By Elaine Magliaro
Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore said last week that “we had all lost” even before the Democratic Party suffered a big loss at the polls on election day. Fiore added that “money pouring into politics from Super PACs and shady political ‘nonprofit’ organizations was stealing Democracy” from all of us. The 2014 midterm election has been reported to be the most expensive in history. Dark money from shadowy big-money sources increased this election cycle and eclipsed the campaign contributions from individual voters. Fiore said that the advertising and attacks got meaner and more repellant as nearly “a billion dollars poured in from pop-up 501(c)4s and Super PACs…” Fiore thinks that is why “people feel like checking out from the whole process.”
SOURCE
The Last Campaign Ad Ever (Mark Fiore)
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
So true. Fiore is again on the mark.
I laughed until I cried and then I laughed some more . . .
I don’t know about how it went in other States, but in Florida the airwaves overflowed with Koch backed campaign ads, that uniformly were irrelevant and dishonest attack ads. Elections are now decided not on specific issues, but on allegations about ones opponent that seem to have more resonance with the voters than what a candidate stands for. Another way to see Fiore’s conclusion is that the current purpose of these ad blitzes is to make the voters irrelevant.
http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/how-much-difference-did-new-voting-restrictions-make-yesterdays-close-races “The Republican electoral sweep in yesterday’s elections has put an end to speculation over whether new laws making it harder to vote in 21 states would help determine control of the Senate this year. But while we can breathe a sigh of relief that the electoral outcomes won’t be mired in litigation, a quick look at the numbers shows that in several key races, the margin of victory came very close to the likely margin of disenfranchisement.”
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