Acronyms, Acronyms and More Acronyms

I've come to realize that, for whatever reason, I'm particularly interested in minutiae as it relates to "politics." I like to study the charts that congresspersons use as props when making floor speeches and search through legislation archives looking for bills that pertain to what are, frankly, ridiculous things (like the duties on certain types of pasta products or, one of my personal favorites, improving the management of wild free-roaming horses and burros). I think perhaps I feel that so many other people out there are thinking and writing about the "bigger" political picture (not that this isn't a really good thing), that there have to be some others who are interested in the smaller things. In this vein, there is a particularly minutial issue (indeed, I don't think I should really call it an "issue" at all) that has continued to annoy me for quite a while now--the widespread practice of using rather ridiculous acronyms in the titles of official pieces of legislation.

Here are some examples of some of these acronyms (from the current Congress), but there are COUNTLESS others (I'd be curious actually to see the results of an analysis of legislation from, say, the last 5 Congresses as to the percentage of bills that use acronyms in the title):

H.R. 3379: LOPSIDED Oil Prices Act of 2009 (Lowering Oil Speculation for Infrastructure Dedicated to Economic Development)

S. 1588: STOP Act (Stop Tax-breaks for Oil Profiteering Act)

H.R. 3295: RISE Act of 2009 (Removing Impediments to Students Education)

H.R. 3168: U.S. OUTDOOR Act (United States Optimal Use of Trade to Develop Outerwear and Outdoor Recreation)

H.R. 3222: AWARE Act (Adolescent Web Awareness Requires Education)

H.R. 2932: Stop VULTURE Funds Act (Stop Very Unscrupulous Loan Transfers from Underprivileged countries to Rich, Exploitive Funds)

H.R. 2681: P.R.O.U.D. Act (People Resolved to Obtain an Understanding of Democracy)

H.R. 3583: ASPIRE Act (American Samoa Protection of Industry, Resources, and Employment)

H.R. 3577: EARNED Act of 2009 (Education Assistance to Realign New Eligibilities for Dependents)

I could keep going forever, but I'm sure you get the picture. It's quite likely that I'm just odd, but I honestly find this horribly annoying. It very nearly makes me shudder to think of how much taxpayer-funded work/time went into JUST coming up with these immensely clever (sarcasm) bill titles. I think this is the reason why I'm so interested in digging around to find such seemingly trivial political "issues" -- it annoys the hell out of me to think of all the time spent by our congresspeople (perhaps not directly but via their staffers for certain), and also taxpayer dollars, on such stupid things at a time when there are certainly many gravely significant problems facing our country. So, yeah, it really does bother me that surely a reasonably significant amount of time and effort was put into figuring out how to create a bill title that fit the purpose of the bill and, more importantly, fit to the acronym LOPSIDED (because it's obvious that the acronym came before the actual title). I can't help but think that the time, effort and even creativity spent coming up with these titles could be put to much, much better use...although, at the same time I think I'm probably giving these bill writers too much credit. If I were in Congress, I think I would introduce a bill called the STUPID Act or something like that...it really doesn't matter that I don't know now what it stands for; I'll just leave that to my staffers to figure out.