What money won’t buy, and what it will

        Jeb Bush didn't exactly get skunked in Iowa. But, well, his 2.9 percent showing meant – let's put the calculator to it, as political savant Nate Silver did: The $14.9 million he spent on advertising alone there meant he harvested one vote for every $2,844.

It would have been better for Jeb to have spent it all on corn.

We've been led to assume the contrary, but in presidential politics, as the Beatles once sang, money can't buy you love.

The two super PACs Karl Rove assembled to influence the 2012 elections raised a stunning $175 million and accomplished almost nothing.

Indeed, that year PACs on both sides spent $14 billion. In the presidential race, all that gold didn't move the needle. Barack Obama entered the 2012 campaign with a 3-point lead in the polls. He won with a margin of, yes, 3 percent.

When it comes to presidential politics, money can buy you time (Ted Cruz). Money can get you in when uninvited (Donald Trump). Money can scare off some competitors (George W. Bush, 2000). But it may be the worst investment outside interests could make.

Now, if you want to spend your money in ways that will influence policy, buy a member of Congress -- or the state Legislature.

Is it possible to oversell the role of big money in politics? No, not at all. Money talks. Charles and David Koch are sitting in their lair right now dangling $250 million in support for the survivor of the GOP sweepstakes, and that survivor is likely to do exactly what they say.

It is odd to hear Cruz say that his campaign is a "grassroots" effort when $15 million of his super PAC's $38 million comes from one source: West Texas fracking moguls Dan and Farris Wilks.

The Wilks Bros. may have no higher expectations about Cruz's presidential chances than you or I, but they do know now that they have bought their own senator. 

This senator has a post on the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. In other words, the Wilks have purchased their own committee seat now, and they know it. Beats a stadium luxury box all to heck.

So, yes, money matters – a lot. Aside from the gerrymandering that has left so many in Congress in racially identifiable fortresses, money from special interests has sculpted today's Congress into an institution with public approval ratings ranking somewhere between chiggers and ragweed.

Jack Abramoff, who went to prison for bribing congressional Republicans on behalf of Indian tribes' casino dreams, says the bribery is so brazen that no one would see it as anything else.

We have "gifts" rules, you see. However . . .

Well, let's let Abramoff explain it to "60 Minutes":

"You can't take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a hamburger or a steak or something like that. But you can take him to a fundraising lunch and not only buy him that steak, but give him $25,000 extra and call it a fundraiser."

That's how Washington is run, and it all bubbles up in policies that benefit those with the extra millions rattling around in their petty cash (or petro cash, as it were).

Those policies protect the oil industry from telling us what chemicals get pumped into the ground and to dodge controls on pollution that to poisons the Earth and its atmosphere, and causes an earthquake or several hundred. Let us hear an "amen," Sen. Cruz.

Money. It doesn't matter except when it does.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

'Hand on the Bible' time for these climate deniers

On behalf of a planet and its species, I'm asking a certain Texas grand jury if it still has time on its docket.

I speak of the Harris County grand jury that turned the tables on hucksters who conspired to paint Planned Parenthood as a law-breaker.

Instead of indicting Houston Planned Parenthood, the grand jury indicted two conniving videographers. David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt now will be tried for painting a lie about Planned Parenthood with their video-editing toys.

Those of us who applaud this decision, just as we applaud the amazing work of Planned Parenthood, hereby ask the grand jury to consider another case. This, too, involves the same types of players: skilled ideological hit men.

I got the idea from a piercing Washington Post commentary by Robert Brulle, professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University.

Brulle says guileful energy industry players who have seeded so much doubt about climate change and man's role in it should be investigated.

"Just as Congress investigated the efforts of the tobacco industry to dupe the public into believing its products are harmless," he writes, "we need a full and open inquiry into the conduct of ExxonMobil and the other institutions whose misinformation campaigns have delayed our efforts to address climate change."

This is a smashing idea. One problem, though: The entity Brulle wants to do the investigating is itself an ecological crime syndicate: Congress.

Forget congressional hearings. We need a criminal grand jury. Harris County, our planet calls.

Brulle points out that, nearly 40 years ago, ExxonMobil officials were aware of the problem of carbon-loading in the atmosphere and launched legitimate scientific inquiry into the matter.

However, in a few years an industry coalition decided that rather than give weight to such science, its goal would be to make sure that "recognition of uncertainties (of climate change) becomes part of 'conventional wisdom.'"

So, how can we pull off this criminal inquiry into how Big Oil and other vested interests harmed the planet and derailed action because the money was too good to do otherwise?

No problem regarding any venue question. Houston is located on Planet Earth. Enough said.

No problem projecting real or potential harm, or finding victims. Name a species whose fate is not tied to climate conditions

However, there's no need to focus on polar bears or Eskimos. Houstonians will do. There city is where the chickens will come home to roost in the Lone Star State if sea levels rise as projected.

A study in the July Science magazine says that historically sea levels rose at least six meters – more than 20 feet – in periods when temperatures rose only 1 to 2 degrees. According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015, the warmest year in 156 years or record-keeping, had an average temperature 1.65 degrees above average.

Coastal Houston, we have a problem.

That sounds flippant. It's no joke, however, to island nations like Micronesia, Antigua and Maldives, all facing "serious threat of permanent inundation from sea-level rise" according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Add to those locales New Jersey's shore, based on what happened in Hurricane Sandy and winter storm Jonas.

This is a crime against man, a crime against nature. Convene a grand jury. Ask a devoted climate denier to swear on the Bible. Tell the court, Sir, how certain you really are that "business as usual" isn't doing what science is telling us.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com

Anti-Saloon League rides again in new forms

   At the height of Prohibition, columnist H.L. Mencken proclaimed, "There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more."

   He was right. Though single-issue politics had held sway over public policy with the 18th Amendment, the result had been exactly what proponents feared.

  This did not deter the full-of-itself Anti-Saloon League from exerting the influence that resulted in Prohibition.

    The single-issue influence made such figures as Wayne Wheeler and Howard Hyde Russell king-makers, as they could deliver hundreds of thousands of votes, mostly of pious Protestants.

   Lest we think of the Anti-Saloon League's power as fleeting, the 18th Amendment was the law of the land for 13 years before sanity took hold and Americans could toast Prohibition's end.

   Today we see the same single-issue clout with the National Rifle Association. Like the Galactic Empire of "Star Wars," it can unleash a veritable clone force to assail anyone who dares suggest even modest reforms.

   Hence, though most Americans support such measures as universal background checks, such policies will go nowhere.

   However, if we are to identify a modern-day heir to the Anti-Saloon League's single-issue pathology, it is the religious right and its devotion to fighting reproductive rights.

   We aren't just talking about anti-abortion politics. We are talking, really, about forces devoted to making sure that the sex act has a punishment phase. Call it the Anti-Sex League.

   Observe efforts to gut the infrastructure that allows women to avoid unwanted pregnancies and therefor abortions. Observe efforts to foist the fraud of "abstinence education" off as sex education.

   What could motivate Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to yankfunding from Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast for HIV testing and prevention services?

   It's the same mentality that caused Abbott to pull Planned Parenthood from the list of the state's Medicaid providers.

   All any of these steps do is undermine public health. Smart. Very smart.

   We are to presume that all of these steps are linked to Planned Parenthood's dedication to preserving women's right to legal and safe abortions. In that regard, we can see symmetry with Prohibition's unintended consequences.

   Anyone alive in the dark days before Roe vs. Wade knows that if one had the means to have an abortion, one had one. That was as plain as day, and Roe or not, it will not change. The question is who was so empowered or so prohibited.

   Back during Prohibition, as Mencken wrote, the drinking, and the hypocrisy, did not stop. Chief among hypocrites was President Warren Harding, who supported Prohibition, but who had his own substantial stash of booze for his own entertainment.

   The Anti-Saloon League, as with the anti-abortion movement, advertised its cause as protecting human life. However, countless Americans died from alcohol poisoning from illegal hooch, because – yeah – people were going to drink despite what the government said.

   (Hmm. Sounds like the deadly back-alley abortions of pre-Roe, for whatever Bible-thumping policy makers may say, people are going to have sex, and abortions.)

   It is amazing that the Republican Party, which has made "liberty" and "less government" rallying cries, would be so devoted to the intrusive and presumptive state actions that a ban on abortion would require.

   Yes, just like Prohibition.

   Let us take heart with knowledge that Harding's hypocrisy and the clout of the Anti-Saloon League finally withered. Franklin Roosevelt ran and won against the forces that gave us Prohibition. His words upon inauguration: "What America needs now is a drink."

   Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.