On the way in to work this morning I heard something interesting on talk radio. They were talking about an editorial in a local newspaper, the Coloradoan, about local businesses contributing to local elections. The editorial equated it to "buying elections". But the same editorial writer has no problem with billionaires contributing to local campaigns, calling it a "grass roots" effort.
Now, perhaps I'm just incurably ignorant, but I thought that "grass roots" campaigning was an effort started by multiple private individuals, not big monied lobbyists. Are they diluting the meaning of grass roots to mean something totally opposite of what it actually means, or did I just not understand the term?
And it doesn't seem right anyway for an editorialist to be talking of boycotting local businesses for contributing, within the law, to local elections, but embrace big multinational firms for doing the same.