Every year has its buzzwords, the phrases that people say over and over again that come into the general vernacular that we use in daily life.

One of those buzzwords is “transparency.” The concept: Everyone sees what’s happening. Somewhere, generally on a website or in an office or somewhere, the public can find out what’s being spent by someone on somebody and for what.

It’s like letting everyone see the change in your pocket or the contents of your wallet, and while nobody wants their friends and neighbors or people with an Internet connection to know what’s in his/her wallet, it’s all different when it comes to government.

The transparency fans want virtually everything done by or for or with government to be accessible to everyone. That’s probably not a bad idea. It would be better if all that information was somehow given some context by…hey, how about reporters who work for newspapers which sell subscriptions to people who need some context for just what that transparent information shows, but that’s a different story.

But transparency probably makes sense. We don’t know whether the last time you went to a government office and saw coffee and cinnamon rolls if you would have thought to ask whether the rolls were paid for with your tax dollars or brought in by the guy who wants the contract to service the copying machines…someday, that’s probably going to be on-line. Just in case you care.

But it got a little different last week in the Kansas Legislature, this transparency business.

The House, probably in an extreme demonstration of transparency, did a publicly recorded (that’s rollcall for you insiders) vote on an amendment that would require many special interest groups to report to the state where they get their money for those attractive  ads and postcards that cite some candidate for public office for doing something, well, nice.

The campaign materials don’t specifically say “vote for” someone, or even mention whether the nice thing some candidate did is what the third party group is interested in…just that he/she is nice and ought to be thanked, though not specifically voted for…

That transparency in the House? It told the political organizations who voted for transparency and who didn’t. And it allowed those political organizations to target the transparency fans by lobbying to change their votes to prevent the public reporting of where their campaign money came from. Oh, it worked. The transparency bill was defeated the next day.