“Our results show that political connections play an important role in a firm’s access to capital. The effects of political ties on federal capital investment are strongest for companies with weaker fundamentals, lower liquidity and poorer performance — which suggests that political ties shift capital allocation towards underperforming institutions.”

-Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, University of Michigan School of Business

In practice this is like an advertisement for why businesses should invest in lobbying.

As much as I think the US needs healthcare reform, I sympathize with conservatives who feel that something crooked is going down. Something crooked is almost certainly going down. Unfortunately those Conservative voices ring somewhat hollow, because the same people have spent the past 8 years completely blind to their own party's corruption.

I've been thinking about the dialog on torture. We went from an administration that said things like "I'm not sure what we're doing really fits the definition of torture" to an administration that says "we're certainly not torturing people" while simultaneously upholding an opinion which states, in black and white, that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military's detention of suspected enemy combatants."

After a year - Barak Obama's complete failure to take a stand on any actual principal regarding the Constitution is the final nail in it's coffin.

Principals are dead. The law is dead. We don't stand for anything. We'll do whatever we can get away with doing. We'll manage perceptions. We'll lie about it and you'll believe us. We'll use your outrage to serve our political interests and quickly forget about you when we've got what we want. If we have to, we'll immunize ourselves against prosecution retrospectively.

The only thing you have to hold on to is the notion that men like Dick Cheney and Barack Obama really do just want whats best for this country, because there is absolutely no law constraining their actions.

The only thing that really holds us back is a religious notion held by most of the people involved that we are supposed to be a free country. At this point that belief tempers people's actions more effectively than the Constitution. I'm beginning to think that Lee Greenwood has done more to defend our freedom than the Supreme Court ever has. I'm not being sarcastic.

Shocker! Banks with Lobbying Ties to Pols Get Bailouts! | The Big Picture