lobbyists

Corrupt legislators Isadore Hall and Henry Perea from the juice committee joined lobbyist Dennis Loper at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. Who picked up the tab?A few years ago Democrats in the California state legislature, the Sacramento Democratic establishment and the state's labor bosses were incredibly eager to get rid of the worst state senator among them, corrupt conservative San Diego Democrat Juan Vargas. So they backed his bid for an open congressional seat!

Big Oil and the bipartisan pack of corrupt state legislators their lobbyists buy at bargain prices freaked out over the climate-change legislation that was barreling through the California legislature. Democrats hold 52 seats in the Assembly; Republicans have 28. When lobbyists can bribe enough Democrats to vote with the Republicans, guess what happens?

This week Hart Research released polling on how millennials in battleground states feel about the climate-change debate. Short version: Bye-bye, Ron Johnson, Rob Portman and Pat Toomey. "[T]oday’s Millennials accept the established science around climate change and see it as a serious problem and a threat."

Hercules starting to clean a 1,000-cattle stable that hadn't been emptied in 30 years. Like the U.S. government, says Gary Hart.

"They talked a lot about the benefits, and how much they were going to invest in Time Warner Cable and improve the service it provided, but every time you talked about industry consolidation and the incentive they would have to leverage their market power to hurt competition, they gave us unsatisfactory answers."-- an unnamed senior Senate staff aide, quoted by the NYT's Eric Lipton regarding Comcast's massive lobbying efforts for its takeover of Time Warner Cable"No amount of publi

Yesterday, Justin Amash celebrated Ronald Reagan's birthday with a tweet quoting his hero: "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism." Far be it from me to lionize the right right-wing icon, but on the occasion of his 104th birthday, I found a not completely unrelated celebratory quote (above) from 1985. It could have come from a Barack Obama speech as easily as from a Ronald Reagan speech-- or, even more likely-- from a Bernie Sanders speech.

If our children still studied Civics, Ken Silverstein's book would be a perfect textEarlier today, we looked at how Wall Street banksters and their lobbyists have bought off the entire Republican Party and the influential Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the New Dems and Blue Dogs.

The first thing this morning, we tried, once again, dealing with the nature of conservatism and its historical demands for austerity. Thursday the NY Times came at it from another perspective-- a secretly taped speech by Dr. Evil, Rick Berman, an opportunistic union-busting fanatic and a vicious operative for the worst of the one percent.

Since first being elected to Congress in 2000, Eric Cantor has raised $32,386,930 and spent $30,889,639 on his reelection bids-- and on building power for himself inside the GOP caucus. He spent $5,794,611 in the current cycle, significantly more than the $392,316 his primary opponent no one had ever heard of spent. Eric Cantor, on the night he lost his primary election to Dave Brat addressed his supporters at what everyone assumed would be a victory party: "I believe in this country," he declared.

I was head over heals about Barack Obama in 2003 when he was an Illinois state Senator and I helped put on one of his first Los Angeles fundraisers when he ran for the U.S. Senate. He was in 4th place in the Democratic primary when I wrote my first check to his campaign. When I heard him speak in person, I wrote a bigger check. And then he was elected to the Senate. By the time he ran for president, I knew he wasn't what I thought he was. I had watched him carefully in the Senate and I didn't vote for him in the 2008 primary.