132,469 political ads, maybe one too many…

At last, one of the bona fide news stories I've been waiting for…

Seems that voters in Ohio are saying there are way too many political ads on TV and they're not paying attention any more.

Stick that in your pipe, Mr. SuperPAC.

So, now we can say that this is a realistic question: how many hundreds of millions of dollars in political TV advertising gets to be "too much"?

Seems like they've reached "too much" in Ohio: since April, more than $72 million has been spent already on, at last count, 132,469 TV ads boosting President Obama or Romney. If you wanted to watch all of them, consecutively, without a potty break, it would take a month and a half. I guess our friends in Ohio have already decided that's too long….

Is it possible that you don't need hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to try to buy an election? Maybe just a hundred million here, a hundred million there might be enough to give it a shot.

This may give some encouragement to the sort-of-not-really-really-wealthy folks who have been glumly standing aside from the money storm, thinking that with their paltry few millions of dollars they had no chance to crassly try to buy a candidate and get him elected….

On the other hand, for those of us who think the Citizens United ruling was destructive for our democratic republic, this SuperPAC overload story is frightening indeed…..what happens if the very wealthy and the corporations who are funding the SuperPACs figure out that they can shift a coupla hundred million from national elections to state and local contests?.......

Too much money....

Elections for sale (part 3)

Elections for sale (part 2)

Yup, elections for sale.....