I caught the Diane Rehm show while in the car running errands. The segment to which I listened seemed to be all about the Trump campaign and his relative lack of SuperPac money and organization compared to the Clinton campaign. I heard next to nothing about any policy differences. All I heard was how critically important big money donors are in this election. Here's specifically what I learned from NPR's "expert" panel today:

Hillary's massive advantage in big money donors to her campaign and to the SuperPacs backing heris a good thing, and not just because it will help her win the election.

Really, Hillary's ability to fund raise, and the political organization she created to structure a group of large SuperPacs who coordinate with one another, and in many cases with her campaign itself, is a huge plus. It shows she will be a more competent President than Trump because she knows how to get billionaires and millionaires to fork up millions of dollars to fund her historic race to be the first female president.

Oh, the panelists blithely admitted big donors expect "time with the candidate" for their donations, but nothing negative was said about that fact, or that they expect more than just face-to-face meetings with the politicians to whom they invest such large sums of cash. Indeed, as far as the panelists were concerned, the fact that Hillary's campaign is spending millions right now for television ads running in Ohio and other "battleground states," and that her SuperPacs have been spending money on general election ads attacking Trump since May, is an example of her advantage over Trump, as both a candidate and as a potential leader of the most powerful nation, economically and militarily, on the face of the planet.

Trump, on the other hand was sharply criticized for not creating a similar SuperPac structure to fund his campaign going forward. Apparently, big money donors are confused regarding where to place their bets to which SuperPacs they should donate in order to help him and other Republicans win.

Not one panelist, nor the guest host sitting in for Diane Rehm, said a word about the corruption inherent in a political system that relies on billions of dollars of contributions, mostly from the wealthiest one percent and .01 percent of Americans to fund our elections. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

Not one considered how our democracy has been buried by billions of dollars of campaign funding. Oh, they shared a few jokes about how both Trump and Clinton are so unlikable that one woman's obituary recently stated that because they were her two options, she decided to go to heaven. Ha, ha. Very amusing. To them, anyway. That was the closest they came to raising the issue of money as a corrosive influence on our politics. A gallows humor joke.

On to the next thing I learned:

Trump's attacks on his opponent's reliance on SuperPac money in the primaries, and the corrupting influence of big money represents a leftist critique of our political process.

Gee, I wonder, if you asked all those Tea Party supporters of his if they think his attacks regarding the SuperPacs who supported his GOP establishment opponents constituted a leftist critique, how they would respond? Well, surveys have shown that his supporters consistently approve of his stance that big money in politics is a bad thing. For example, he did much better in counties where white GOP voters were financially distressed.

When NBC went to Trump rallies to ask people why they supported Trump, they gave reporters a consistent response as the single biggest reason they backed him:

If you go to a Trump rally and ask people why they support him, what’s the most common answer? You might be surprised. [...]

... [I]t’s an issue that’s been almost entirely ignored by the Republican Party in recent years: Money in politics.

“He can’t be bought,” Eleanor Crume, 72, said at a South Carolina rally. “He’s not going to be bought by the lobbyists.”

“He can speak his mind because he’s not backed by these donors who say what he can and can’t say,” Travis Klinefelter, a 39-year old Iowa nurse, said.

“He’s not bought and paid for by special interests,” Dominic La Rocca of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida said. “Insurance companies, the banks, they get the law that they want.”

I don't think any of these people would consider themselves leftists, do you? Yet, NPR's panelists live in such a bubble that they simply assume that anyone who criticizes the corrosive effect of money on politics must be making a lefty argument. I speak to Trump supporters on a regular basis. Trust me, they are as far right as you can get. But they all say the same thing to me that they told NBC: they think our politicians have been bought by big money interests and they are sick of it, and that's what they like about Trump the most.

Okay, last thing I learned:

NPR is worthless as a news source.

Actually, that's not quite true. I knew this a long time ago. But today's panel discussion on the Diane Rehm show is just more piece of evidence that demonstrates our news media, even our so-called politically independent, publicly-funded news outlets, PBS and NPR , are nothing more than shills for the political elites of both parties, The the media elites share the same opinions about big money in politics that establishment Republicans and Democrats, who achieved their exalted positions because of their fealty to their big money donors, do - it's just the way things are, and that's not so bad. It helps to pay their one percent salaries, after all.

Well gag me with a spoon. Such boot-licking acceptance by the media of our failure to provide even a minimum semblance of democracy is appalling, and I'm being way too kind by describing them in that manner.