I'm tired of it.

A boy and his father are in a car wreck and are badly injured. Two ambulances arrive and take them to two different hospitals. The boy is wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon walks in, looks at the boy and says "I cannot operate on this boy, for he is my son." How is that possible?

The surgeon is the boy's mother.

Old riddle, I know... but there is a point (aside from sexism in this country). The mother cannot operate because there is a conflict of interest, and it is built into their Code of Ethics. There is no hospital that would let her, even if she wanted to. So why are we letting our politicians introduce, or even vote on bills that involve an industry who gives them campaign funds? I'm speaking of course, about Rep. Lamar Smith. The man that introduced a bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and had it shot down by the millions of internet users. Now, I'm not going to beat a dead horse and explain why this bill was wrong, since I've already done that and the bill was squashed anyway. My question is, why are we letting Rep. Smith introduce a bill that involves the industry that gives him the most campaign contributions?

Doesn't that seem like a conflict of interest?

If a Senator that received the most in campaign funds from Big Oil puts forth a bill that would make electric cars illegal, you wouldn't stand for it, right? Conflict of interest? Absolutely.

Now, Rep. Smith has come back by sponsoring an internet surveillance bill called 'Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011'. While the idea of stopping child pornographers is a grand one, again, the execution of the bill would grant too much control. Please explain to me if I bought something on Amazon.com, why would my internet service provider need to keep record of my credit card information for 12 months? Recording my IP address is no big deal to me personally in a world of ever-revolving IP address, but what purpose does recording my credit card info serve? Keep in mind that all this information (name, IP, credit card info, etc) can currently be attained with a subpoena, but if this bill passes, it will no longer be necessary.

What does Rep. Lamar Smith have against the internet? He either wants to shut it down, or install big brother on every connected device. While it is known that the biggest backers behind SOPA were the MPAA and the RIAA, I can't seem to find the money behind this newest bill. In my opinion, it smells like a heavily altered and misdirected version of SOPA. 'If we can't do that one, then how about this one', kind of thing.

And I'm tired of it. Can we get some people in Washington that aren't corporate whores? Please?