STOP PLAYING GAMES WITH MY COUNTRY!

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Another Black Eye for Rand Paul: Pallin’ Around with Neo-Confederate Secessionist

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Here’s Jack in his confederate mask (he’s not nearly so creepy looking sans mask, but then, intimidating others is obviously a goal of Jack’s and is much harder to pull off as himself):

Jack Hunter in his Confederate Mask, “A photo of the Southern Avenger posted to Rebellion Blog” via Free Beacon

Politicususa

By: Sarah JonesJul. 9th, 2013

Nobody but a hardcore, Fox-watching, Daily Caller-reading Republican will vote for Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) for President now.

It turns out that Senator Paul has been pallin‘ around with a neo-confederate pro-secessionist named Jack Hunter. Hunter is a close Congressional aide to Senator Paul, and is, according to Media Matters, a “regular” on Fox, writes for the conservative Daily Caller (also known as the Daily Screamer for screaming at President Obama during a Rose Garden speech, but they are also not racists — they just play racists when covering the White House), is associated with former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint (big surprise), and helped Paul write his 2010 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington.

The Free Beacon reported Tuesday that among Hunter’s other activities like advocating for the secession of the South as chairman of the “implicitly racist group” League of the South or writing for The American Conservative or promoting Ron Paul’s presidential run on Fox News Business (‘cuz nothing says freedom like secessionism, just ask Sarah Palin), he was also a shock jock supporting the assassination of President Lincoln.
MORE HERE

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Follow the Dark Money

The down and dirty history of secret spending, PACs gone wild, and the epic four-decade fight over the only kind of political capital that matters.

Mother Jones  —By Andy Kroll

| July/August 2012 Issue

“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.“—Mark Hanna, 19th-century mining tycoon and GOP fundraiser

I.NIXONLAND

Bill Liedtke was racing against time. His deadline was a little more than a day away. He’d prepared everything—suitcase stuffed with cash, jet fueled up, pilot standing by. Everything but the Mexican money.

The date was April 5, 1972. Warm afternoon light bathed the windows at Pennzoil Company headquarters in downtown Houston. Liedtke, a former Texas wildcatter who’d risen to be Pennzoil’s president, and Roy Winchester, the firm’s PR man, waited anxiously for $100,000 due to be hand-delivered by a Mexican businessman named José Díaz de León. When it arrived, Liedtke (pronounced LIT-key) would stuff it into the suitcase with the rest of the cash and checks, bringing the total to $700,000. The Nixon campaign wanted the money before Friday, when a new law kicked in requiring that federal campaigns disclose their donors. Maurice Stans, finance chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, or CREEP, had told fundraisers they needed to beat that deadline. Liedtke said he’d deliver.

Díaz de León finally arrived later that afternoon, emptying a large pouch containing $89,000 in checks and $11,000 in cash onto Liedtke’s desk. The donation was from Robert Allen, president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Company. Allen—fearing his shareholders would discover that he’d given six figures to Nixon—had funneled it through a Mexico City bank to Díaz de León, head of Gulf Resources’ Mexican subsidiary, who carried the loot over the border.

Winchester and another Pennzoil man rushed the suitcase to the Houston airport, where a company jet was waiting on the tarmac. The two men climbed aboard, bound for Washington. They touched down in DC hours later and sped directly to CREEP’s office at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, across the street from the White House. They arrived at 10 p.m.

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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Abandon Ship: How the Left Sunk the Swiftboating of Barack Obama

Politicususa

By: Sarah Jones May 9, 2012

It turns out that Joel Arends, the Chairman of Swiftboating 2012 style’s “Veterans for a Strong America” and creator of the viral “Obama spiked the bin Laden football” video, is exactly what he accuses the President of being. He has politicized the Navy SEALS and exploited those who actually were on the bin Laden mission, even though not one of them from that mission is currently involved in his organization.

You know Joel, he’s the “non-partsian” (wink wink) Iraq War vet acting as the front man for the super-secret, stealthy corporate cowards who Swiftboat Democrats every election cycle because they can’t win on the issues.

This time, Joel is pretending to represent the Navy SEALS in order to Swifboat President Obama in an ad that shows shots of soldiers while accusing Obama of being “shameless” and “despicable” for politicizing the success of the bin Laden raid.

VIDEO AND MORE HERE

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Koch Brother Admits Buying Wisconsin Governor (VIDEO)

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GOP + Tea Party = Box Of Hammers

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Billionaire Buddies: Adelsons Join Forces With Koch Brothers To Take Down Obama

Think Progress- By Josh Israel  on Feb 2, 2012 at 10:45 am

In recent years, billionaire oil magnates David and Charles Koch have bankrolled the Tea Party movement, Republican candidates, and efforts to deny the existence global warming.  But less noticed have been their series of twice-yearly strategy coordination meetings for wealthy right-wing donors.  These secret confabs have attracted Republicans like Govs. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Rick Scott (R-FL), as well as former Fox News Channel talker Glenn Beck, Supreme Court JusticesAntonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and executives from the oil, banking, and health insurance industries.

The most recent meeting attracted two newcomers: Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.  Between them, the Las Vegas casino-owner and his wife have reportedly plowed $10 million into a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC and have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican party committees and candidates already this cycle.

A Center for Public Integrity report suggests this may just be the beginning:

Adelson has recently indicated strong interest in backing other GOP allied groups, say fundraisers familiar with his giving. In 2010, Adelson wrote a seven figure check to Crossroads GPS, a non-profit advocacy group that doesn’t have to disclose its donors publicly which was co-founded by GOP super consultants Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

The story quotes unnamed fundraisers “familiar with Adelson,” the American Crossroads super PAC and the 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS, as expecting Adelson to “pump a few million dollars more” into one of the Crossroads groups this year, to help defeat President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. They also say Adelson is also considering writing a check to the American Action Network, former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)’s non-profit, to help preserve the Republican majority in the U.S. House.

Between the Kochs and the Adelsons, voters around the country should expect to see what voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida have seen in recent weeks: a seemingly unending stream of dishonest attack ads, paid for by billionaire-funded super PACs and tax-exempt organizations.

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‘Tea Party 10’ Targeted In Multimillion Dollar Campaign By Liberal Super PAC

HuffPost- First Posted: 01/30/2012  9:04 am Updated: 01/30/2012  1:22 pm

WASHINGTON — A liberal super PAC is set Monday to launch what it is billing as a multimillion dollar campaign to “Take Down the Tea Party Ten.”

The effort by the progressive outfit CREDO aims to use the new big-spending super PAC model, which can accept unlimited donations, to back extensive local organizing and “education” aimed at defeating 10 members of Congress seen by the left as the worst of the worst.

“We’re talking about some of the most odious members of Congress. Even for Republicans these guys are low,” said Campaign Manager Matthew “Mudcat” Arnold in a statement.

“We’re going to empower local activists to organize their friends and neighbors to lay out the truth about their representatives in the most basic terms,” Arnold added. “They are anti-woman. They are anti-science. They are hypocritical, bigoted, and have said and done things that are downright crazy. They’ve done more to embarrass their constituents than they have to govern or work toward solutions. They are unfit for Congress, and we’re going to help their constituents hold them accountable.”

The first six lawmakers targeted by the group are Reps. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), Steve King (R-Iowa), Allen West (R-Fla), Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), Frank Guinta (R-N.H.), and Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.). Four more will be chosen by CREDO’s members.

MORE HERE

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Bill Moyers to return to PBS

Is This Land Made for You and Me – or for the Super-Rich?

truth-out Thursday 12 January 2012

by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Co. | Op-Ed

The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.

Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times. And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. “So long, it’s been good to know you,” he sang, and off he would go.

What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the state’s prodigal son, but times change, and that’s the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma’s more conservative than ever – one of the reddest of our red states with a governor who’s a favorite of the Tea Party.

Read article at truth-out Thursday 12 January 2012

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