Hot Dog

Hot Dog by Mark McLaughlin

Until last night’s quarterly fund raising deadline, I kept getting these emails from Dan Pfeiffer et ilk telling me it’s not too late to join the lottery for dinner with the President. All I needed to do was donate $150 $75 $15 to something like the Committee to ReElect the President (CREEP) and I’d be entered in a raffle to win dinner with Obama.

I hope you saved your money. From The Washington Post’s blog, Obama Raises More than $1.2 million in Philadelphia.

President Obama raised more than $1.2 million at two campaign fundraisers here Thursday night, the last events of his money-raising blitz in this early stage of the 2012 campaign.

Campaign officials said about 800 people, each giving at least $100, attended the first event, at a Hyatt hotel. Later in the evening, Comcast’s executive vice president, David L. Cohen, hosted about 120 people in his home for a dinner, each of the attendees giving at least $10,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign.

[snip]

Cohen, a longtime Democratic operative, has successfully sheparded the regulatory review of Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal earlier this year.

So the chief D.C. lobbyist responsible for successfully shepherding the merger of Comcast and NBC through the regulatory process is a chief fund raiser and bundler for the President’s campaign coffers. How nice.

Of course, it’s just harmless bipartisan fun. One of the Republican appointees to the FCC who voted for the merger soon resigned her position and took the Governmental Affairs lobbying job with Comcast-NBC Universal. All in the family.

Anyone who gets Comcast’s rising monthly cable bills and deteriorating service and looked at that merger would have asked how it could possibly be in the public interest to allow one of the worst corporate cable monopolies to merge with another corporate media oligopoly? Answer: it can’t. But of course, that was never the relevant question.

The only thing that mattered was how much could the corporate sponsors deliver and how much could the President’s men and both parties extract from the deal? In Afghanistan, it’s called corruption. These people belong in jail. All of them.

Remember this the next time you get a letter from these CREEPy people asking you to make a small donation of just $150 $75 $15. You can’t compete against the monopolists, and you can’t counter balance their influence. The dinner that matters has already been held, and you weren’t invited.

Update from commenter Wendydavis, who notes this Obama quote from the WaPo link:

“I’m prepared to bring our deficit down by trillions of dollars. That’s with a ‘t’ – trillions,” he said at the Hyatt. “But I will not reduce our deficit by sacrificing our kids’ education. I’m not going to reduce our deficit by eliminating medical research being done by our scientists. I won’t sacrifice rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our airports. I want Philadelphia to have the best, not the worst.”

Man is just phonin’ it in now; he forgot the ‘corporate jets’ thingie. That’s just not right!

Except mentioning the private jets would not be polite before having dinner later with an audience that probably owns private jets. The man is nothing if not polite.