Cappy Rudyard:

$5,900,388

Is the amount Common Cause reports Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman received in health industry campaign contributions from 2000-2008.

$77,000

A year is how much his wife Hadassah received from a lobbying firm to consult on health care in just one year during that period. Prior to this, she also ran PR for drug companies like Hoffman-LaRoche and Pfizer, according to Salon.

Priceless

Is my forlorn hope that somehow the founders designed a system that can weather the craven cash-for-obstruction breach of the public trust that has paralyzed the national legislature:

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.

- Federalist Papers, No. 62

Free Market Squirrel:

Nice try, Cappy. That was how Madison and Hamilton justified the creation of a deliberative body called the "Senate" that would be isolated from the winds of public instability that buffet the House. What they don't seem to have predicted was that lawmakers like Joe Lieberman have a vested interest in maintaining the imbalance between rich corporate interests and poor people too busy scrambling to pay their medical bills. As George Bush put it, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." Which means that as dollars replace votes as the currency used to buy political influence in government, actual governing becomes increasingly impossible. As the forces of obstruction grow ever more dominant, the private sector emerges as the only agent of change. And that's when everyone will learn to love and accept the efficiencies of the market. Bwah-hah-hah-hah. Enjoy your last few years of freedom before you too learn to love your squirrelly capitalist overlords!