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Much more practical: send elected representatives on those trips.

Elected representatives are already visiting Israel.
Destination by Country: Israel

The trips are almost exclusively paid for by Israeli interest/lobbying groups,
so you can imagine that the agenda isn't the most neutral or nuanced.

I propose an open-source decentralized big-data platform for tracking all politicians, their movements, who they talk to, where they've been, they're locations, their correspondence (that's public), their donations, criminal backgrounds, known associations, and everything about them in an easily searchable, index-able manner.

There's a beginning to that here that has made some capitol hill type rather queasy.

Legistorm.com

That'd be Rep. Mel Watt (-NC)
http://www.legistorm.com/person/Stephanie_Y_Moore/18315.html

Mrs. Moore seems to be well educated in the political science of this era and her political outlook seems to be leftward leaning, perhaps a meaningful conversation could be had. If Mrs. Moore needs better information on how the Internet and in particular the FREE internet functions, perhaps some of you /.ers can provide her with the proper instruction. Also for those of you who have the desire to educate Congress, she could be the conduit. (This in no way implies any malicious acts or negative attention for Mrs. Moore.)

Stephanie Y. Moore, Minority Counsel, House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet
(202) 225-3951
Stephanie.Moore@mail.house.gov
LinkedIn Salary includes gifts and such gained via lobbying.

Education: Oberlin 1982 BA; Harvard 1985 JD
Career: Counsel, Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives; Counsel, Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property

She already makes 6 figures a year as a staffer... Here is a summary. She must be running short on cash or gunning for her boss's job.

All those big name news outfits, CBS or FOX or what not, they are in the business of selling ad time. Digging and finding the truth costs money and produces uninteresting information. "Was there a mystery missile? Film at 11" collects eye-balls and sells ads. The amateur on the other hand does not have any incentive to hype the mystery and in fact has an incentive to debunk the myth. So he got it. Way to go.

Wish there are more such amateurs tracking the money and misinformation spread by everyone about politics.

getting a bit offtopic, but, there are such amateur sleuths following the money in politics... check out http://www.opensecrets.org/ and http://www.legistorm.com/

Regardless of the reason, the Shelby blackmailing the passage of legislation isn't unusual. Between 2008 - 2010 he's requested a total of $488,734,050. I have no idea if they were all/any "good" programs (and I have no definition of good. I suppose "good" for his state is different than "good" in the overall picture.) For more info, source is here: legistorm.com

Although it sounds horrible, keeping up with legislation being put forth is more than a full time job.

Which is why, of course, members of Congress each tend to have more than one person assigned to do that job; look at any representative or Senator's staff listing at legistorm or any similar site, and note the number of staffers with titles like "Legislative Director", "Legislative Correspondent", "Legislative Aide", "Legislative Assistant", "Legislative Research Assistant", etc.

High-level decision makers in any field make decisions based on brief decision papers prepared by the analysts working for them, not in-depth personal reading of the details of every proposal.

This kid ain't exactly making the big bucks here:

http://www.legistorm.com/person/Shriber_Todd_J/118 24.html