Credit: minutemennews.com

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Butch Hancock would have come up with, had he composed “Derp Road Song.”

We have a great deal of fun here with certain elements of the content provided by The New York Times—coughDowdcoughBrookscoughDouthatcough—but there are times in which the NYT reminds us that there is one thing it does better than any other newspaper. It can be The New York Times. Over the weekend, courtesy of a team of three NYT reporters, we had one of those moments.

Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.