The War On The Plutocrats Has It's First Victim, No Wait Second, No Wait ...

As we noted yesterday, the plutocrat Republican majority on the Supreme Court further trashed campaign contribution limits that have been in place since the Constitution-shredding Republican debacle known as Watergate.  Today, in the tradition of other Republican-funding, self-pitying plutocrat billionaires, Evil Koch #1 (Charles) penned an op/ed in the (where else?) Wall Street Journal bawling about how unfairly he and Evil Koch #2 (David) are being treated by the "collectivists."  (Haven't heard that term lately, though we don't make a point of visiting the fever swamps of the John Birch Society/ Ayn Rand/ tea bagger world).  Don't we "collectivists" get it?  Their "free speech" is not only infinitely more deep-pocketed, but it's not supposed to be criticized!

As a public service, and as an antidote to the projection, piety and false umbrage in the op/ed,  we wish to point out a few things to anyone unfamiliar with the Koch brothers' assault on American democracy:

-- they're the compassionate plutocrats who fund the "Americans for Plutocrat Prosperity" ads, most recently those manifestly dishonest anti-Obamacare ads running in key States;

-- they're the civic-minded plutocrats opposing a mass transit project in Tennessee;

-- they're the environmentalist plutocrats who fund deniers of global climate change;

-- they're the grass-roots plutocrats who fund (through "Americans for Plutocrat Prosperity") the credulous cosplay conservative "grass-roots" movement known as the Tea Baggers Party;

-- they're the transparent plutocrats who have created a network of "dark money" fronts to hide fellow plutocrats' funding of far-right causes;

-- they're the small-d democratic plutocrats (along with the American Legislative Exchange Council) funding the voter suppression activities around the country.

Yeah, nothing to worry about from them.

(Image:  The Koch brothers (visual approximation) with apologies to Matt Groening & The Simpsons)

An Anthology of Koch Brothers' Lying Obamacare Ads

Here it is.  It was a lot of lies and bullshit to wade through, so thank you, Joan McCarter.  We expect this to have to be updated on a regular basis, of course.

Lies and the Lying Liars*

As enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) reaches 4 million, there are signs that getting the uninsured to view it favorably, much less sign up, is proving a tough sell:

Fifty-six percent of those who identified as uninsured in a new poll conducted in February by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a research institution, had an unfavorable view of the health care reform law, compared to just 22 percent who said they view it favorably. The uninsured now see Obamacare less favorably than they did when the enrollment period began in October. As recently as September, more uninsured approved of the law than disapproved.  (our emphasis)

There's no question the bollixed rollout of Obamacare in October has contributed to the reluctance of many of the uninsured to take a closer look at how they would benefit from the coverage.  There are many other reasons individuals might mistrust health care reform or the government or whatever.  But the ceaseless, false drumbeat of the far right, magnified by its media outlets and often segued into the "mainstream media," has doubtless had a negative effect on public perception and, therefore, enrollment.

As the 2014 elections approach, Republicans are aiming to make Obamacare the main cudgel with which to beat vulnerable Democrats.  The Koch brothers' Americans for Plutocrat Prosperity have been aggressively running false ads around the country about "victims" of Obamacare:

Some eight months before the midterm elections, the airwaves are being flooded with the sad tales of Obamacare victims. The tales all fall into the same predictable rut. First, the poor victim steps forward to share his (or, more frequently, her) tale of deprivation. Then reporters discover the putative victim is either a non-victim, or possibly a beneficiary, of Obamacare. Then conservatives get angry.**

(**Conservatives like Byron York, who writes for the driveway-cluttering Washington Examiner, who want you to believe that fact-checking a Koch brothers lie story like cancer victim Julie Boonstra's amounts to attacking the victim -- please go f**k yourself, Mr. York.)

The Koch brothers' propagandists have gotten so desperate to find "stories" that they've even resorted to hiring actors and Republican activists to tell their lies  tales of faux woe.  So, tens of millions will be spent in a desperate campaign to discredit and derail a signal Obama Administration achievement, to fire up the sheeple in the Republican base for the off-year election, and to win back the Senate.   But in the process, remember one thing:  the bottom line is that they just don't want "those people" =cough= "The Moochers" =cough= from having health insurance.  Think of that for a moment.

For that reason, we can't think of viler people than the Koch brothers and their pants-on-fire ideological cave-mates.

Apparently, Harry Reid thinks the same way:

*Apologies to Sen. Al Franken.

The Koch Brothers' Dark Money

The once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle has an in-depth investigative piece in today's edition examining the "dark money" being raised by a right-wing network led by the god-awful Koch brothers.  (To remind you of the Koch brothers' political pedigree, their father Fred was a founding member of the John Birch Society, so the nuts didn't fall far from the tree.)  Here's an intro into the lengths to which the Kochs and their minions go to shield their plutocrat donors from exposure:

Its funders remain largely unknown; the coalition was carefully constructed with extensive legal barriers to shield its donors.

But they have substantial firepower. Together, the 17 conservative groups that made up the network raised at least $407 million during the 2012 campaign, according to the analysis of tax returns by The Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.  [snip]

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame Law School professor who studies the tax issues of politically active nonprofits, said he has never seen a network with a similar design in the tax-exempt world.

“It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure,” said Mayer, who examined some of the groups’ tax filings. “It’s designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap.”

Having lost in their efforts to buy the 2012 election, the Kochs are funneling millions of dollars into sabotaging the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), as well as efforts to weaken or eliminate environmental regulations, gun control laws, and social safety net programs.  Their network includes allies such as the National Gun Manufacturers Rifle Association, the Club for Growth, Jim "Demented" DeMint's Heritage Foundation, and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.  In other words just about every frothing fringe right-wing assortment of sociopaths extant.

For all of this and more, let's not forget to thank Chief "Justice" John Roberts and his merry band of anarchist right-wingers for their Citizens United ruling! (We have a feeling "Justice" Kennedy's permanent blinders would still cause him to find that such arrangements "do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." )

Republicans Offer College Students Obamacare Alternative: Tappa Kegga Beer!

Just when you thought the Koch brothers and Rethuglicans had bottomed out in their frantic efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), you find out they're still descending in their bathysphere:

Obamacare needs young and healthy people to sign up for health insurance for its finances to work, and its opponents know it. That's why groups like the Koch brothers-backed Generation Opportunity, which was behind the infamous videos with 'Creepy Uncle Sam,' have sprung up and urged young Americans to opt out of the law.

Step one of their master plan was that video series, an attempt to go viral. The next step, it seems, is going to where the young people are: Tailgating at college football games.

As Yahoo! News reported, Generation Opportunity teamed up with College Republicans to throw an anti-Obamacare party outside the University of Miami's game this Saturday against Virginia Tech.

Pizza, anti-Obamacare tchotchkes, beer pong (but no beer, mind you!), and "music" were among the goodies provided to the inebriated chuckleheads at this tailgating party, all in an effort to try to convince them not to sign up for health care.  (Reasoned arguments?  Nah!  Pass the brewski!)  That's the Koch brothers' "Creepy Uncle Sam" in the picture above with the guzzling co-eds.  It's unclear how many of them knew what they were being manipulated for or by whom.

If there's anyone more cynical and malignant out there than these ratf**kers, who are spending so much time and money to convince the "invincibles" that they don't need no stinkin' insurance, we'd like to know who they are.