For a double-shot of Goldman-owns-the-Democrats goodness, may I suggest a round of Lowry followed by a Costa chaser? Costa kills with a just-the-facts-ma’am paragraph:

With former senior aides to Obama, Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and other Democrats on its payroll, Goldman isn’t fretting about DeFazio and company. As Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner reports, four of the five in-house lobbyists at Goldman were Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill, with the remaining one a contributor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Directing Goldman’s Washington shop is Michael Paese, Frank’s former go-to committee staffer, who had responsibility for committee policy related to the banking, securities, and insurance industries. One of Paese’s deputies is Ken Connolly, a veteran of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And this week, Paese’s bosses enlisted Greg Craig, Obama’s former White House counsel, through the law firm Skadden Arps, just days after Goldman was charged with fraud by the SEC.

Remember, out of every dollar that Goldman Sachs spends on buying political influence, 73 cents goes to Democrats. And, as NR has reported more than once, it’s not just Goldman, and not just Wall Street. The Democrats are the preferred party of big, entrenched business interests, with a few important exceptions.

In 2006 and 2008, Wall Street poured money on Democrats. Big Wall Street firms that made major political contributions — including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Lehman — gave the majority of their contributions to Democrats. The hedge funds followed suit, as they are inclined to do — they depend on the big Wall Street institutions to clear their trades. And it wasn’t just Wall Street: Democrats led in six of the ten big-business sectors tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics: law, health care, defense contractors, communications/electronics, finance/insurance/real estate, and the catch-all category that includes chemical firms, retailers, manufacturers, food processors, and other industrial operators. Republicans held on to agriculture — which is, not coincidentally, the industry in which they are the least interested in practicing capitalism: It’s not the philosophical commitment to free markets that opens up corporate checkbooks, but the promise of favorable exceptions to those principles.

Americans now face a legal mandate to buy the insurance lobby’s products on terms set by insurance lobbyists. We are on the hook for an unlimited financial commitment to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Dodd bill promises a similarly open-ended commitment to propping up ailing financial firms, indefinitely. You get what you pay for.