Crossroads GPS And Americans For Prosperity Outspend All Super PACs Combined

Think Progress Justice

By Rebecca Leber  on Aug 14, 2012 at 3:50 pm

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS (an affiliate of the super PAC American Crossroads) and the Koch brothers’ Americans For Prosperity have spent more on TV ads than every super PAC combined, according to a ProPublica analysis of CMAG data. Unlike super PACs, these groups do not have to disclose donors. That has allowed a handful of unknown billionaires  — like Sheldon Adelson and the Kochs — to funnel millions into attack ads through outside groups.

SOURCE

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Sheldon Adelson To Lavish $71 Million In Casino Money On GOP Super PACS, Nonprofits

Las Vegas Sands Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson speaks at a news conference for the Sands Cotai Central in Macau Wednesday, April 12, 2012. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

HuffPost

Peter H. Stone

Posted: 06/16/2012 12:24 am Updated: 06/16/2012  2:06 am

WASHINGTON — Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whose net worth makes him one of the world’s richest men, is on a check-writing spree that will soon bring his total political contributions in this election cycle to at least $71 million, according to sources familiar with his spending. That money is spread across the spectrum of GOP super PACs, which are required to disclose donors, and nonprofits, which are not.

Adelson and his wife, Miriam, along with other family donations, have already reached $36 million, including $10 million to the Romney-backing super PAC Restore Our Future that was reported this week. But two GOP fundraisers familiar with his plans say that Adelson has given or pledged at least $35 million more to three conservative nonprofit groups: the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS, another with ties to billionaires Charles and David Koch and a third with links to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Adelson, 78, is a staunch supporter of the Israeli right and a strong foe of American unions. In recent years, Adelson has been a major financier of GOP-allied groups, but has emerged this year as the consummate super donor in the wake of 2010 court rulings that permitted corporations, unions and individuals to supply unlimited amounts of money, sometimes anonymously, to independent groups that can advocate directly for candidates.

Adelson has told friends that he might give as much as $100 million in donations this year in support of GOP candidates and conservative issues. That target now seems easily within reach and could be surpassed, say the two GOP fundraisers with ties to the casino magnate.

Crossroads GPS — founded by GOP consultants Rove and Ed Gillespie in 2010 alongside the super PAC American Crossroads — could wind up as the major recipient of the casino titan’s largess, due to Adelson’s longstanding and close ties to Rove. Crossroads GPS has already received one $10 million cash infusion this cycle from Adelson, who, according to the two GOP fundraisers, recently committed to another donation of the same amount.

MORE HERE

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GOP Groups Plan $1 Billion Blitz

By: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei

May 30, 2012 04:34 AM EDT

Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations.

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit.

Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign.

(PHOTOS: Republican money men)

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, proved its potency by spending nearly $50 million in the primaries. Now able to entice big donors with a neck-and-neck general election, the group is likely to meet its new goal of spending $100 million more.

And American Crossroads and the affiliated Crossroads GPS, the groups that Rove and Ed Gillespie helped conceive and raise cash for, are expected to ante up $300 million, giving the two-year-old organization one of the election’s loudest voices.

“The intensity on the right is white-hot,” said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. “We just can’t leave anything in the locker room. And there is a greater willingness to cooperate and share information among outside groups on the center-right.”

In targeted states, the groups’ activities will include TV, radio and digital advertising; voter-turnout work; mail and phone appeals; and absentee- and early-ballot drives.

The $1 billion in outside money is in addition to the traditional party apparatus – the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee – which together intend to raise at least $800 million.
MORE HERE

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Rove-Linked Crossroads GPS Launches $650,000 False Ad Campaign On Gas Prices (VIDEO)

Think Progress

By Josh Israel  on Mar 23, 2012 at 4:00 pm

This week, Crossroads GPS announced a $650,000 nationwide television adcampaign called “Deflect.”  The 30-second spot falsely blames Obama administration actions for the rise in gasoline prices since 2009.

Crossroads GPS is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) group, affiliated with the American Crossroads super PAC. Karl Rove has been linked to both groups.

The spot begins by noting gas prices “then and now” — going up from the unusually low prices of January 2009 to the higher prices of today.  A narrator asks what has made the difference.

The narrator then claims the reasons for higher gas prices are:

– “President Obama’s administration restricted oil production in the Gulf”

– Limited development of American oil shale

– Obama personally lobbied to kill a pipeline bringing oil from Canada

VIDEO AND MORE HERE

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Shocker! Karl Rove Endorses Obama in WSJ Op-Ed. (Though Not Really)

Forbes

Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff

3/22/2012 @ 2:49PM

In his fight for re-election this fall, President Barack Obama will have support from the unlikeliest of quarters: Karl Rove, former top aide to George W. Bush.

Writing on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal today, Rove, normally a staunch partisan and Republican loyalist, declared, “Mr. Obama deserves re-election for restoring America to prosperity after a recession.” Further enumerating his accomplishments, Rove added, “Mr. Obama ended the Iraq War and…Osama bin Laden was killed on his watch.”

It was the surprise of the political season, but maybe it shouldn’t have been. While it took until now for him to issue a full endorsement, Rove has for months been using the Journal’s op-ed page to signal his approval for the president. Just last week, in fact, he praised Obama’s work ethic, writing, “He is working a lot harder than he thought he would.”

In February, he lauded the president’s motives in establishing a new agency, saying, “Mr. Obama set up a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 to make sure people are treated fairly.”

And last September, Rove explicitly accused his own political allies of doing voters a disservice by opposing Obama, writing, “[H]is Republican opposition puts party ahead of country.”

MORE HERE

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Is Rahm Emanuel Providing Cover for Karl Rove and GOP Thugs?

For OpEdNews: Roger Shuler
March 24, 2010

Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has led efforts to prevent investigations of political prosecutions during the George W. Bush administration, according to a recent Web report.

Brendan DeMelle, at Huffington Post, writes that the Obama administration’s decision to turn a blind eye to politicization of the U.S. Justice Department has profound implications for the country–not to mention the victims of political prosecutions, such as Don Siegelman in Alabama, Paul Minor in Mississippi, and Charles Walker in Georgia.

Read more…

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Rove Is ‘Proud’ Of Waterboarding

Rove Is ‘Proud’ Of Waterboarding, But Falsely Claims It Was More ‘Constrained’ Than SERE Training

Think Progress- By Matt Corley at 10:45 am

In an interview with the BBC yesterday, former Bush adviser Karl Rove defended the administration’s use of waterboarding, saying that he was “proud” that Bush “used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information.” “Yes, I’m proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques,” said Rove. “They’re appropriate, they’re in conformity with our international requirements and with US law.” Watch it:

In a separate part of Rove’s interview with the BBC, he invoked a familiar and misleading argument to claim that waterboarding is not torture. “U.S. military personnel go through waterboarding every year in special training courses on survival and escape,” said Rove.

MORE HERE

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Liz Cheney Is Thinking Of Running For Office

And You Thought We Left The Monarchy In England? Liz Cheney’s Thinking of Running for Office

Crooks And Liars- By Susie Madrak Tuesday Mar 09, 2010 7:00am

You may have been under the impression that we don’t have a monarchy in this country, but apparently we do – especially if you’re part of the Cheney gene pool:

Liz Cheney, a mother of five children, has become one of the sharpest and most outspoken critics of the new White House and has needled the Obama administration for failing to protect the nation against terrorism, and mollycoddling terror suspects while pursuing government lawyers who approved water-boarding, a method of inquisition she approves of. She called the president’s Nobel Peace prize a “farce”.

Pushed by friends and family, Ms Cheney is now reportedly contemplating a run for office herself either in Virginia, where she was raised, or in Wyoming, her parents’ home state.

A former senior state department official on the Middle East, the 43-year-old has already attracted favourable comparisons with as a more substantive version of Sarah Palin, another conservative working mother.

“She’s likely to seek office,” was the judgment of Karl Rove, the former chief adviser to George W Bush.

“I’d love to see her run for office someday,” said her father, 69, recently. “I think she’s got a lot to offer, and it’s been a great career for me, and if she has the interest, and I think she does, then I would like to see her embark upon a career in politics.”
In 40 television appearances in the past year, Ms Cheney has robustly defended her father against criticism that he was the sinister force behind war on terror policies that subverted the norms of American justice, arguing that he and Mr Bush did nothing illegal and kept the country safe after 9/11.

Imagine that. She’s been on TV forty times in the past year, for nothing more than her DNA and social connections. Yes, Marcy Wheeler calls her “Babydick” and points us to a piece in New York magazine about why NBC loves her so much:

Fox is a regular pulpit, of course, but Liz is also all over NBC, where she happens to be social friends with Meet the Press host David Gregory (whose wife worked with Liz ’s husband at the law firm Latham & Watkins), family friends with Justice Department reporter Pete Williams (Dick Cheney’s press aide when he was secretary of Defense), and neighborhood friends with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Carter-administration national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. When Mika criticized Dick Cheney on her show last year, the former vice-president sent her a box of chocolate cupcakes.

Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC pundit who engaged in a particularly testy shouting match on Good Morning America with Liz Cheney over waterboarding, says the networks have allowed her a high degree of control over her appearances. “She had up to that point been completely accustomed to having interviews go her way and ceded on her terms,” he observes. “She has been careful to make sure that the interviews worked that way.”

Marcy also reminds us that Cheney was her father’s eyes and ears in the State Department:

What Hagan describes here, of course, is out and out insubordination (or rather, BabyDick’s insubordination layered on top of Bolton’s insubordination). But what he also makes clear is that not only was BabyDick wired into Bolton’s shop (and with it, discussions that would have revealed the genesis of Joe Wilson’s trip), but she also helped Wurmser accomplish his two-fold goal of thwarting State Department efforts to set up a broad-based Iraqi government (where OVP pressed Chalabi instead) and of setting up propaganda efforts–complete with their very own NYT shill, Judy Miller–to support claims they had found WMDs.

Not that that should be a surprise. But if you’re looking for news in this big [BJ] of an article, that’s one tidbit of it.

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Rumsfeld, Defence Industries, 911, & Corporate Government in Retrospect

Rumsfeld, Defence Industries, 911, & Corporate Government in Retrospect

On September 10, 2001 Rummy said this in a speech at the Pentagon

“Today’s announcements are only the first of many. We will launch others ourselves, and we will ask Congress for legislative help as well. We have, for example, asked Congress for permission to begin the process of closing excess bases and consolidating the B-1 bomber force.”

One month later…

Rumsfeld Visits B-2 Bomber Base as Afghan Campaign Heats Up

By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo., Oct. 19, 2001 – Amid news reports that U.S. ground troops are aiding anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld flew to this Missouri air base today to meet B-2 Spirit bomber pilots and support crews.

Speaking to reporters en route here, Rumsfeld praised the air base’s service members and declared that the B-2’s more than 40-hour missions to Afghanistan are “amazing.”

The secretary declined to give specifics on reported U.S. ground operations in Afghanistan. He noted that providing operations information about U.S. air attacks or the involvement of U.S. troops could imperil lives, missions and damage national security.

~0~

 

Jeremy Scahill mentioned the speech that Donald Rumsfeld made at the Pentagon on the day before September 11, 2001 in his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. In this address Rummy outlined the streamlining of the DOD and changes in CIA policy, where radical changes would be implemented in the military, especially in the organization of the National Guard and the three branches of the armed sevices.

This speech can be found on the DOD web site and should be required reading for those who are interested in the history of what is now being called The Long War.

MORE on Home Nature Report

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“The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove”

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
–Thomas Jefferson

A video by Project Save Justice

American Justice is At Risk. What Are You Doing About it?

by Rob Kall
OpEdNews
August 21, 2009

The health reform debate is roaring, as it should be, and we are engaged in pressing the spineless Dems – including Obama – to stand up to the insurance companies and rescue American health care. While we are enaged in this one noble battle, we are in danger of distracting ourselves from another urgent situation– the toxic US Attorneys appointed by Bush are still in place and their victims are in jail.

SOURCE

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