Samantha Bee interviews a wealthy man who has thrown a ton of money at losing candidates over the various elections cycles and is now kind of depressed about it. Going well back to her stint at The Daily Show, Bee has shown herself to be brilliant at faking empathy when interviewing people whom she is not sympathetic to and she does not disappoint here with this hilarious segment from her show Full Frontal.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
In this case I felt the guy was well aware of the comedic situation and was working with it to get his message out. He certainly played along well with the orgy joke. (“First things first.”)
I think the point he was making was that with so many donating such large sums, no one is really outbidding anyone else for greater influence and since every candidate has a SuperPAC, none of them gained any clear advantage from having all that money. So all those millions of dollars are just being wasted and not really helping the campaign.
The whole exercise is pointless, but they have to keep doing it because they can’t unilaterally disarm.
So Citizen’s United isn’t turning out to be such a great thing for them after all because instead of the 1%ers outspending the rest of us, it’s them trying to outspend each other.
Saw a lot of masks like those at the Venice carnival earlier this year!
Trickster Goddess is clearly right that the interviewee was playing along.
Well, it does serve to make the barriers to entry really high if you are neither very rich yourself, nor have very rich backers. If there was a reasonable limit on what any individual or entity could donate -- say $1,000 -- might Sanders have beaten Clinton? (I know he’s actually outspent her, but in terms of small donations, I think the disparity was far greater.) Even Trump -- who sneered at other Republican candidates for their reliance on rich backers -- is now taking $100,000,000 from Sheldon Adelson for the battle with Clinton -- and no doubt other billionaires will be chipping in their pocket change.
Love the word play of “Sewards” played against The ‘C’ words. LOL.
A bare minority of ladies saved Seattle from millions of dollars of debt and wasteful spending while saving jobs and preserving the viability of a functioning port. They deserved high praise but, shamefully, got abuse heaped on by children in men’s bodies.
Sports teams and, particularly, stadiums and sports complexes simply do not have a record of paying off for anyone but developers, operators, and the owners of the teams. What profit there are stay within the sports complex because stadium complexes are built to contain all the services and entertainments a fan might desire. The vast majority of fans come to a game, park in stadium parking and spend their entire time in the city at the sports complex. When they leave they drive completely out of the city. Studies have shown that businesses surrounding the stadium typically lose money on games because they invest in extra staff and food that goes unused when fans fail to leave the sports complex. Building a stadium is not an effective way of revitalizing an area.