Alex Pareene

Political journalists, socially inept or no, are not nerds. Most of them can't do math, a fact that campaigns and politicians regularly exploit. ”

Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really. ”

Political junkies' and liberals will watch MSNBC, and angry, old right-wingers will watch Fox. ”

Political battles are won when the rich favor them. ”

Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy. ”

Sen. Rand Paul is a Different Kind of Republican. He will drag the party, kicking and screaming, toward a new kind of conservatism that appeals more to today's youth, who embrace liberty and are skeptical of foreign intervention. ”

There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate. ”

FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires. ”

Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable. ”

Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people. ”