Well, That’s Over With

Well, That’s Over With

©2012 Ross Williams

In 2000 I gave advice to Democrats and Republicans after Republicans took the White House. My advice to both was to pay attention to federal incursions into matters of state law. Republicans who didn’t like the Voting Rights Act owed their winning the White House to a law they denounced for decades; Democrats who loved the Voting Rights Act argued vehemently against it claiming that they could, in fact, change election procedures before the election is in the books, since they were not white racists trying to prevent blacks from voting. They were, instead, Democrats trying to prevent a Republican from winning; that’s totally different

Democrats; it was your idea in the first place; put on your big girl panties and quit crying already. Ironic, no?

Ironic, yes.

In 2004 I again gave advice to Democrats and Republicans. To Republicans it was to not be smug and complacent for political tables will always turn; to Democrats it was to grow the hell up and realize that your own political tables had turned away from you, due in large part to your own smug complacence.

In 2008 I repeated this exercise. Only to Republicans I gave a “tolja so” on the turning of the political tables with a reminder to steal the Democrat’s social issues from under them – the nation wants legal abortions even if it is uncomfortable with all abortions being legal, so drop it already; and gay marriage is a fulfillment of our rights to Free Association and Equal Protection – it’s time to claim that issue as your own while Democrats are still mealy-mouthing about “legal unions”.

I reminded Democrats that they won only because their candidate didn’t have an [R] after his name, and not because the one-third of us in the middle wanted his socialist nonsense. The nation did not [and does not] want endless governmental nannying, and the nation did not [and does not] want Obamacare – some of the issues their party and their candidate, respectively, were advocating.

What the nation wanted was a removal of the onerous, insulting and tyrannical violations of civil rights that Democrats had spent seven of Bush’s eight years denouncing. So were a great many Republicans denouncing them as well, just like us libertarians always do. What the nation wanted was an end to $500B deficits, when the bulk of that money was being used on wars that had long grown pointless, as well as making it simpler for the government to violate our civil rights. So my advice to Democrats was to remember that being “not Bush” wasn’t good enough.

It also wouldn’t hurt to stop portraying Obama as “black” ... for he is not. If you want to move the nation beyond race, then he’s a mutt. Honesty matters, doesn’t it?

The first thing Democrats did after my ’08 advice was to forget about our least-productive war – the daily body counts stopped with the change in Commander-in-Chief, literally overnight ... it might embarrass the guy, or something, and we can’t have that! You don’t embarrass the President of the United States, not if you’re a true American. It just isn’t done! ...unless he has, like, an [R] after his name, or something.

Shortly after that was the race-baiting “beer summit” where “I’m a mutt, and if I can figure out how to work together the two of you certainly can” was never uttered.

Next they forgot all about the $500B deficits which were a millstone around the neck of the United States, and shoveled money hand over fist to the auto industry full to the top with union labor, and to the same financial industry which created our “great recession” by following federal regulations to the T and, which also [surprise, Democrats!] contributes to the Democratic party in much the same way as the oil industry contributes to Republicans. They also funneled the single largest chunk of “stimulus” money to the pork project of TSA by which they could invest in a whole new range of expensive electronics to further violate our civil rights with. The makers of such equipment tend to be Democrats and also contribute heavily to Democrats’ coffers... including to my own Senator Dick “US Soldiers are Nazis” Durbin. The deficit ballooned to $1,000B, and then to $1,500B.

The coup d’merde before the midterm was, of course, the passage of Obamacare, which was opposed by 60% of the nation – some areas more than others and, with the exception of large cities, favored by no distinct demographic. It was at this point that I thought there might have been some hope for the US; Congress went R in a big way and even Kennedy’s seat went to a – can it be?? – Republican. The only reason the Senate was also not a majority Republican house is, as I reminded the aforementioned nazi-baiter Durbin, only a third of the Senators were up for re-election.

Durbin actually seemed contrite after the 2010 election, giving an address to the nation indicating that, as Number Two Democrat in the Senate, he had learned his lesson about Democrats’ profligate spending. Uh huh. Congress went back into session, and with it went my nazi-baiting Senator bought and paid for by Goldman-Sachs and the makers of TSA’s backscatter machines; as Lincoln’s Secretary Cameron suggested the honest politicians would do, Durbin stayed bought. Will of The People be damned.

Among the bright spots in the 2010 midterm was a quasi-libertarian movement coming out of the Republican party, which demanded strict Constitutional limitations of federal government power – which is to say, its bureaucratic authority and the budget such bureaucrats command – and a return of our lost civil rights. These “Tea Party Republicans” were at odds with everyone in Washington, including their own erstwhile party leaders whom they believed had been seduced by the Dark Side of politics – political contributors [which, among Republicans not already invested in reduced government, is pretty much limited to the social issues criticized earlier] and their “honesty” to stay bought.

But between the midterm and 2012, the Tea Party was at once denounced by the Democrats so hidebound that they see any and every criticism of a socialist mutt as being racially motivated, and it was infiltrated by the social conservatives who don’t know when to leave the 1950s behind.

Once again, I am bereft of a legitimate toehold in either political party. Democrat math teaches 2+2=22 and other psychoses, and Republicans are too busy being their brothers’ keeper that they can’t see straight. Neither one has more than a passing familiarity with the US Constitution – including the newly re-elected socialist mutt who claims to having taught the subject in law school. I dispute that claim; he may have stood in front of the classroom, but he could not teach the subject because he knows nothing about it.

Democrats use the Constitution as a public wiper of tears for all those instances when people fall down and get ouchies ... when they aren’t using it as an ass-wiper for those who shit their own beds – both exactly as the Constitution does not authorize; Republicans roll it up to use as a blunt instrument to beat outliers and odd ducks into the same rigid conformity that our Constitution was written to not mandate. Neither party understands that the Constitution is the upper limit of government power, and not the starting point for government power. It was designed to limit government power and give The People the right to succeed or fail all on their own, and to be left the hell alone while they went about it.

Democrats want to reward failure and punish success and pester everyone to those ends; Republicans want to simply pester everyone to make sure they’re all properly regimented. To hell with you both.

So here’s my advice, like quadrennial clockwork.

For Democrats it’s easy: look to Greece and Spain – that’s the future you’re building for us. And stop it. It doesn’t matter how many teary-eyed didactic digressions you can avail yourselves of, or the slimy, pious morality snail-tracking behind you: a government has only so much money, and only so much credit, and once it’s gone – no matter how swell a reason you can come up with to spend it – you will cease to exist. Yeah, I know, “the United States isn’t Greece and Spain”... and Greece and Spain aren’t the Soviet Union, either; is it making a difference to them? or are they both falling into fiscal pieces? Two plus two does NOT equal twenty-two. Learn math and stop punishing wealth.

Republicans ... oy. To steal a phrase: It’s the economy, stupid! It’s always the economy; barring Huns wading ashore to rape and pillage, it’ll never be anything else. You’re the only major political party who knows math and understands that if we don’t have rich people allowed to become rich so they can provide the lion’s share of the taxes by which the poor people get their free ride, then our nation will fall apart just as Greece and Spain are doing, and which the Soviet Union already did. And so I say this with all the patience I can muster, which isn’t much as I feel like I’m talking to an idiot savant or other “autism-spectrum” specimen of modest potential but blinding, blinkered self-involvement:

1] drop abortion, it annoys the women when you go on and on about it;

2] drop everything related to abortion, which includes stem cell research, since it annoys those with college educations who frequently work in those areas;

3] drop every religious quibble with science, which includes creationism and its “Creationism in Science’s clothing” cousin: “intelligent design”, as it insults anyone not currently in a Sunday School class;

4] latch onto gay marriage as a celebration of Americans’ rights to freely associate and be treated equally under the law despite the concurrent right of others to despise it and say so. Simply put, acknowledge that freedom is messy, and requires nonconformity to coexist with denunciation of the nonconformists, likewise requiring individual failure to coexist with individual success [which Democrats cannot fathom]; and finally

5] nag, harp, pester, harangue and browbeat Democrats about one thing and one thing only: the economy – about what happens when you subsidize failure, reward non-participation, and punish wealth; about how the punishment of wealth is observed in industry, industrialists, and jobs leaving the country to find a healthier environment for them to live; about how regardless of the “humanity” shown by robbing a rich Peter to pay a poor Paul, there is a very short limit as to how much can be robbed before Peter becomes poor himself, or simply takes his money out of reach by moving to Switzerland or Cayman Island.

And remind them that Paul has never ended up being better off than he started after getting Peter's money.

The government cannot fundamentally do anything for Paul’s lasting benefit: government is the least effective means of creating social change ever invented – it’s why our Constitution does not give the federal government any authority in that area. The only tool government has is law, and subsequent punishment for law-breakers; law is notoriously inept at doing anything besides creating criminals and bureaucrats, while breeding a popular resentment of the tyranny the law engenders.

When the law is used against thieves and killers and those thieves and killers get resentful, the rest of society can live with it; when the law is used against someone for having a lack of social conscience while being rich and he gets resentful ... he moves his wealth, business and jobs to Honduras. And that, the rest of society cannot live with; society dies without jobs.

Democrats will refuse to pay attention to my advice, and so that leaves you.

Reprioritize or die, Republicans. Leave “staying bought” for others.

A Torpedo to the Ship of State

Damn the Expense, Free Healthcare for All

©2012 Ross Williams

Some internet acquaintances tried to tell me that up was down and black was white last week and I corrected them. Those who were corrected took great offense from it and either disappeared or stood on the sides sniping, while others thought the conversation was quite interesting and informative.

The conversation naturally had political overtones, and dealt with insurance ... so you can guess which particular tones were political.

One of the many points I made in attempting to get these people to understand what insurance is designed to do and how insurance is currently being misused to the point of insanity by politicians willing to buy cheap votes by selling my children, my grandchildren, and your own, is that “preventive care” spends more money to detect a rare medical condition than is saved by finding it earlier than later ... thus it is not a proper thing for insurance to cover.

“It saves lives!!” I was told in capital letters.

Not the issue, I said. The issue is the cost of saving those lives, and how much money we are digging out of our pockets to pay the insurance companies to pay for the routine care which includes health screenings ... exactly the way insurance was not designed to work. Demanding that insurance cover this type of thing becomes inflationary. This is the point that was ignored.

This morning, to highlight my argument, comes a medical study done in Britain and published in their medical journal, The Lancet, saying that for every woman saved from breast cancer through mammogram screening, 3 are “overdiagnosed”, and other fascinating numbers. “Overdiagnosed” patients are given surgery when cheaper radiation would do; given radiation when cheaper chemo would do, given chemo when doing nothing would do. Yes, there are apparently many cancers that grow too slowly or not at all to ever worry about. Who knew?

Also noted in the study are a “significant” number of false positives which result in costly follow-ups and further treatments that ultimately prove unnecessary.

Some numbers from the study:

1] every year 300,000 British women aged 50-52 are offered their first routine 3-year mammogram

2] of all women screened annually [article doesn’t give this number but it’s undoubtedly well into the millions], 5,300 are diagnosed with breast cancer each year

3] of those 5,300, four thousand – over 75% – are “overdiagnosed” and given too much treatment than is necessary

4] there are, by implication, tens of thousands more who are given “false positives” and undergo unnecessary treatment until they find out it was a false alarm

5] there are still several million mammograms handed out annually of which all but a few tenths of one-percent – to be conservative [which is to say, exaggerating the risk] – ultimately shows nothing.

I am perfectly aware that mammograms save lives; I am perfectly aware that a mammogram which shows nothing makes people feel better in knowing that nothing is wrong. That is not the issue.

The issue is what all this costs, and why demanding that “everyone” pay for it is stupid.

Britain’s health care system – a single-payer monstrosity, and which is going broke, and which does an abysmal job at any rate – hands out mammograms every three years starting at the age of 50. There are 300K women in the 50-52 year age cohort, nearly a third of a million getting mammograms each year. The 53-55 year cohort will probably have almost as many, the 56-58 year cohort almost as many as the prior, etc. Shall we say for the sake of making the hypothetical math simpler that there are 5,300,000 women under Britain’s socialized medicine getting mammograms each year?

No, tell ya what. I’m going to rig the numbers against me, here. There’s only half that number: 2,650,000 women are getting mammograms each year.

Of that figure, 5,300 are diagnosed with breast cancer. The risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer in any given year in Britain is 0.2%. Two out of a thousand; one in 500. I’m going to assume British women are similar to American women, for that is American’s breast cancer rate.

A mastectomy – far and away the most common treatment – costs between $15K and $55K in the US – $35K average [without reconstruction]. To claim this screening was cost-effective, the cost of 500 mammograms would be required to be less than the difference in cost between breast cancer treatment when the cancer was caught early and the cost of that treatment when it was caught late. Sadly, there is no statistical difference in cost, so no matter what a mammogram costs it isn’t a cost-effective screening technique.

If we could be satisfied that the screening doesn’t cost us more than the actual thing being screened for, the 500 mammograms would have to cost no more than $70 each. But they don’t.

The average mammogram in the US costs $100, as it includes the services of the x-ray tech, the radiologist, the equipment and supplies ... And insurance [in the US, in Britain the government] pays for it. Even when mammograms are “free”, someone is still paying for it – frequently city and county governments who operate clinics at cost. The average includes these. Mammograms frequently run to near $1,000 – so let’s work from the average.

When insurance pays for the mammogram, it means that the insurance company is going to charge its customers more than it’s paying out for the x-ray, because just like the radiologist has his medical school, staff and equipment to pay for, so does the insurance company have its investigators, claims adjusters, actuaries, clerical workers and office supplies. And so is the British government paying out for these extras.

Insurance is going to ultimately charge you $150 and probably closer to $200 to pay for that $100 mammogram every three years starting at the age of 50 – in the US, the age routine screening starts is 40, so that simply adds ten years of $200 insured mammograms that the doctor charges $100 for.

Chemotherapy, instead, is the least expensive of the traditional medical treatments for breast cancer. The average cost of chemo is $15K in the US. Yes, there are some drugs that cost a whole hell of a lot more and $15K is simply for one dose, but insurance works off statistics so we’re using the average. In order to make 500 screenings cost no more than the breast cancer cured by chemo, the mammogram would have to be $30 each. The average mammogram still costs $100, for which the insurance company will collect between $150 and $200 to give away “for free”.

Five hundred $100 mammograms to detect one $35K mastectomy or one $15K chemo are going to cost someone $50,000 to provide. Because insurance companies – whether government-mandated or otherwise – are just the middlemen in this transaction and they have to make a profit in order to stay in business, the someone coughing up the $50,000 will not be them. It will instead be the customers of the insurance company. Or, when the government starts buying insurance for those it feels sorry for, it will be the taxpayers.

We’ll be paying $200 to get $100 of preventive service that is useful to only one person while being medically irrelevant to 499 others. Insurance is designed to pay for breast cancer treatment – it is a rare condition that is very expensive to treat. And whether it is caught early or late, the cost remains the same; what doesn’t remain the same is the survival rate. 500 women could insure themselves for breast cancer treatment for $100 a year – only one-in-500 will get breast cancer, the risk is shared across the group because it is a rare event. But to insure for breast cancer treatment AND its preventive screenings costs $300 a year.

The risk of having a preventive screening cannot be “shared” across the group because the risk is damnear 100%. Risk this great turns the insurance company into a middleman of a guaranteed service. You may as well hire someone to pay your electric bill and phone bill and water bill and trash bill and mortgage each month. Do you think it’s cheaper to hire someone to do it for you than it is to do it yourself?

That’s right, it’s not. These people are called “personal assistants” in Hollywood, and are paid, typically, six figures. How does “competition” lower the total cost of your monthly utility bills and mortgage when you hire a personal assistant to do it for you?

That’s right, it doesn’t. Your utility bills are still $700 per month, and your mortgage is $900. You’re still paying $1,600 a month for these. Having someone else do it for you only means that you’re paying the someone else on top of those other bills. It is not cheaper; it is more expensive.

Additionally, for every real diagnosis there are several false positives. Let’s say, for ease of math, not to mention accuracy of thesis, ten. There are ten false positives to every true positive.

Each false positive requires a follow-up imaging; another x-ray or, increasingly, an MRI [I’m ignoring the even more costly biopsy]. An MRI is $500 [minimum], for which the insurance company charges $1,000 in premiums to pay for. So for each actual case of breast cancer found which costs $15K or $35K to fix, we’re paying $50,000 to find it [for which the insurance company collects between $75,000 and $100,000 to pay on our behalf], and we’re also spending between $1,000 and $10,000 [which costs between $1,500 and $20,000 for insurance to cover for us] to find out about the false positives.

Spending up to $120,000 on insurance premiums to provide up to $60,000 of medical care, to find one $15,000 or $35,000 case of breast cancer. Aren’t you glad I didn’t go with the greater figure of British screenings? We’d have been spending twice these amounts to find the same cost of illness.

Think it will be any better by having a “single-payer” system where the US government – like Britain – pays for all this out of taxes?

The government still has the same overhead that the insurance company ever did [and arguably more] – they have to hire people to process paperwork, investigate fraud and mere overcharges, process more paperwork, handle the irate phone calls from the people whose treatment was denied because it was deemed to be “medically unnecessary” [which, in the Medicaid system, is the excuse they use when they run out of money in the first place because “we’re rationing your healthcare” is considered rude], and process yet more paperwork.

They’re still going to collect $200 in taxes to pay for $100 in preventive diagnostics. Because that’s what Britain is doing ... and it’s why they’re going broke doing it. It’s what France is doing ... and why they started allowing people to opt out of mandatory state health care in favor of insurance which operates, in France, like insurance is supposed to and doesn’t cover routine care and preventives. It’s what Canada was doing ... stress on “was”, because they have undertaken steps to reduce the cost-ineffective aspects of health care of which breast cancer screening is just one example.

And finally, it’s what Greece continues to do, with Germany’s money, because they have none of their own anymore, because they spent it all giving away free education, free jobs [mostly working for the government], free healthcare, free vacations, and free pensions at the age of 50 ... when British women are just starting to get screened for breast cancer.

Yes, preventive screenings save lives. But it is not cost-effective. You spend $200 to get $100 of medical screening; you provide $50,000 of medical screening to find one patient who is cured for $15,000 or $35,000.

There’s 310,000,000 Americans – 165,000,000 American women ... 120,000,000 American women over the age of 40 when breast cancer screening begins in this country. This is 240,000 sets of the one-in-500 example of giving $100,000 to the insurance company to pay for $50,000 of doctoring to find one $15K or $35K illness and 10 cases of false positive that costs $20,000 for $10,000 of doctoring to figure out it’s a false alarm. Collectively we are giving insurance companies $24Billion to pay for $12Billion of medical service, which is finding between $3.6Billion and $8.4Billion of illness.

Do those numbers better indicate the seriousness? The difference between $12B and $24B is what we’re paying our personal assistants to pay our regular doctor bills, the ones that we’ll have to pay regardless. Why are we volunteering to pay double the true cost? Do we love insurance companies that much?

And this is just for one disease; how many diseases are there for which we are doing very similar things? How many “lifestyle choices”, Sandra Fluke?

How much do we spend each year immunizing against pertussis? What does pertussis cost to someone who contracts it? How many times does that occur ... even without immunization? A brief perusal of the numbers and doing the math shows another non-cost-effective insurance coverage – giving insurance companies a few million to pay for several hundred thousand dollars of serum and a two-cent syringe, to prevent each $10,000 case of coughing up a lung.

If you don’t want whooping cough – and who would – pay for your own damned immunization. Like mammograms, it’s smart to do, and it saves a life here and there. But it’s not smart to make everyone else pay for it for you.

Everyone paying means overpaying, and that means eventually running out of money. ...which, when governments do it, tends to lead to revolutions and/or invasions and/or riots and/or starvation, but, as Britain, France, Canada and Greece [et al] are finding out, it means the absolute loss of those things you thought you were so clever and so enlightened and so politically righteous to give yourselves.

You were none of those things. You were, instead, lazy, wasteful, greedy and ignorant.



Nota bene: The figures provided above are a combination of numbers from the British medical Journal The Lancet, from the American Cancer Society, CDC, and WHO, and are entirely consistent with the health care reality in the US, not to mention Britain, even if it is worst-casing the situation, rounding for ease of arithmetic [the average cost of a mammogram is, in fact, $102], and assuming that everyone gets routine mammograms; they don’t – not by a long-shot.

Run-Up Run Down

Run-Up Run Down

©2012 Ross Williams

Headline: Texas Threatens to Prosecute Election Observers

Article Synopsis: A western-democracy alliance, which includes the United States, routinely monitors their own and other member states’ elections; US elections have been monitored since ’02 by this group, which has recently issued an opinion that Voter ID laws inhibit fair elections. Texas has a voter ID law that has been waylaid by Justice Department action and doesn’t think much of any outside opinions of their laws; they have reminded the group that they are obliged to follow Texas election laws while in their state and will prosecute all violators. Texas also declared that any UN election observers will be detained on sight. Texas’s main objection stems from the observer group getting coached by the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against their Voter ID law. Only states with such laws currently in the court system seem to be getting observed, but South Carolina isn’t as upset as Texas is.

Looking Gift Horses in the Mouth: Voter fraud is rampant. Only those committing it, or those benefiting from it, deny this. The major form of denial goes thus: “...so how come we never see anyone convicted of it?”

The answer is, of course, we do ... and so would they as well if they chose to look. But they don’t, because it’s a gift horse.

There are, naturally, Republicans who construct elaborate vote fraud mechanisms, and a few of them have been caught at it – a Republican voter registration worker was arrested last week for throwing away a little more than a dozen voter registration forms submitted by those who were [let’s face it] about 120% likely to vote Democrat. But by far the major culprit behind vote fraud in our current political climate is Democrats and their auxiliaries.

Nobody could hold a candle to ACORN for registering voters multiple times, their dead grandfathers and pet dogs. ACORN has been decertified as a voter registration service, and though their other services [e.g., creating pimping and prostitution business plans] were left untouched, ACORN disbanded itself and simply renamed their offices a thousand other cute acronyms. Their previous activities continue, but now when investigators find one committing voter fraud, only that one can be shut down. The rest are “unaffiliated”.

Decentralization has benefits to those who seek centralized control. You’d think they’d take a lesson from that.

Conclusion: In every election since I’ve lived in Illinois, a city near mine is discovered to have a double-digit percentage of the votes cast in that city consisting of dead people, nonexistent people, and even the odd pet dog – and I cannot for the life of me figure out why unless it’s the presidential election. And even then it doesn’t make sense: Illinois is solidly Democrat and so is this city. In any event, it is this form of vote fraud that Voter ID laws would address. But since we don’t have Voter ID laws, people in East St Louis and Chicago don’t need to fear being found out: the inspectors are going elsewhere.



Headline: Criminal Probe into Vote Fraud Scheme

Article Synopsis: The son of a northern Virginia Democrat Congressman was caught on video tape giving advice to someone on how to vote illegally; this son was in charge of his father’s campaign “field director”. The son, Patrick Moran, has resigned his position and has been declared persona non grata at all Democrat party campaign headquarters in the area. The videographer is the same one who caught ACORN advising a client on how to set up a prostitution ring. Congressman Moran is one of two Virginia Democrats demanding criminal investigations into the Republican voter registrar who threw away around a dozen voter registrations from future Democrat voters.

Live by the Fraud, Die by the Fraud: The scheme proposed by the videographer is not a new one: find someone in a district who is not voting, and take their place. It is arguably a larger fraud issue than dead relatives and pet dogs. He proposed to the Junior Moran that he would replace 100 people, if only he knew how to do it.

Apparently he came to the right guy, because after initial “hesitation” he advised the sting-man – in some amount of detail – on how to create fake utility bills with which to establish residency at the polling place, and to impersonate poll workers over the phone to ensure that the person he’d be voting for hasn’t already voted. ...which would be a dead give-away. It’s fine if the veal voter shows up second because he’ll have a photo ID to demonstrate he is who he is. But if the fraudulent voter is the second one to arrive and doesn’t have a photo ID to match the name he’s voting under, the jig is up.

The younger Moran claims he was “playing along” because the sting-man was “unstable”, but it was only after being told how the fraudulent votes would be cast that he opened up on how to do it.

Conclusion: ...but, yes, laws requiring photo ID are the bad guy in all this. Because ... it wouldn’t ensure that votes aren’t fraudulent. Wait, no, that came out wrong: because ... it would ensure that votes are fraudulent. Hmmm ... help me out here, Democrats ... why don’t you want fair elections again?



Headline: Two Billion Spent on Presidential Campaign

Article Synopsis: Neither candidate chose to accept public funds for their campaigning which unshackles their campaign from spending limits; in 2008 only Obama declined to accept federal funding, and thus outspent McCain by 2:1. A lot of numbers are tossed around only to end up at the bottom of the tally-sheet with both candidates having collected, in their various allowable campaign sectors, a roughly equal amount of this obscene amount.

Money Must Grow on Democrat Trees: We all know – because we’ve been told so often, and it must be correct otherwise they wouldn’t be telling us so often – that Republicans are the party of the obscenely rich. If you have two dimes to rub together in hopes of breeding pennies, then you’re a Republican; if you don’t, well, you’re a Democrat who’s been abused by the abusive abuses of the abusing Republicans.

It’s obvious where Romney has gotten his campaign contributions; it’s the gold dust swept up from the 1% CEO’s vaults. But Obama? None of those who’d vote for him have any to give. They all wish to be the famed fatcat Tom Joad, who left Oklahoma for California in his flivver at the end of The Grapes of Wrath musing pretentiously, sanctimoniously, bombastically, and – as we may thus surmise – Republicanly, for Joad was rich by comparison.

So where’d Obama get his booty, then? Hollywood’s limousine liberals can’t hold a candle to rapacious CEOs, not to mention, we’re finding out that Hollywood isn’t necessarily as liberal as it was thought to be.

Democrats are notoriously bad at math yet they can raise political swag equivalent to [or in excess of] the “big money” competition ... but Democrats don’t have any to give. And there are no Democrat organizations which have any money either, since they are made up of Democrats with turned-out pockets.

Either Democrats have institutional investors behind them [such as labor unions, the American Trial Loyyers Association, the media, and financial industries] just like they continual accuse Republicans of having all to themselves, or it’s a modern version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes: the typical 2+2=22 explanation of Democrat policy-making.

Conclusion: $2billion spent and all we’re getting is a $400,000 president out of it. Doesn’t seem really worth it ... by four orders of magnitude.