Oh, Tommy, Tommy.

Have you ever heard of Tom Delay? He was a Republican strongman who has just been convicted of money laundering in Texas. Now, I call him a "strongman" not to belittle the Republican Party, but to belittle the Delay style of politics. Goodness knows there are strongmen in and out of both parties. These are the politicians who give politicians a bad name. And it takes some doing to be worse then a politician. See, in politics today, you have to make sounds like you want what the folks back home want all the while giving corporate sponsors exactly what they want. See, corporations don't care about what the folks back home need or want. They want special consideration for their actions. They want to be able to break laws and ignore regulations without being penalized. Now we all know they can't just do those things without getting in trouble with law enforcement, so they give huge amounts of money to politicians through organizations like PACs. If your favorite politician wants to keep his job, he doesn't have to do what you want him to do. He only has to pretend he does. But what he does have to do is exactly what the corporate dogs tell him they want him to do or he won't get the money. That it will go to his opponent so he'll lose his job. That'll get his attention. Anyway, Delay had another motive. He wanted more Republicans to get elected. The problem was that too many Democrats in many districts wanted Democrats to get elected. So he got money from the corporations . Then he gave that money to local Republicans to help them get elected. Once they did, they reconfigured all the districts so that most would have enough Republican votes to send more Republicans to Congress. So there are still as many Republicans and Democrats in Texas, they just vote in different districts now. It was clever enough to get him arrested and found guilty.  A once in a lifetime event.