If there is any institution that perfectly embodies the vacuous, superficial, money-centric nature of America's ill-concealed oligarchy, it is our national political conventions. They are useless pieces of shit. Now, it will be slightly easier for moneyed interests to buy them.

An example of something that could be done about political conventions that would benefit our nation as a whole would be: carpet bomb them from the air, while they are underway. That is not the direction in which our regulatory bodies are moving. Today, the Federal Elections Commission (over the objections of public interest groups, but at the request of the Republican and Democratic parties) decided that the parties can form new fundraising committees explicitly to fund their political conventions.

There can be little doubt that this step, designed to allow the parties that ostensibly represent your interests to more easily swallow money vomited from the mouths of special interest groups, will make our democracy better.

Let us not make jokes; the political parties had a very important reason for their urgent plea, reports Sabrina Eaton in the Plain-Dealer:

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee, which will hold the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland, thanked the FEC for recognizing the plight of the political parties after Congress took the roughly $18 million the federal government had spent on each convention and redirected it to pediatric disease research.

I would like to award Sabrina Eaton our "Sly Impartial Journalistic Hero of the Day" for the devastating way that she phrased that paragraph. Keep the bastards honest, Sabrina.

In conclusion: you whores.

[Photo: AP]