Democratic Group Asks Koch Brothers for Donations After Attacking Them

It's official: there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans

Chris Moody reports at The Ticket:
Koch Industries, the billion-dollar energy conglomerate that faces regular attacks from liberal groups for donating millions to conservative and free-market political causes, reported that a national Democratic group approached the company seeking campaign donations. The appeal went out out over the signature of Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).

The DSCC asked Koch for a five-figure donation, a request the company is making very public after it weathered months of criticism from Democrats, including the DSCC.

A Koch spokesman responded to the request with a scathing letter to Murray.

"For many months now, your colleagues in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leadership have engaged in a series of disparagements and ad hominem attacks about us, apparently as part of a concerted political and fundraising strategy," wrote Philip Ellender, Koch's president of government and public affairs. "So you can imagine my chagrin when I got a letter from you on June 17 asking us to make five-figure contributions to the DSCC. You followed that up with a voicemail indicating that, if we contributed heavily enough, we would garner an invitation to join you and other Democratic leaders at a retreat in Kiawah Island this September." ...>more

How Long Has "New Media Strategies" Been Trolling Wikipedia on the Kochs' Behalf?

It’s official: the Kochs pay social media PR companies to troll the Internet on their behalf.

Yasha Levine reports at The eXiled:

According to Lee Fang over at ThinkProgress, an internal Wikipedia investigation revealed that a number of Wikipedia users making pro-Koch edits were actually sock puppets set up by employees at an Internet marketing company called New Media Strategies. After being outed, a New Media Strategies rep all but confirmed the findings of the Wikipedia investigation:

Soren Dayton, a GOP operative and executive at New Media Strategies, is reported to be the contact for Koch Industries at NMS. Reached by phone yesterday by ThinkProgress, Dayton exclaimed, “I’m not going to talk about this, thanks,” before hanging up. Lyndsey Medsker, a senior account director for NMS, spoke to ThinkProgress today. She explained that NMS also maintains the Koch Industries Twitter page, Facebook page, and has an active team working on promoting Koch Industries in the comment section of blogs and news websites.

Reading Lee Fang’s post, I couldn’t help but think that the name of the company, New Media Strategies, sounded oddly familiar. ...>more

BOO YAH! "Anonymous" Nails Americans For Prosperity!

"Shadowy" Collective Calls for Boycott of Paper, Other Products Manufactured by Koch Industries

Christopher Weber reports at Politics Daily:

The shadowy activists who call themselves "Anonymous," and who made headlines last year for attacking websites opposed to WikiLeaks, have entered the Wisconsin budget fight fray.

The group temporarily knocked out a site belonging to Americans For Prosperity, a political organization backed by David and Charles Koch. In a press release, "Anonymous" said Sunday's denial of service attack was to protest the billionaire brothers' support of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is seeking to end collective bargaining rights for state workers' unions.

From the release:

The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating 'grassroots' organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America's broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers' political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.

...>more

Walker PWN3D!

Buffalo Beast Crank-Yanks Wisconsin Guv, Exposes Plans To Crush Workers

Everybody Wants Some Of That Koch Money

Washington Post Shamelessly Shills for Right-Wing Billionaire Brothers and their Supreme Court Lackeys

in a Washington Post editorial of February 20, 2011:

SUPREME COURT Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have been in the news lately for attending events sponsored by conservative interest groups. But they are not the only members of the high court who routinely enjoy all-expenses-paid excursions funded by third parties, including some that may be considered controversial.

Take Justice Stephen G. Breyer's 2008 trip to Vienna to attend the World Justice Forum, which is sponsored by what some conservatives consider the liberal American Bar Association; Justice Breyer next traveled on the ABA's dime to attend the group's international law symposium in Japan, where critics might assume that he picked up fresh ideas about how to insert foreign judicial notions into his jurisprudence. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent several days in Montreal in 2006 courtesy of the American Sociological Association, which billed its meeting as "an intellectual platform to explore how the constructs of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class and nation create serious inequalities, conflicts and human suffering." And in 2009, just before her Supreme Court nomination and while she was a federal appeals judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor enjoyed a week's respite in sunny San Juan, Puerto Rico, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union. Enough said.

Were these justices, often characterized as left-of-center, unduly swayed by their hosts' allegedly liberal agendas? Not likely. Was their presence an indication of being in sync with the group's views - or were they invited in the first place because the groups believed they shared common values? Perhaps.

The same could be said of the outings by Justices Scalia and Thomas. The two drew fire from the liberal interest group Common Cause for accepting free trips from the Federalist Society to speak at dinners hosted by corporate titan and political donor Charles Koch. The group has asked the Justice Department to determine whether the justices should have recused themselves from the 2010 Citizens United case that paved the way for increased corporate and union donations. The move is far-fetched, because both justices had expressed hostility toward certain campaign finance restrictions. In other words, they did not need Charles Koch to prod them.

But all the members of the high court should take steps to avoid the kind of damage that can be inflicted if justices are simply seen as political players with ideological agendas.

Justices should ensure that all outside appearances are open to the public or the press to discourage the kind of conspiracy theories that inevitably surround closed-door events. They should consider paying their own way or, if possible, seeking court funds to underwrite travel that has a legitimate educational purpose, to eliminate concerns about being indebted to outside groups.

Appearances before groups that do not obviously or necessarily share a justice's legal views but extend an invitation would be refreshing.

Justices should not be forced to live cloistered lives devoid of meaningful exchanges with individuals and outside groups - even those with strongly held beliefs. But they should be careful not to put themselves in situations where their impartiality is cast in doubt or allow themselves to be seen as on one side. The legitimacy and independence of the high court are at stake.

Surprise, Surprise! Koch Bros. Own A Huge Chunk Of Scott Walker's Soul

Andy Kroll writes at Mother Jones:

Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker, whose bill to kill collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions has caused an uproar among state employees, might not be where he is today without the Koch brothers. Charles and David Koch are conservative titans of industry who have infamously used their vast wealth to undermine President Obama and fight legislation they detest, such as the cap-and-trade climate bill, the health care reform act, and the economic stimulus package. For years, the billionaires have made extensive political donations to Republican candidates across the country and have provided millions of dollars to astroturf right-wing organizations. Koch Industries' political action committee has doled out more than $2.6 million to candidates. And one prominent beneficiary of the Koch brothers' largess is Scott Walker.

According to Wisconsin campaign finance filings, Walker's gubernatorial campaign received $43,000 from the Koch Industries PAC during the 2010 election. That donation was his campaign's second-highest, behind $43,125 in contributions from housing and realtor groups in Wisconsin. The Koch's PAC also helped Walker via a familiar and much-used politicial maneuver designed to allow donors to skirt campaign finance limits. The PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker. The RGA also spent a whopping $3.4 million on TV ads and mailers attacking Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker ended up beating Barrett by 5 points. The Koch money, no doubt, helped greatly... >more

Pimp Hard, Libertard, Pimp Hard!

In which Reason editor Matt Welch grabs an anti-Koch conspiracy theory in his teeth and runs with it like a big dog

Matt Welch writes at Reason:

Back in 2008, if you pressed a libertarian planning to vote for Barack Obama, chances are he’d yelp out the name Austan Goolsbee. The Libertarians for Obama website (which, appropriately, shut down after November 2008), claimed “Obama’s chief economic adviser—a friend from the University of Chicago, where they both taught—sounds an awful lot like a libertarian.” The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle repeatedly pinned her preference for the Democrat on his closeness with Goolsbee, “one of my favorite professors, and a hell of an economist.” The libertarian economist David Friedman cited Goolsbee when musing to the San Francisco Chronicle that Obama might end up emulating the liberals who launched New Zealand’s wildly successful deregulation project in the 1980s.

Two years later there probably isn’t a libertarian-leaning person on earth who still thinks Obama has it in him to pull a Nixon-goes-to-China when it comes to downsizing government. The president has followed up George W. Bush’s big-government disaster with a big-government catastrophe, setting consecutive annual records for spending, deficits, and debt while extending the pernicious too-big-to-fail doctrine all the way to the auto parts business. And every day on the hustings in advance of the Democrats’ midterm drubbing, Obama campaigned against a wholly fictional Bush record of deregulation and spending cuts.

“Between 2001 and 2009,” the president falsely claimed in September, “a very specific philosophy reigned in Washington: You cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires; you cut regulations for special interests; you cut back on investments in education and clean energy, in research and technology. The idea was if we put blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everybody to fend for themselves, America would grow and America would prosper.” As any good 2008 libertarian for Obama could tell you, that description does not square with Bush’s record of jacking up federal education spending by 58 percent in real terms, increasing significant regulations and regulatory spending at rates not seen since Richard Nixon, and boosting discretionary spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

And what about our University of Chicago hero Austan Goolsbee? In September he became chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Just before the appointment, Goolsbee gave a background briefing to reporters on behalf of the administration in which he trashed the most influential donors the libertarian universe has ever seen: Charles and David Koch, funders of the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and much more. (David Koch sits on the Reason Foundation’s Board of Trustees.)...

...>more (if you can stand it)

American Hero Hugo Chavez Holds Venezuelan Tea Party!

Nationalizes Businesses Owned By Teabagger-Bankrolling Koch Brothers

We are all Venezuelans now! CHA-VEZ! CHA-VEZ! CHA-VEZ!

The Gulf Today reports:

CARACAS: Koch Industries said it had received no word that Venezuela nationalised Fertinitro, a large fertilizer maker in which the US-based group has a substantial stake.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez announced that the takeover of Fertinitro, one of the world’s main producers of nitrogen fertilizer, days after vowing to radicalize his socialist “revolution” following legislative elections last month.

Koch has a 35 per cent stake in Fertinitro and Venezuelan state-run petrochemicals company Pequiven has 35 per cent. Saipem, a unit of Italy’s Eni, holds 20 per cent and local brewer and food company Polar has the rest.

“Koch Fertilizer has not received any official or informal notice, nor have we received any notification from Fertinitro regarding any disruption,” a Koch spokeswoman told Reuters by email. “We are attempting to obtain details and information.”

Chavez has put much of the OPEC member’s economy into government hands during his 12 years in power. He has said he will accelerate the pace of reforms after the opposition won 40 per cent of National Assembly seats and almost half the popular vote in Sept.26 parliamentary elections.

Also on Sunday, Chavez announced the nationalization of a local motor lubricants company and said the state would take control of nearly 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of land owned by British meat company Vestey Foods.

Last week, the government nationalised a major local agricultural supplies company, Agroislena.

Venezuela’s Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said the nationalization of Fertinitro guaranteed the government access to all the fertilizer it needed for farmers and a nationwide seeding plan that would ensure abundant, cheap food for all. ...>more

Caught On Tape: Koch Bros. Reveal Selves As Tea Party Astroturf Funders

Various Local Teabagger Commissars Report Back To Hive Mind Overlord At "Americans For Prosperity" Shindig



Find out more; view the entire documentary and order the DVD at astroturfwars.com.

"Tea Party" Republicans Nothing But Big Government Whores...

...just like their billionaire masters


Yasha Levine writes in The eXiled:

If tea party candidates were serious about stopping runaway spending and bringing fiscal responsibility to Washington, they would have to address one of the most egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars: federal farm subsidies. These handouts have become little more than taxpayer robbery, sending billions of dollars every year to wealthy “farmers,” even some who do not farm at all. It is not an opportunity the tea party is willing to take.

“Washington paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009, but to characterize the programs as either a ‘big government’ bailout or another form of welfare would be manifestly unfair—to bailouts and welfare,” says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog that tracks federal farm subsidies. “After all, with bailouts taxpayers usually get their money back (often with interest), while welfare recipients are subjected to harsh means-testing, time-limited benefits, and a work requirement. …”

Not so with farm subsidies. Forget about helping struggling farmers—this taxpayer-funded gravy train is skewed primarily toward the rich, paying out billions to “McRanches” and to businesses like Fidelity National Financial, a Fortune 500 company, which got $6.5 million over four years to not farm its land.

If you think such blatant waste would galvanize the tea party, think again.

Truth is, the primary goal of tea party politicians is not to shrink the government, but to use it to transfer taxpayer wealth to rich Republicans. And there is no bigger welfare-for-the-rich program than federal farm subsidies, which have been paying out $20 billion a year to some of the richest—and predominantly Republican-affiliated—people in the country.

With so much money sloshing around, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that tea party politicians have gotten their share.

Take Rep. Michele Bachmann, the self-appointed leader of the tea party movement and recent founder of the Tea Party Caucus, whose stated mission is to promote “fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution and limited government” in the House of Representatives.

But, as I first reported on Truthdig in December 2009, Bachmann’s free-market beliefs do not seem to apply to her own pocketbook. According to federal records compiled by the Environmental Working Group, since 1995 the congresswoman profited from $251,973 in dairy and corn subsidies via a stake in her family’s farm. Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her piece of the business earned her a (federally subsidized) income of up to $50,000 in 2008, a nice addition to the $174,000 taxpayer-funded salary she gets as a House member.

Bachmann is not the only tea party subsidy queen. Many of the fresh-faced tea party candidates jockeying for a spot in Congress on a platform of “fiscal responsibility” and “small government” are quite content to allow themselves—and their constituents—to keep feeding at the “big government” trough. ...>more

Anatomy Of A Libertard

Will Wilkinson: Libertard With Sadditude

Mark Ames writes in The eXiled:

Ever since Yasha and I first broke the story about the Koch brothers financing the Tea Party Campaign in February of 2009–a scoop that the New Yorker plagiarized from us a mere 18 months later, waytago fellas!–ever since then, I’ve been wondering: Have all those billions that the Brothers Koch invested into their libertarian brain-washing project paid off?

The answer: You betcha.

Let me demonstrate how the Kochs’ investment into libertarianism has paid off by way of a near-stroke experience I just had a couple of days ago. There I was, just wasting time on Reddit, when I came across one of those beyond-idiotic-and-evil headlines that bite you if you’re not careful: “Is rising inequality in America exaggerated?” The headline linked to an article in The Economist.

H’m, is inequality exaggerated? Gosh, let me get my ol’ chin-scratching machine out for this one…

Naturally, I did the exact wrong thing and clicked the headline, which brought me to an Economist article titled, “The Inequality Myth: Is Rising Inequality in America Exaggerated?” It was an oddly meat-headed headline for The Economist–usually that magazine’s formula is to zap the reader with somewhat more nuanced right-wing shock value, counteracted with elitist irony and know-it-all charm. Not this time:

SLATE’S Timothy Noah has just wrapped up a ten-part series on the rise of economic inequality in America. Most of Mr Noah’s instalments are devoted to examining the impact of one of the usual suspects—immigration, trade, de-unionisation, education, executive pay, etc—on the level of inequality in the United States. I found Mr Noah’s series disappointing from the start because he failed squarely to confront recent findings that challenge the premise of his exercise.

Many popular narratives about inequality are grounded on the alleged fact that wages and incomes at the middle and bottom of the distribution have been stagnant for decades. It appears that this, too, may be an artefact of insufficiently sophisticated methods for building the price indices used to calculate rates of inflation.

The author of this Economist blog post, identified as “W.W.”, sounded nothing like one of those sly Economist correspondents I’ve known in the past, and everything like a typical ham-fisted right-wing libertarian, the sort that are a dime a dozen in this country. So I wondered: Are the Kochs debasing even their own natural propaganda ally, The Economist, by dumbing it down with one of their own Koch-sponsored libertard meatheads? Who was this “W.W.”? ...>more

A Tea Party Fairy Tale

Fearful Old White Men

Don Monkerud writes at CounterPunch:

Current attempts to revive that Boston Tea Party of 1773 are marketing gimmicks to masquerade conservative forces bent on defeating Obama and destroying any attempt to reform the present gridlock political system. Examining the history of this faux-movement reveals the actors behind the curtain.

One of the earliest revivals of the Tea Party involved 100 people meeting in Seattle to protest the stimulus bill passed by Congress to keep the U.S. from descending into another Great Depression. After bloggers and libertarians spread a call for protest on the Internet, the media blew it into a major event.

Right-wing groups poured funding into the nascent movement. These groups included: Americans for Prosperity, a pro-tobacco, anti-healthcare and anti-tax lobbying organization; and FreedomWorks, a lobbying firm devoted to opposing taxes, immigration, healthcare reform and solutions to global warming. Koch Industries, an oil, mineral, ranching and securities conglomerate, funds both of these groups, while the Sarah Mellon Scaife foundation, with interests in oil, industry and banking, funds FreedomWorks.

After Fox News began promoting the Tea Party as a social movement, their crowds grew. Fox News entertainer, Glenn Beck, invited viewers to "celebrate with Fox News," by attending tax protests in Washington on April 15, the date federal tax returns are due.

A mere 3,000 Tea Party supporters attended the rally and grabbed the headlines. More people rallied across the country in support of Single Payer Healthcare Reform but they received few headlines. After much smaller groups of Tea Partiers protested in several cities, right-wing entertainers such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly giddily talked about "a growing movement" for weeks. Soon Republicans Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Ron Paul, Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich jumped on board, hoping to revive their failed political careers.

Seldom has so much been made about so little... >more

Teagagged!

Born in Offshore Drilling, Tea Party Protest Silenced Over Organizers' Links to 2008 "Drill Here! Drill Now!" Campaign

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine write in The Exiled:

Why are the hoppin’-mad Teabaggers so oddly quiet these days, ever since the BP oil disaster? That’s what Thomas Frank, author of What’s The Matter With Kansas? asked last week in his column, “Laissez-faire Meets The Oil Spill.” Ideologically, it’s painfully obvious why the Teabaggers are now the Teagaggers: their free-market gospel got mugged by oil-drenched reality — a reality so horrific that even pollster Frank Luntz couldn’t spin the BP disaster as the government’s fault. Best to just shut up when you’re that wrong.

But there’s another, more concrete reason why the Tea Party revolutionaries melted back into their suburbs as soon as the enormity of the Gulf spill disaster hit: The Tea Party evolved out of the pro-offshore drilling astroturf movement in 2008. They even share some of the same organizers and front groups, from PR operative like Eric Odom, to advocacy groups like FreedomWorks, whose combined efforts on the “Drill Here! Drill now!” astroturf campaign succeeded in opening up all of America’s coastlines and waters to offshore drilling, overturning a 27-year ban thanks to threats of “a Boston-style Tea Party,” as one Republican put it in the summer of 2008.

We have been following this movement from the beginning. Back in February 2009, on the eve of the first Tea Party protest, we published the first investigative article exposing the hidden relationship between the fake-”spontaneous” Tea Party protests that month, and the Republican machine that backed and promoted the campaign. Our research led again and again to the right-wing Koch brothers, who are worth a combined $32 billion as owners of the largest private oil company in America, Koch Industries. Koch-linked front groups like FreedomWorks and the Sam Adams Alliance (named after the leader of the original Boston Tea Party) played key roles in both the 2008 campaign to deregulate offshore drilling, and in the Tea Party movement.

Eric Odom, the PR flak who launched the Tea Party in February 2009, is the same Eric Odom who in August 2008 organized Republican Twitter-mobs who crashed Capitol Hill chanting “Drill here! Drill now!” to force Congress to open up American coastlines to unrestricted offshore oil drilling. Odom used the same Twitter front group, “DontGo Movement,” in both campaigns: Twittering the pro-offshore drilling mobs in 2008 and Twittering the first anti-Obama teabaggers in early 2009. Odom was listed as the “New Media Coordinator” for the Sam Adams Alliance until a few days before the very Tea Party Protest in 2009.

If these organization names get confusing, then just remember this: What really matters is the money behind them — namely, the billionaire Koch money. Since we first broke the Koch-Tea Party links, other media and research outlets have confirmed the Kochs’ key funding and organization role in the Tea Party campaign, as well as defeating climate change legislation and defeating health care reform. The Kochs are the largest oil & gas contributors to the last few electoral campaigns, and their network of fronts and think tanks is daunting... >more

Koch Family and Teabagger Loonies, 1961-2009: JFK Faced Same Crazy Rightwing Billionaire Family as Obama

Mark Ames writes in The eXiled:

While wasting time yesterday I looked up that bizarro rightwing “patriot” General Edwin A. Walker, who was fired by Kennedy for insubordination, and who was later allegedly nearly shot by Oswald in Texas, and who was tied to the notorious “JFK Wanted For Treason” flyer distributed in Dallas on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. (I posted that flyer in my last entry on the JFK-Obama Repeat scenario.)

Gen. Walker was yet another in a long illustrious line of closet homosexual tea-bagger Republicans who, after the assassinations wound down and the South gave up fighting desegregation, ended his days in public toilets trying to suck off undercover cops a la Larry Craig. But Gen. Walker’s spirit lives on, as these chilling New York Times articles below show.

One thing that’s particularly interesting is what a true patriot Ike was, going against the insane wing of his party to support the President, despite their ideological differences. Compare that to W’s sulking-groundhog act, or Cheney’s role in firing up the crazies.

Also note that the far-rightwing John Birch Society which led the radical anti-JFK movement branding him a traitor was co-founded by none other than Fred Koch of Koch Industries. Like father, like sons: today, sons Charles and David Koch are co-founders and major funders of FreedomWorks, the Tea Party movement, Americans for Prosperity, and the crazy-rightwing movement branding Obama as a traitor... >more