Political Hay or a Real Problem?

As I was watching Fox news today they ran a story regarding how much the Political Action Committee (PAC) representing Fannie May and Freddy Mac had contributed to certain Democratic members. They're stance was the top recipients of this money was all Democrat specifically the number 2 person, Senator Barak Obama. Well folks, this isn't my first rodeo so the news wasn't any surprise to me; however I thought it was interesting so I did a little checking myself.  Yes it was as it was reported, the top 6 folks are Democrat but guess what; there are over 350 names on the list. I found the website they had cited as their source (OpenSecrets.Com) and found the entire list and it became very obvious to me that while they had reported correctly they hadn't told they whole story. Here's some data I thought you'd want to see:

Place	Name	Office	Party	Grand Total
1	Dodd, Christopher J	S	D	$165,400
2	Obama, Barack	S	D	$126,349
3	Kerry, John	S	D	$111,000
4	Bennett, Robert F	S	R	$107,999
5	Bachus, Spencer	H	R	$103,300
6	Blunt, Roy	H	R	$96,950
7	Kanjorski, Paul E	H	D	$96,000
8	Bond, Christopher S 'Kit'	S	R	$95,400
9	Shelby, Richard C	S	R	$80,000
10	Reed, Jack	S	D	$78,250
62	McCain, John	S	R	$21,550
217	Biden, Joseph R Jr	S	D	$3,300

 

Now I only put in the top 10 and then McCain and Biden but do you notice something interesting here? The game is tied folks! 6 Dems, 6 GOPs! So what does this tell us? Well since I downloaded the entire list I did some number crunching to see what other truths I could gleam from the data.

If you broke of the money by party it comes out to 42% GOP, 57% Democrat, and 1% Independent. If you changed it around and looked to see if there was a difference between the House and Senate; House 55% and Senate 45%. Hmmm, it looks like the PAC knows how to do math too; remember, Democrats are the Majority right now and, as we all know, the House has more people than the Senate. So do the Democrats have a larger problem, does the house? Nope, they're all equal opportunity leaches.

Now I do have to say it is rather troubling to me to see Senator Obama's name so high on the list considering his time in the Senate but that's not really the point to all of this. So what is the point… None of us should take what we hear on the news as gospel. If we want to know the real truth we need to look for ourselves especially if it's particularly damning towards one person. Don't follow the hype folks, become free thinkers, take responsibility for your own knowledge.