$469 million, That's what been spent by candidates vying to be our next President, and that's just the money spent by the also-rans. The losers have spent nearly a half billion dollars and the only people who don't see a problem with this are the people blowing through the cash. Total in all the candidates and it sits at $889M, and that's just through Feb.     Campaign money comes from two sources generally, the campaign committee fund and pacs/superpacs and trust me , they don't want the general public to understand how these work. There are four different kinds of pacs, connected, non-connected, leadership and super, each with their own set of rules that are rarely followed b/c no one really gives a shit. When the rich want to influence an election they'll find the ways to get it done. A superpac is supposed to be independent of a candidate it's usually people hired by the campaign to run it. While most pac donations must say who the money comes from

    While Congress sits on their hands and does absolutely not a damned thing except the occasional naming of a Post Office (and even that's not without controversy, nine House members voted against naming one after Maya Angelou on March 2nd, calling her a communist sympathizer) the state legislatures have been quite busy, although generally not in the best interests of its citizenry. . Alabama    Alabama is the 47th poorest state in the US. For every dollar it pays into the federal government it takes $2.46 out. It has no minimum wage law so it's residents have to abide by the governments $7.25 statue. A person earning min. wage will bring home about $290 per week, minus taxes puts a paycheck at around $200. net. That's $800 a month for rent, utilities and food. Heaven forbid you have kids    The largest city, Birmingham, said enough is enough. We can't survive as a city unless our citizens are paid a fair wage. They decided that a minimum wage of $10.10 would not

  Although my GOP bracket went to hell in a hand basket, and rather quickly, there were some things I got right.     When I put Ben Carson on the list of  candidates who were "in it for the money" I couldn't have hit the nail more squarely, in fact, I greatly underestimated his prowess as a grifter.     Ben raised about $58M for his campaign, $27M in the last quarter alone and by the end of Feb. he was broke. While running a campaign can be expensive most of Bens money never made it onto the campaign trail. He never opened offices in Iowa or New Hampshire and simply relied on his appearances. Sure he bought some hats and t-shirts( ($600,000) and spent some some money on travel and lodging (about $2M). He even bought some balloons ($50) and a couple of books $74.25)     His biggest expenditures? Digital media and web services ($10M), printing and postage ($7M), and fundraising phone calls ($2.4M). While fundraising is important, most campaigns spend about 10% of their

    First off let me get the sarcasm out of the way. Thank you to the GOP for contributing your best and brightest to be the leader of the free world. Your donation of a semi-fascist, a religious ideologue and a yes-man toady who's clearly not ready for prime time anything has created a scenario that's somewhat frightening but, oddly enough, sometimes humorous in a WTF sort of way.     I've never been a fan the GOP, mostly over social issues. From the fight against global warming to the staunch opposition of equal rights for my gay friends, family and neighbors. Every time they lose a battle it would be on to another, always using fear and hatred as the catalyst. And now? Now their worst nightmare has come true, someone has come along and exposed a large part of their electorate that they wanted to keep hidden. The mainstream members of the party see this as a death knell but it's not as if Trump has an opposing view of the world, everyone on the stage last Thurs said