Here’s your Democracy in Action index
Almost.
We don’t know what awaits us Wednesday morning and beyond. But we know that the most hostile, vulgar, sensational, depressing, divisive, racially charged and humiliating mud bath many of us have ever witnessed is about to leave a permanent stain on the history books.
The next president of the United States of America will be either someone under a constant cloud of inquiry or someone who, during nationally televised debate spectacles, boasted about the size of his manhood and said he doesn’t pay taxes because he’s smart.
It’ll be a woman, or it’ll be a man who has bragged about groping women.
Civility has been hit by a truck.
A child at a Trump rally yelled “take the bitch down!” when Trump mentioned Clinton.
In a dangerous world with complicated challenges, substantive debate has been virtually nonexistent, and constant cable coverage has illuminated nothing but our inability to look away from a spectacular wreck. And let’s be fair. It’s not just the presidential election that hangs over the republic like a toxic cloud.
Money is poison, and there’s hemlock everywhere you look, thanks in part to the U.S. Supreme Court’s support for the unlimited corrupting influence of cash.
California’s billion and one ballot measures float on a rising tide of greenbacks.
A crack team of muckraking L.A. Times reporters — or scum of the earth, as Trump calls journalists — has just exposed what smells like a monstrous pay-to-play operation in Los Angeles.
And no one is particularly surprised, because Chinatown is everywhere you look.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been clipping headlines and circling statistics that jumped out at me for one reason or another. I’d like to borrow from the Harper’s magazine model and share some of them with you.
Here now, my Democracy in Action index:
Amount of money spent on California ballot measures this campaign season: nearly half a billion dollars, a record.
Amount spent by pharmaceutical companies on Proposition 61, which would cap what the state pays for prescription drugs: $126 million.
Amount spent by tobacco companies to oppose Proposition 56, a proposal to add a $2 tax increase to the