We still remember energy deregulation here. Who was to blame? Corporate whores in the state legislature. Today, the GOP doesn't hold enough seats in either house the state legislature to sustain a gubernatorial veto by themselves. If corporate big shots come to Sacramento looking for whore in the state legislature, they have to buy a Democrat. The Koch brothers don't come to these parts looking for some too often.

The thought for the day is that capitalism really wasn't such a bad thing back in the days when it existed, before it was replaced by corporate fascism, something that goes hand-in-hand with that dreaded institutional disease, corporate elephantiasis. Today, it easier for corporations suffering from elephantiasis to strangle upstart competition in the crib than compete with it. Without competition, corporations do nothing that justifies their existence, like innovate and keep their prices reasonable. There was a time, before corporate elephantiasis became a pandemic, that corporations would have been tripping over each other to solve environmental problems. Now, they deny there is a problem ("climate change is a hoax, so is peak oil and America only needs to tap its own energy resources to become energy independent forever". This followed a period where the problem was minimized. Remember when Donald Hodel, a corporate whore who became both Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Interior in the eighties? He said the solution to global warming was more sunscreen and hats with broader brims. Remember that matinee idol who became a corporate whore who appointed Mr. Hodel Secretary of Energy in 1982 and Secretary of the Interior in 1985. Yeah, that's right, him. The Sally Stanford of corporate whores. Remember when, while successfully running for President in 1980, he said that trees cause more pollution than automobiles?

Now the elephantiasis sufferers' favorite corporate whore is Jim Inhofe. He says "Problem? What problem? Environmental pollution is a scientific impossibility." Of course, Inhofe not only disbelieves climate science, but he doesn't believe in evolution, either. He's got a better reason not to believe in evolution than most people who don't. After two or three million years of human evolution, Inhofe is still an ape.

Another favorite corporate whore is Mitch McConnell. Like Inhofe and many other corporate whores, he can be found in the House of the Senate. Unlike Inhofe, McConnell is a firm believer in evolution. He not only believes that man evolved from a more primitive animal that also became monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas, but he thinks we're still evolving. He says that corporations are people. Not only are corporations people, but those that suffer from corporate elephantiasis are the highest form of human being yet evolved. A real Nietzschean Übermensch. They should have rights that we mere homo sapiens don't. Like the right to rule over the rest of us and the right to collect the wages on our labor for us, because they are wiser and would know better how to use our money than we do. McConnell is consulting the scientists at a Koch funded think tank to understand how, if corporations with elephantiasis are such smart people, how they crashed the world economy in 2008.