Billionaire self-pity and the Koch brothers - Glenn Greenwald. Since the financial crisis of 2008, one of the most revealing spectacles has been the parade of financial elites who petulantly insist that they are the victims of societal hostility: political officials heap too much blame on them, public policy burdens them so unfairly, the public resents them, and — most amazingly of all — President Obama is a radical egalitarian who is unprecedentedly hostile to business interests. One particularly illustrative example was the whiny little multi-millionaire hedge fund manager (and CNBC contributor), Anthony Scaramucci, who stood up at an October, 201o, town hall meeting and demanded to know: ”when are we going to stop whacking at the Wall Street pinata?” I’m not someone who sees the Koch Brothers as some sort of unique threat. That said, this Weekly Standard interview shows how delusional and extreme the Koch Brothers are — though in ways quite representative of other resentful elites.
Let’s begin with this: 9 Bills That Would Put Creationism in the Classroom. Ginni Thomas joins The Daily Caller - Jennifer Epstein and Kenneth P. Vogel. Walker's Attack on People of Color. While Wisconsin protest coverage has focused on GOP efforts to limit public sector collective bargaining, less attention has been given to the Republican attack on the poor and people of color.
On Saturday, activists gathered at the Exposing Colorlines event at the capitol to focus on the under-reported aspects of Walker's budget and proposed GOP legislation. The numbers at Saturday's protest were down from previous weeks, but the energy, creativity, and diversity reached new heights, especially with increased involvement of young people performing music and spoken word.
The vitality of the event was both a function of creative energy and of participants drawing attention to the little-discussed ways legislation will impact people of color. For example: Walker's proposed budget repair bill restricts medical assistance eligibility, leaving 70,000 poor, disproportionately of-color people without medical coverage.
CMD has discussed some of these issues previously, see here and here. Jim DeMint: Public Broadcasting Should Go Private. Tea Party pollutocrat David Koch hosted one of Mitt Romney’s first fundraisers for 2012 campaign « Climate Progress. By Joe Romm on March 16, 2011 at 8:49 am "Tea Party pollutocrat David Koch hosted one of Mitt Romneys first fundraisers for 2012 campaign" Last year, the New York Times revealed that petrochemical billionaire David Koch was among a small group of multibillionaires quietly promoting a presidential candidacy for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Today, a report by investigative journalist Peter Stone states that Koch actually hosted Romney last summer for one of his first large fundraising parties.
ThinkProgress has the story. Romney’s team boasts veteran bigwig bundlers such as Woody Johnson, who owns the New York Jets; Wayne Berman, who chairs the lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations; and David Koch of Koch Industries. This trio and other big bundlers have done yeoman’s work already. Last August, Koch and his wife hosted an evening soiree at their home in the Hamptons for Romney. The Koch brothers have historically played a key role in selecting GOP candidates. Palin 'becoming Al Sharpton'? - Jonathan Martin and John F. Harris.
Sarah Palin has played the sexism card, accusing critics of chauvinism against a strong woman. She has played the class card, dismissing the Bush family as “blue bloods” and complaining that she is the target of snobbery by people who dislike her simply because she is “not so hoity-toity.” Most famously, she has played the victim card — never more vividly than when she invoked the loaded phrase “blood libel” against liberals and media commentators in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. Continue Reading Palin defends 'blood libel' Palin’s flamboyant rhetoric always has thrilled supporters, but lately it is coming at a new cost: a backlash, not from liberals but from some of the country’s most influential conservative commentators and intellectuals. (Related: Sarah Palin charges critics with 'blood libel') Palin’s politics of grievance and group identity, according to these critics, is a betrayal of conservative principles.
“Conservatives are very proud of that,” Wehner said. Wisconsin Proxies. Sarah Palin Has Secret ‘Lou Sarah’ Facebook Account To Praise Other Sarah Palin Facebook Account. Sarah Palin has apparently created a second Facebook account with her Gmail address so that this fake “Lou Sarah” person can praise the other Sarah Palin on Facebook. The Gmail address is available for anyone to see in this leaked manuscript about Sarah Palin, and the Facebook page for “Lou Sarah” — Sarah Palin’s middle name is “Louise” — is just a bunch of praise and “Likes” for the things Sarah Palin likes and writes on her other Sarah Palin Facebook page. “Lou Sarah” even says “amen” to Facebook posts by Sarah Sarah. UPDATE (2/23): The “Lou Sarah” account has been taken down.
So we’ve been reading this leaked Palin book. Interesting read! But this manuscript doesn’t seem quite ready to be published, despite it being leaked around to the entire Internet. “Lou Sarah” is also friends with some of Sarah Palin’s political appointees. From what we can see, “Lou” wrote a total of four happy things on Bristol Palin’s fan page in recent months: Justice Thomas’s Wife Sets Up a Conservative Lobbying Shop. , the justice’s wife, said on libertyinc.co, a Web site for her new political consulting business, that she saw herself as an advocate for “liberty-loving citizens” who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues.
She promised to use her “experience and connections” to help clients raise money and increase their political impact. Ms. Thomas’s effort to take a more operational role on conservative issues could intensify questions about her husband’s ability to remain independent on issues like campaign finance and health care, legal ethicists said. Justice Thomas “should not be sitting on a case or reviewing a statute that his wife has lobbied for,” said Monroe H.
Freedman, a Hofstra Law School professor specializing in legal ethics. “If the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that creates a perception problem.” Ms. Mr. Ms. “The level of bias we’re seeing is really troubling,” Mr. Tea Party Patriots Investigated: "They Use You and Abuse You" Manny Crisostomo/Zuma Two years ago, Tea Party Patriots got its start as a scrappy, ground-up conservative organization. Its rowdy activists demanded more transparency and less business-as-usual in the nation's capital, and they worked hard to elect candidates who they believed wouldn't succumb to the ways of Washington. But it didn't take long for the grassroots tea party organization to embrace the DC establishment—and some of its more questionable practices. Lately, Tea Party Patriots (TPP) has started to resemble the Beltway lobbying operations its members have denounced.
The group's leaders have cozied up to political insiders implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and have paid themselves significant salaries. TPP accepted the use of a private jet and a large donation of anonymous cash right before a key election, and its top officials have refused to discuss how the money was spent. The MDS deal with TPP is anything but cheap. "Tea Party Patriots? Jacobs: Egyptians Need to Learn From America's Mistake of "Blindly Voting" For Change. Paul Ryan's State Of The Union Rebuttal: The Best They Got? Paul Ryan delivered a heck of a rebuttal tonight, especially if you wanted to make one of those "Sarah Palin breathing" videos. But as far as the facts -- on taxes, stimulus, and health care reform -- go, a lot of Ryan's rebuttal came rebutted-back in advance of its delivery. Ryan: Not Exactly A Budget-Busting Genius Ryan's budget plan doesn't balance the budget: The CBO score that people are relying on to reach that conclusion doesn't actually estimate how much revenue Ryan would raise, instead it just takes Ryan's word for it that his ideas would raise 19 percent of GDP.
That's because the CBO doesn't score tax issues, that's done by the Joint Committee on Taxation. Ryan's Neat Trick On Taxation As often as Ryan despairs over the high burden taxpayers face, it often goes unsaid that Ryan's own tax plan is an idiot exacta: It slashes government revenues while simultaneously raising taxes on 90 percent of taxpayers. Ryan and the "Failed Stimulus" The Affordable Care Act: Getting It Right. Health-care law: Arizona tries new approach to get by federal Medicaid rules. Republican efforts to repeal or limit the reach of the new health-care law took a new direction last week when Arizona lawmakers approved a novel and controversial attempt to cut Medicaid for 280,000 of the state's poor. The bill, requested and signed by Gov. Jan Brewer (R), empowers her to make a formal request, most likely this week, for a federal waiver to avoid complying with provisions of the law that prohibit states from tightening their eligibility requirements for Medicaid.
Twenty-nine Republican governors, including Brewer, have signed a letter calling on President Obama and congressional leaders to remove the provision from the law. But Arizona is the first state to, in effect, play chicken with the Obama administration by directly requesting a reprieve and daring Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to refuse. The move is widely regarded as a long shot. Sorry Tea Partiers -- The GOP Only Cares About Their Corporate Paymasters and Wealthy Elites Like the Kochs | Tea Party and the Right.
January 19, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Early this month, when John Boehner was sworn in as the new speaker of the House of Representatives, he tipped his hat to the teabag activists across the country who had fueled the Republican takeover of the chamber last fall. He almost choked up as he promised to "give the government back to the American people. " Boehner was not choking back tears, however, he literally was choking on the flagrant hypocrisy of his words. Throughout his two decades in Congress, the new speaker has been a reliable ally of corporate interests. Of course, most congressional leaders work with lobbyists, so that's not odd, but to have them also be his closest friends and social chums -- well, you just want to say, "For heaven's sake, Johnnie, get a life!
" These influence peddlers are now the speaker's inner circle, guiding his legislative decisions. Stephen Colbert Ridicules The Dismantling Of Wake County's Successful Schools. Last night, Stephen Colbert deployed "The Word" to bring his show's unique and wonderful brand of language-brutality upon the recent decision of the Wake County, N.C. school board to dismantle a successful school system that had achieved schools of high economic diversity and astounding rates of parent satisfaction. The baseline reason given for taking apart a success story was austerity. But Colbert highlighted a lot of the pure disingenuous nonsense involved -- in the mind of Tea Party acolyte and school board member John Tedesco, for instance, the successful program was nothing more than government sponsored "social engineering," and the poor were much better off in a situation that magnified their hopelessness.
TEDESCO: If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public will see the challenges, the need to make it successful...Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it. To which Colbert archly responded: "See? Doctors and Tea Party. The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama.
On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green.
Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small. The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists.