Tom Toles for April 17, 2015

There should be campaign reform and take money clean out of the picture!Of course all those rich politicians would howl about that.

It’s still astonishing how comfortable Republicans/Fox “news” viewers are with having big donors pick their candidates for them. Not just at the Federal level, but also the state level, and many county and local levels.

Sure. If those are the rules you have to play by, then you play harder and better. But that doesn’t make the rules right. And that doesn’t make the people who want to change the rule hypocrites. It’s a rigged system that needs to change. Get private funding out of it entirely.

By the way, show your documentation for this…otherwise, those “stats” you toss out are meaningless and probably lies.

Hmmmmm, where you getting your data?

Uh huh. And the right wing is comprised of unicorns and rainbows. Nope no cash is speech problem there. Nope. None. It’s all the fault of the democrats. Uh huh. Right. Got it.

Clearly both sides are hypocrites when it comes to money. Clearly the likes of the Koch brothers are a really bad thing. We need to change that..

Meanwhile, a man with a “Tax the 1%” sign sets himself on fire (fatally) at the DC Mall, and nobody much seems to care:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/13/1377534/—Tax-The-1-Political-Statements-by-Suicide-in-DC-Shall-Not-Go-Down-the-Memory-Hole

OK, I looked at your opensecrets link. It’s for organizations, not people. The #2 group, Actblue, gets donations from many people. The #1 group is basically Tom Steyer; who is he buying? Well, of $75 million , about $35 thousand went to individual candidates. All the rest went to organizations. And of course, there’s the masses of dark money that I doubt even opensecrets can get at.Thanks. You’ve helped me confirm that it is, in fact, the superrich Republicans who are most active at buying politicians.

Calling a PAC a “social welfare organization” doesn’t make it a social welfare organization any more than calling a dog’s tail a leg makes it a leg, as Abe Lincoln reminds us. (Can you imagine how much contempt he would have for the legalized bribery running rampant these days?)

vfwiffo, I’m not sure quite what your position is here.

I get that you’re claiming that Democrats benefit more from secret donations than Republicans. And because of the secrecy, it’s pretty difficult to prove/disprove.

But does this mean that you believe that secret money in these amounts (Billions, nowadays) is perfectly OK with you? And you’re defending it as a perfectly legitimate driver of elections?

The Open Secrets refers to EMPLOYEES of organizations and the totals from those organizations. That represents a LARGE number of people having a voice.INDIVIDUAL and corporate donors like the Koch brothers give far more and try to hide as much of it as possible.

The Post link didn’t work.

“The Best Congress that Money Can Buy”

Getting money out of politics is the meta-issue of our time, because it prevents progress on any other issue. Desmond Morris in his book Collapse notes that a major factor in the collapse of civilizations is when the wealthy elites start serving themselves, instead of doing what’s best for the whole society.