An article in today's
Wall Street Journal only goes to demonstrate once again whose bidding lil' Ricky Santorum and the rest of his GOP compatriots-in-craveness-and-corruption really heed.
John D. McKinnon does an excellent job of detailing (subscription req.) all of the dollars the pharmaceutical and oil & gas industries are dumping into this election, the vast majority of it to Republicans.
This is nothing new, really, but this is good information for anybody out there doing GOTV over the next two weeks. Kavita already covered some of this ground yesterday, but the WSJ article provided enough extra info that it seems worth repeating, on the flip...
On his state-wide tour telling fundies and anybody else who will listen that the
world will implode if Bob Casey is elected to the Senate, somethin' tells me lil' Ricky isn't talking about this:
Battling to keep his seat in a crucial Senate race, Mr. Santorum's campaign has received almost $500,000 from pharmaceutical interests and their employees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. The industry has also helped fund television advertisements and aided get-out-the-vote efforts.
Mr. Santorum's opponent, state treasurer Bob Casey Jr., regularly attacks the Medicare program as "a giveaway to Big Pharma," in part because it bars the government from negotiating prices. He and many fellow Democrats say they will overhaul the benefit if they win control of Congress on Nov. 7. Not surprisingly, Mr. Casey counts just $11,850 in contributions from pharmaceutical interests.
I guess they're scared of this:
Within the first 100 hours of taking over the House, promises House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrats will rewrite the prescription-drug benefit to take away most of the advantages it handed to pharmaceutical companies.
"It'll take five minutes" to make the biggest change of all -- the proposal to let the government negotiate prices, Ms. Pelosi told a group of about 100 retirees in Sunrise, Fla., earlier this month.
The article is just full of interesting tidbits. The oil industry, for instance, has forked over $13.6 billion in this election, more than 80% of which has gone to GOP candidates. Ah, the best contributions tax breaks can buy.
And it's not just pharma and oil. It's commercial banks and electric utilitiesm, too, all giving far more to GOP candidates than Democrats.
Of the top 10 recipients of big pharma largess for the '06 election cycle, 8 are Republicans. Oh, I'm sorry, I keep forgetting that Joementum is a party unto himself. The two Democrats in this sorry bunch are Ted Kennedy and Ben Nelson.
With Senator Man-on-Wolverine's electoral hopes dimming in Pennsylvania, pharma has, of course, turned its Eye of Sauron to the Keystone State:
Pennsylvania is one of the biggest battlegrounds in this year's political drug wars. It has a large concentration of seniors -- second only to Florida -- so Medicare could play an outsized role in the state's campaigns. Seniors are also the most reliable voters and carry extra clout. While people 65 years and older make up 16% of the state's population, they cast more than a quarter of the ballots in 2002.
Pennsylvania is home to a number of pivotal races for both houses of Congress. Democrats need 15 seats to take control of the House and four of their most promising pickups are in Pennsylvania. In late July and early August, drug companies helped pay for the Chamber of Commerce's TV ads on behalf of the four endangered Republicans, thanking them for supporting the Medicare drug bill, even though one, Mike Fitzpatrick, wasn't serving when Congress passed the benefit.
I don't think those 4 pickups include Jason Altmire, who two new independent polls now confirm is within the margin of error of Santorumette, the House's own Melissa Hart.
So here's your GOTV talking point:
Nearly 70% of big pharma money and more than 80% of big oil money goes to Republicans. And look what it has bought them!