  Okay, I admit, when it comes time for my weekly report at work, I like to finish a bunch of short things to at least have a number of items in my bulleted list of accomplishments.  Surely the senators feel the same way, as they approved this one liner of a bill.  I won&#8217;t tell you WHAT the state grape is.  You&#8217;ll have to check it out yourself.\n<\/ul>\n<p>I understand passing these things in the state senate is only a third of the tri-partite bicameral-legislature-and-governor-signature system in place here in Missouri, so they&#8217;re not laws yet.<\/p>\n<p>But I have to wonder how important a lot of the legislature&#8217;s business is.  Do we really need a state grape?  Legislation defining, and reglating, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.senate.state.mo.us\/03info\/bills\/sb600.htm\" target=\"top\">professional ultimate fighting<\/a> (no throat hitting allowed)?  How seriously will my state senator vote on these things?  How will he (or she) react to a letter detailing a list of my positions on these issues?<\/p>\n<p>Rightly, I would be labeled a crackpot, but wrongly I expect I would be ignored and\/or sent a form letter based on some weird keyword search\/merge.  But this is what my state representative government does all day, four days a week, all legislative year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I have started this blog, I have discovered things beyond the ken of normal man. I have researched into the bowels of the Internet, and I have found shocking, eldritch things. Such as what government does daily. Of course, they put it out there in plain sight, on Web sites of the .gov domain, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-missouri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6764"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7695,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764\/revisions\/7695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}