Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for January 21, 2021

Well I didn’t win the powerball last night, still have chance with the mega on Friday. If I win, I’m going to buy myself my very own Senator.

Allegedly, Trump’s associates were offering clients the opportunity to lobby for presidential pardons at up to $2 million.

What I found more interesting was that some Republican congressmen (and perhaps senators) were asking for a preemptive pardon protecting them from any charges due to the Capitol terroristic invasion.

Thanks Bill Clinton!

For you kids out there reading this strip and scratching your heads, those two guys in the last panel are Senator Robert “Bob” Dole of Kansas on the left and President Bill Clinton on the right. They were the opposing candidates in the 1996 presidential election, which Clinton won.

“As the differences between the parties disappears, and they both offer essentially the same political philosophy”… quite the prediction!

1996. Dole and Clinton certainly were more alike than cands now. Dems pulled toward Center and Pubs rewarded everyone by giving us 45.

Love the Crazy Eddie reference … “We must be InSaNe!!!”

All politicians basically work for their own reelection. They may sincerely believe that their being in a position of power helps people they care about, or they may be simply interested in keeping the job. The result is the same. You just need informed voters so the ones who are interested in helping you stay and the corporate stooges can go get a job with their contributors. If you really want to know who a candidate will be working for, look at a site called “Open Secrets”. There are others, but this is a good one. It will tell you who is financing their campaign.

We all have to do the bidding of who ever is supplying the money to pay our bills. So do politicians. If most of their money is coming from individuals, unions, or other organizations representing the Middle Class, that is who they are going to work for. If most of their money is from banks, etc, they are going to work for the 1%. They don’t really have any choice if they want to win the next election. To vote their conscience against the 1% would be political suicide

In panel four, I can totally see Rudy “Tooty” (complete with sweaty dark goo dripping down his face) saying this.

Trump streamlined this process through the front desks at his properties.

Trump is still selling pardons – at great deals now!

Hotelling’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law#Political_Science), although there are always confounding factors, like demagoguery, that can mess it up.

“Our cities become uneconomically large and the business districts within them are too concentrated. Methodist and Presbyterian churches are too much alike; cider is too homogeneous.” -Harold Hotelling https://web.archive.org/web/20160221155849/http://people.bath.ac.uk/ecsjgs/Teaching/Industrial%20Organisation/Papers/Hotelling%20%20Stability%20in%20Competition.pdf (that’s all one big URL, complete with multiple http)

This is just so very prescient (consider that the strips are set up weeks in advance), in light of the yuuuge pile of outgoing pardons yesterday.

Best government money can buy. Now, for a limited time, prices slashed.

Some things never change.

“We must be insane!!” says it all.

I didn’t like a lot about Clinton, but compare him to Regan and compare him to W. Bush. No, they are not all the same.