5
Nope.
Will President Obama's stormtroopers pound on your door in the middle of the night and insist that you have an RFID chip implanted in your hand under penalty of death? Some people would have you believe so. This has been a persistent rumor for hundreds of years, thanks to some particularly lurid and bizarre bits in the Book of Revelation. Most recently, a government bill titled HR3200 has been the focus of the intersecting sets of paranoid conspiracy theorists, Biblical literalists, and ultra-Libertarian survivalist fanatics. However, there are two things that these groups overlook, in their overheated panic at the thought of having a government mandated hand chip linked to their bank accounts.
The first thing is, THIS BILL IS OBSOLETE.
It's dead, Jim. It's not pining for the fjords. It has long since been superseded by two other bills. In the House, H3962, the "Affordable Health Care for America Act." And in the Senate, H3590, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." And guess what? Neither of these bills requires that citizens be imprinted with the digital Mark of the Beast.
The second thing is, pretty much anyone can add anything to a bill as it winds its way through the House. And there are a lot of reasons why they might do so. This is where the phrase "pork barrel politics" comes into play.
Let's say someone proposes a bill whereby kittens shall be granted "Super Cute Forever" status. No one would argue with that, right? So I'll just tack on some fine print about how "Also, Erika shall receive a $50,000 grant to study the adorableness of kittens." The guy to my left adds on a rider that "$4 million shall be allocated to the state of Oregon for highway repairs."
Meanwhile, the person at the far end of the aisle is getting annoyed at this. Seeing this perfectly innocent bill getting weighed down with all these pet projects, she decides to ensure that the bill fails. She adds an amendment that "All women who become pregnant in the month of January shall receive mandatory abortions and forced sterilization." Obviously that's a deal-killer. And so the bill is dead.
Is that what happened to HR3200? I honestly don't know. But I have my suspicions. How better to attempt to scuttle Obama's promised health care reform bill, than by playing to the fears of the right-wing Christians in the audience?
In other words, with this bill, consider yourself trolled. And remember, it's dead anyway, so it doesn't really matter!
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