Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 20, 2014

Rich people have earned the right to rule over the rest of us. After all, they are rich so they must be smarter than us.In fact, the number votes a person has should be determined by how much taxes that person pays.-http://time.com/8466/tom-perkins-taxes/-It is obvious, that a semi-literate steroid using baseball player should have more votes than, say, a science teacher. That votes of a banker or stock broker should have more worth than that of a firefighter or a nurse.As for the retired, disabled, or college students, they should be disenfranchised unless they are paying taxes. They have either not contributed to society or have stopped contributing.

Oh, Mike…MIKE….

But there’s trillions and trillions of dollars in taxes I haven’t paid.

OOH! BURRRN. =)

Money spent is money gone.Interesting unions took spending limits to court so they could spend more money to put favored candidates in office. Now we are upset others can compete..If our side had more money, we would be happy with the situation. Since we don’t, we decide it is unfair. We equate money spent with votes and power, forgetting voters can decide — often against those who spend, often for things unrelated to money.

OK. I did the math. 2 divided by 310 million is actually 0.00000065%

mike reads a newspaper, kim reads a … whateverthehell that thing is…

Princeton University recently did a study of the laws passed over the past fifty years or so, compared with the will of the majority (as measured by polls of the time) vs the will of the very rich minority. It showed that A) the will of the very rich has increasingly been that which is heeded, B) for the past couple of decades, it is pretty much only the desires of the very rich which are made into law, especially laws which affect ability to control money and power, and C) by definition, we now live in an oligarchy.

American capitalism looking puzzled at its own Frankenstein creation

The billions being spent by ‘job creators’ of both slants to get their preferred candidates elected to state and national office is money not spent to create jobs that last. Granted that the money is creating jobs at convention centers and hotels where people meet to strategize and network with one another. Money also helps keep printing companies busy during election cycles as well as advertising dollars on television and radio stations, but these are ‘seasonal’ jobs, like Christmas and Thanksgiving and when very few permanent positions remain after the elections.Then there’s the ‘understanding’ between donor and recipient that some form of gratitude must be conveyed for the largesse granted.We already see where money has caused the news channels to become biased and unable, if not unwilling, to cover stories with the same conviction and ethic for which people like Cronkite, Brinkley, Morrow, and others were famous. And our parties have become a self serving oligarchy whose only real goal is to keep their most senior members in office without anything but lip service to their oaths of office.The American people deserve better, and America deserves citizens who are willing to actually take the time to be part of the machine that chooses and nominates candidates so that the news media and rich men’s dollars don’t do it for us.Respectfully,C.

@Night-Gaunt49It used to be that sarcasm was fairly well recognized, but these days almost anything, no matter how whacky, sounds like something a politician might have actually said.

Who was sarcastic? Some people really believe in the Koch brothers and their lies, and they aren’t even billionaires. Others were just paid off by them. So they are stuck, as in stooping pretty low…

…and the left has George Soros, and HIS money.

My favorite lines from Shakespeare, certainly apropos:

“Care for us! True, indeed !

They ne’er cared for us yet; suffer us to famish and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us."

From Coriolanus

Yes, it does.

Hey, you guys. Quit arguing. As a strip, it was set up well, making the punch line that much funnier. Lighten up, already!

The Left fears economic power yet trusts constantly growing political power. They think a man with a billion dollars can somehow violate their rights but they ignore the thousands of ways unfettered government violates rights. Of course, they can believe these things because in their fantasies they are the ones in charge, giving the orders, telling others how to live … or else.

“a man with a billion” (make that $100B) = unfettered government.

“Of course this is a democracy—I can vote for any rich man I want!”

wonder what will happen when the koch brothers die?

Well, Union bosses and Soros and Big Medicine and Hollywood are happy with he decision. They buy votes and elections too.

Since every adult gets one vote they should likewise be allowed to donate one dollar to the one candidate of their choice.

Our elected officials are the best money can buy soback off.

Didn’t we already do this in the Gilded Age? We need another Theodore Roosevelt.

Interesting fact: 85% of self-financed wealthy candidates lose. Because it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you can’t convince other people to join you.

@Al S.To whom are you referring when you say, “I see there are those that don’t recognize sarcasm.”The first post by LWP is clearly meant to be a continuation of the point that GT is trying to make, and tongue-in-cheek itself.

https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-and-citizens-united

The money donated to political campaigns is used to try to influence voters. But it is illegal to “buy” votes directly, so I am offering my vote to be “influenced”. For example, a local city council person could get me to come and hear them give a campaign speech if they also served a complementary first class buffet and open bar at the event. The investment stakes are higher as the power of the political office gets higher. A candidate for state representative could have me hand out campaign flyers if it involved accommodations for my wife and I for a weekend at a luxury resort. For president of the USA? Hmmm, make me an offer.As with any political donation to politics, there is no direct quid-pro-quo allowed. The politician would just have to trust me when I went into the voting booth to vote privately.

These financial benefits to me during the campaign should offset the costs to me that the elected candidate causes after in office; higher taxes or higher cost of living to buy the products made by the corporations that donated large amounts to get favorable legislation passed.

Yes, it is all about money. Even “principles” are influenced by money. We the people (and the corporations) are all looking out for our financial well-being.

Money =/= speech. Money = power.

@TiggerMichael Dell is a Republican. Only entertainers that are worth more than a billion are Winfrey and Spielberg.

Yep, the King of Id (“Wizard of Id” comic strip) said it best many years ago when he proclaimed from his balcony, “Remember the Golden Rule!” When asked what he meant, he replied, “He who has the gold makes the rules.”.If we’re now living in Id, I guess that means we’ve allowed ourselves to become Idiots……

Sarcasm can’t always be recognized in written form!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it DOES!!!!!!!!

Indeed, you got my single favorite political fix: every election should have a “none of the above” option; if it gets more votes than any candidate, a new election must be held, with none of the above allowed to run.

Today’s Tampa Bay Times didn’t run the first two panels, as per usual for Sunday. Today’s really added some meaning to the rest of the strip, I believe.

If you can’t tell sarcasm in written form, don’t bother reading Mark Twain, Samuel Johnson, or Jonathan Swift.

Sigh. Another day, another ignorant rant on Citizens United.

Absent the Supreme Court’s decision, the ratio would be even more lopsided. Unions wouldn’t be able to spend anywhere near as much (which is why the AFL-CIO filed an amicus brief urging the Supremes to make the decision they did). On the other hand, the Koch brothers would only have to take more of the profits from Koch Industries (which is privately held and 84% owned by the brothers) as salaries and make their contributions as individuals instead of through the company. They might take a bit of a tax hit, but thanks to the tax code provisions inserted by Harry Reid and the other one percenters inside the Beltway to protect their own wealth, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too serious. (Of course, that assumes that our Lord and Master wouldn’t just not bother to enforce McCain-Feingold against unions).

The problem isn’t with money in politics per se. The problem is that it can buy as much as it can. Since we repudiated the nomocracy outlined in the Constitution in favor of an oligarchy with two factions, and replaced the idea that the function of government is to secure human rights with the idea that it is to redistribute wealth from the generality of taxpayers to favored cronies, it is absurd to expect the Republicrat establishment to do anything substantive to interfere with the indulgence of their rapacity.

Not surprisingly, this comic is either off by a factor of hundreds, or it’s cherry picking data from a brief part of an election cycle. Opensecrets.org tabulated the biggest political donors between 1989-2014. The Koch Brothers were FIFTY-NINTH on the list!

Koch bros donated $18 million, Unions $278 million! The comic is outright misleading and dishonest.

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/it-turns-out-the-evil-koch-bros-are-only-the-59th-biggest-donors-in-american-politics.-can-you-guess-who-is-number-one/article/2544025

@John RohanMr. Rohan,Is “dark money” included in this calculation? If you include dark money, funds given to super pacs and not to individual campaigns, the Koch Brothers did spend more than twice than the the 10 biggest unions combined in 2012 elections:.

Koch Brothers – $412,670,666Big 10 Unions – $153,473,251.

Somehow, the last digits in the amount Koch Brothers spent seem appropriate.-http://www.thenation.com/blog/178743/koch-brothers-spent-twice-much-2012-election-top-ten-unions-combined-and-http://www.republicreport.org/2014/unions-koch/

You need special symbols to recognize sarcasm??When the contrast is made between wealthy ball players — who are presumed good at playing ball — and others with more intellectual backgrounds and the nod of approval is given toward the ball players, anyone with half a brain SHOULD RECOGNIZE the sarcasm..Interestingly, though, most ball-players don’t dig deeply into politics, so they show more smarts than was implied.

Trillions, me, definitely.In my case because I never had themThink, child, think. BERNICE would’ve understood.

See, YOU understood why I never paid trillions and trillions.You win the kweepie doll

If advertising made no difference, those who wasted money on it would be fools.Most people who have money very long are not fools.THEREFORE, it is logical to assume advertising has an effect on potential consumers..That and the memory of leaving off watching INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and going to Pizza Hut 15 miles away immediately after seeing a Pizza Hut commercial..However, if the movie had been a better movie or if they had been advertising English peas, I would not have gone. .Thus, they had to advertise a product I might want. The same applies to politics. To believe otherwise is the elitest attitude that all voters who don’t vote your way are mindless morons. .Campaign on the position those who don’t vote your way are morons and spend all the money you wish and see how many votes you get.

So you believe if you favored one candidate over another, that you should be forbidden from publicly saying so 22 days before the election?That a woman desiring public office should be forbidden to say so or why a month or especially six months before voters got to vote??That freedom of speech should be limited?

It’s a shame that spending number isn’t worth the crap it spewed out with

We have spending limits for both provincial and federal elections. Unfortunately – I think, from the ads I see – there must be ways around those limits.

Yeah! The filthy rich should indeed subsidize the struggling not-so-well off.

So I’ll be looking for your check for , oh, $300,000 or so—for me.

Touche.

@Illegal Seagull.

Koch Brothers – $412,670,666Big 10 Unions – $153,473,251

Say after me “capital gains loophole, capital gains loophole …”

Corporations are people, who can’t vote.

And look … all that money couldn’t buy a decent government!

Sarchasm – the gulf between the person who makes a sarcastic remark and the one who doesn’t get it.