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Howcome all the maps you use in the episodes show countries' borders as they were before the war? Wouldn't it be useful to show who held which territory during the week in question (with fuzzy colors for ambiguous control) ?

Ahh, thanks for answering. I've been doing a monthly donation for a while now. Hope more people join in, and you can use that money for maps like that! It would really help follow along on the weekly episodes!

Many of the proposals from people who want to reform campaign finance aren't about getting money completely out of politics, but are about giving people who are powerless in the current environment the tools (money) they need to compete with a few massively wealthy people.

I think this is key, and I think a huge obstacle is how badly most people who are aware of money in politics being a big problem actually understand the nature of the problem.

Most people jump first to "politicians with more money win elections", which is actually somewhat untrue - if multiple candidates in a race all have more than enough money to run an effective campaign, having more money than another candidate gives some advantage but it's statistically a fairly small one. It's far from decisive. A better run campaign, or more effective message, will nearly always trump more money in that kind of situation.

After that, people also are aware of what most seem to think is a secondary problem, which is that contributors buy access or get what they want from elected officials - although people don't always understand that a lot of this is a mechanism of selection rather than direct pay-for-play.

What hardly any people think of, though, are things like this:

• The Wealth Primary (that's a blog post I wrote while working for John Bonifaz's campaign for secretary of state of MA in 2006, but the original blog is gone so that's my update on my personal blog).

• How it skews a politician's outlook and work when such a large chunk of their day to day job is fundraising, personally. How someone who spends many hours a week making phone calls asking for money is going to do a very different job than someone who spends all their time on legislation, committee meetings, constituent meetings, and other things that we imaging an elected legislator's job actually is.

• How the need to spend much of their time fundraising actually turns a lot of people who away from even running. People who would be great at the job, who have some experience working as staffers for elected officials and/or on campaigns, but who know that the job is half fundraising and that's not a job they want.

• How it changes the tenor of a campaign when the candidate spends so much less time talking to voters door to door or at town hall type events, because they have to spend so much time fundraising. This is much more salient in state and local elections, where candidates really could spend most of their campaign talking to voters if they didn't have to fundraise, but these kinds of campaigns are what build up the pool of likely candidates for governor or federal office.

So many people out there are fed up about how money corrupts politics, but are focused on solving the rather minor problem of duelling Senate candidates competing for who has more millions, rather than the things we really need to be focusing on, like the wealth primary.

This matters a lot, because these problems are different enough that they call for very different kinds of solutions. While some things (like a Constitutional amendment undoing Citizens United) will help with all of it, many other measures are more targeted at the more important problems - and these are exactly the kinds of measures most people don't know enough to care about.

Edit: For people who clicked on it earlier, there was a stale link in my Wealth Primary post. I fixed it. This is a post I wrote exploring ways in which money distorts and corrupts politics, many of which a lot of people who aren't in politics don't usually think of: http://bluemassgroup.com/2006/05/money-and-campaigns/

So it's clear that you'd have voted in favor of the amendment to strip those provisions from the NDAA - an amendment which sadly did not pass in either house. However, if the final NDAA conference bill came up for a vote with that provision intact - which it did - and your choice were up or down on the whole thing ... how would you vote?

I find the chart at the bottom of this article to be a very useful aid in how to think about it: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3223