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I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

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Yes we did.

I personally stopped the public option…

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Kochsuckers

Open Thread Excellent Read: “The Plutocrat Primary”

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koch primary keep twerking

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Timothy Egan, at the NYTimes:

… We are in the “invisible primary,” an apt term for the age of oligarchs and dark money. It’s invisible, this suck-up campaign, because it’s happening behind the closed doors of a wealthy few, as a half-dozen or so Republicans audition to win the blessing of billionaires. It should be called the Plutocrat Primary.

Having already pledged to put together a political network that would spend close to $900 million to determine who runs the country, the Kochs are getting close to selecting a favorite for president. Normally, the Kochs stay out of presidential primaries. But this year, they’re cutting to the chase, trying to pick a nominee and a president.

On Monday, the Brothers K seemed to tip their hand, gushing over Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Election over, call it a campaign. Why bother to go through the motions of voting? The Kochs have spoken.

But then, Walker went full Glenn Beck, while talking to Glenn Beck, and appeared to come out in favor of curbing legal immigration, a new position to go with his complete flip-flop on illegal immigration. The Kochs need immigrants, both at the low end and the high end of their vast empire of energy and related companies. And of course, as one of the nation’s top corporate polluters, they’ve always needed politicians.

So, David Koch has now clarified the position of the electorate of two. It’s down to five candidates: Walker, Jeb Bush, and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. The billionaire brothers will withhold their backing until one of the five says the most Koch-friendly things. “What we expect them to do is compete on who has a more positive message for America,” David Koch told USA Today.

The Kochs’ political views are like an invasive weed growing in every crack of the country, spreading through think tanks, corrupt academics and talk radio shills. In economics, the Koches have long professed opposition to letting a single entity — usually government — pick winners and losers in the market.

But with this bigfoot move into the Republican primary field, the Kochs are determined to pick a winner from the throne room of their family monarchy — free market and free election be damned. At the same time, a secret Koch memo unearthed by Politico shows that the family-run political machine plans an exhaustive ground game, embedding hundreds of staffers in communities across America, starting this year..

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Marketing Power

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Looks like yesterday’s Koch Bros public announcement that Scott Walker was their guy may have been a ploy to get Jeb Bush (well, Jeb’s handlers) to pay attention to their GOP insurgency…

…[A] top Koch aide revealed to POLITICO that Jeb Bush will be given a chance to audition for the brothers’ support, despite initial skepticism about him at the top of the Kochs’ growing political behemoth.

Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Ted Cruz debated at the Koch network’s winter seminar in January, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made a separate appearance. Those were the candidates who appeared to have a chance at the Koch blessing, and attendees said Rubio seemed to win that round.

But those four — plus Jeb – will be invited to the Kochs’ summer conference, the aide said. Bush is getting a second look because so many Koch supporters think he looks like a winner. Other candidates, perhaps Rick Perry or Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, may also get invitations…

I’m thinking Game of Thrones is popular because its murderous thieving megalomaniacs have the benefit of better writers. And their dragons are more attractive, too.
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Apart from acknowledging it’s gonna be a long eighteen months, what’s on the agendda for the evening?

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Marketing PowerPost + Comments (118)

Can the Kochs Deliver the Mail Better than Florida Man?

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kochrepAs I mentioned in comments on a thread yesterday, the Florida mailman who landed a gyrocopter at the US Capitol to draw attention to the corrupting influence of money in politics lives in the same media market I do and had informed a local paper of his plans prior to taking off. His stunt is therefore receiving more attention and in-depth coverage here than elsewhere.

The mailman is disappointed that the national corporate media outlets are focusing almost exclusively on the security vulnerabilities his flight revealed rather than the two-page campaign finance document he prepared for each congresscritter. The local outlets, having access to the mailman and greater interest due to the regional angle, are covering the campaign finance aspect. Not in sufficient depth, but at least they aren’t ignoring it altogether. The mailman won’t let them.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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barry cruzwater morin

(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
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In you guts, you know he’s nuts! By the time Ted Cruz was in law school, poor old Goldwater would complain to John Dean:

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”

Speaking of demented authoritarians, it’s gonna be interested to see the pushback here:

Dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups are calling for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers.

A letter released on Tuesday asserts that such money is tainted by these donors’ efforts to deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change…

The letter is a project of the Natural History Museum, a mobile museum that draws attention to “social and political forces that shape nature yet are left out of traditional natural history museums,” said its co-founder and director, Beka Economopoulos.

A petition drive, also released on Tuesday and sponsored by environmental organizations including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, urges the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History to “Kick Koch off the board!”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and signer of the letter, said the donors seek a halo they do not deserve. “Cloaked in the garb of civic-mindedness, they launder their image while simultaneously and covertly influencing the content offered by those institutions,” he said…

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Apart from watching the birds flip by, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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BuzzFeed Exploits Unsuspecting Cats for Political Propaganda Purposes

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Kids today are a tough nut to crack for corporate media pimps with a plutocrat-friendly political agenda to sell. My generation was easy — an improbably large portion of our cohort voluntarily read Ayn Rand’s master-race bodice-rippers. And those of us who came of age in the Gipper’s America and grew up to be politicians like Paul Ryan then wove those crackpot principles into public policy, exponentially enriching greed-heads like the Koch Bros. and hedge fund managers while despoiling the American dream for tens of millions. 

But try getting 140 character-consuming Tweeters to read one of Rand’s turgid, 10K-page doorstops. Nope. So the e-ville new media marketing execs gathered ‘round the conference table, twirled their pointy aging-hipster mustaches and brainstormed strategies to corrupt a new generation of impressionable yoots. And because they are morons, they came up with libertarian cats:



So much wrong. For one thing, the premise is an outright lie. Show me a domestic house cat, and I’ll show you a dole-accepting layabout. Pets are goddamn moochers! 

Anyway, fuck you, BuzzFeed Politics. If you want to conscript animals under Rand Paul’s banner and bamboozle millennials into voting against their own interests, at least have the decency to annotate cutesy anaconda pictures.

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CATO, interns, King and privilege

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Scott Lemieux is, correctly, pointing and laughing at Michael Cannon and the Cato Institute for their inability to find sympathetic plaintiffs for their bullshit argument that the Moops invaded Spain and therefore the Spanish now must learn to speak Moopish.

  • The fact that former Cato interns wanted no part of the troofer lawsuit;
  • The title implying that Politico hacked into Cannon’s email, rather than the massively more likely possibility that the email was provided by one of the recipients, or
  • Cannon complaining about the Cato institute being described as “right-leaning.”

I’d say they’re all winners.  Like any great comedy routine, the elements build on each other.

I was unfortunate enough to have known several CATO, AEI and Heritage Foundation interns during my undergraduate years. At first I was surprised that none of the younger siblings of those gliberterian fantasists would have signed on to the lawsuit, but then I remembered some more facts about the class of people who intern at right wing think tanks for fun and profit.

Those internships were either poorly paying or not paid at all with a requirement that the interns live in D.C.  That means parental support was often needed.  One of the interns I was acquainted with had a monthly allowance from her parents that was greater than the a semester’s tuition at a good state school.  Furthermore, most interns that CATO was trying to recruit are under the age of 26.  All of the interns that I knew had a serious and chronic pre-existing condition of either cranial rectal inversion or gaping  rectum syndrome.  Finally, they all knew how to cover their own ass.

PPACA’s provisions and exemptions took away most of the potential intern plaintiff pool.  The combination of keeping young adults on their parents’ insurance until age 26, and cheap catastrophic plans for young adults removes most potential sympathetic plaintiffs from the pool.

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Open Thread: The Best Country Money Can Buy

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Lee Fang, at The Nation:

… While all eyes were on the changing of the guard in Congress as Republicans seized control of the US Senate in January, there was an equally profound change taking place among Capitol Hill staff, as many GOP lawmakers handed over the keys to corporate lobbyists like Leftwich.

“We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in K Street moving into congressional staff positions since the Citizens United decision,” says Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s expert on lobbying and ethics. House Speaker John Boehner, he notes, has “encouraged new members to employ lobbyists on their personal and committee staff.”

On almost any big issue coming up for debate during the final two years of the Obama administration—surveillance, trade, healthcare, entitlements, tax reform, climate change—corporate lobbyists will now be attempting to influence their own former colleagues, whose salaries are now covered by US taxpayers.

The new staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, Jeff Shockey, comes to the Hill after working as a lobbyist for many of the country’s leading intelligence-agency contractors, including General Dynamics, Boeing and, just last year, Academi, the firm formerly known as Blackwater. The House Oversight Committee, a key investigative body, will now have a staff director named Sean McLaughlin, a former corporate lobbyist who spent the past three years as a principal at the Podesta Group. Tom Chapman, who earned compensation worth $1,531,453 in 2014 as vice president of government affairs for US Airways, will now earn considerably less as part of the counsel staff for the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, which oversees his former employer. And as Congress takes up tax reform, one of the latest hires to the Joint Committee on Taxation is Ben Gross, who spent more than a decade as international tax director for PricewaterhouseCoopers, a firm that specializes in helping corporations avoid American taxes.

Lobbyists have been hired to help the offices of the most controversial addition to the GOP leadership team, Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, now House majority whip… In a party at the posh Capitol Hill Club, a private meeting ground for Republicans that has been sued by its employees for alleged racial discrimination, nearly 300 lobbyists cheered the embattled lawmaker as he laid out his agenda for the coming session, according to Politico. Scalise was flanked by one of his newest staffers, Bill Hughes, formerly a lobbyist for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a powerful trade group that has pressured lawmakers to drop efforts to raise the minimum wage.

And why not celebrate? Scalise is beloved by Washington’s army of influence-peddlers for his loyalty to the Beltway’s lobbyist elite. In his previous position as chair of the Republican Study Committee, Scalise welcomed the “K Street community” at special business-outreach events attended by representatives of such major firms as Halliburton, MasterCard, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The news that Scalise would move up the leadership ladder was celebrated by Koch Industries lobbyists, who threw a tony wine-tasting party featuring “pinots from Oregon and the central coast of California.” Soon after ascending to his new post, Scalise shocked many by having a registered lobbyist, John Feehery, sit in as applicants interviewed for jobs…

Via Billmon (this tweet stream here):

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Cause and effect in Louisiana

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A major hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is closing its emergency room because it is hemorrhaging money:

 Baton Rouge General Medical Center-Mid City will close its emergency room within the next 60 days, a victim of continuing red ink and the Jindal administration withdrawing the financial support that kept it open….

The closest emergency rooms from Baton Rouge General’s Mid City campus is Lane Regional Medical Center, 30 minutes to the north in Zachary, and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, 30 minutes to the south on Essen Lane. Mid-City’s ER recorded 45,000 patient visits last year…..

More and more poor and uninsured patients from the low-income neighborhoods of north Baton Rouge ended up at the Mid City hospital, which was the next-closest facility.

Mid City hospital reported losses of $1 million a month as more and more patients who could not pay arrived…. Officials projected losses would grow larger, reaching $25 million to $30 million in 2015.

Poor people can’t pay full freight nor are they likely to be covered by insurance. There just happens to be an extremely attractive offer to get lots of poor people covered by insurance. Medicaid expansion would help safety net hospitals in high poverty areas the most. Poor people covered by insurance will either be able to pay something towards their emergency room visits or divert to lower levels of appropropriate care.

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Open Thread: Steve “Pig Slurry” King in His Glory

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If you’re one of the BJ readers who objects to reading about Repub shenanigans, get ready to do some major scroll-bys this weekend. It’s time for the Iowa Freedom Summit, “Getting America Back on Track”, paid for by Citizens United and hosted by Rep. Steve King, as helpfully annotated by Paul Waldman in the Washington Post:

… After learning that Michelle Obama would be sitting at Tuesday’s State of the Union with Ana Zamora, a 20-year-old college student who came to America at the age of one and can stay because of Obama’s executive action on “dreamers,” King tweeted:

#Obama perverts ‘prosecutorial discretion’ by inviting a deportable to sit in place of honor at#SOTU w/1st Lady. I should sit with Alito.

The NYTimes reports that “Jorge Ramos, the Univision and Fusion television anchor who is often called the Walter Cronkite of Latino America” will be covering the Freedom Summit, so Rep. King’s ugly comments — and any inapt up-sucking by the attendees –will be scrutinized by media with a much larger reach than TPM.

NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) is more diplomatic:

Take a nearly century-old theater in downtown Des Moines. Fill it to capacity, — that’s 1,200 audience members and another 200 credentialed media — bring in a lineup that includes almost 10 would-be, might-be, could-be Republican presidential hopefuls, and it’s looking like the 2016 campaign is officially underway…

The event is King’s attempt to have an outsized impact on the outcome of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, which will take place just one year from now.

King’s big issue is immigration, and he wants candidates to go on the record. He wants them to oppose any kind of deal with Democrats and the White House that would lead to the kind of immigration reform that many leaders at the Republican National Committee have suggested might help the party begin to cut into the huge gap that Democrats enjoy when it comes to the Latino vote..

Apart from many paid political analysts/consultants/pundits, would-be bagmen, irritable RWNJs, and a broad spectrum of media people hoping for a particularly spectacular meltdown, the marquee attendees break down into three overlapping groups:

– “Serious” candidates: Cruz, Christie, Huckabee, Santorum, Perry, Walker

– “Brand managers” looking to keep their grift name in the media: Palin, Trump, Gingrich, Carson, Fiorina

– Local bigwigs & paleocon favorites: Joni ‘Breadbags’ Ernst, Iowa governor Terry Brandstad, Chuck Grassley, Heritage Foundation’s Jim deMint, John Bolton, Utah senator & Tea Party darling Mike Lee, et al.

Slate‘s John Dickerson, as always, focuses on the inside baseball:

… Most people in Iowa’s political class have an interest in getting things started early. They want the state to be the first robust contest of the nominating process. They covet the visits and the personal calls from the candidates. Some want to get paid. The earlier that candidates start, the more they need pricey strategists and paid organizers. So lots of people have an incentive to push a hurry-up message.

The upside of starting early is obvious. “This isn’t like a normal election, where you convince people,” says Craig Robinson, the founder of the Iowa Republican website. “You have to convince them and keep them convinced.” That takes skill, and that skill is getting snapped up by other campaigns…

Organizations are usually staffed with operatives who have well-established networks from working previous election cycles. Robinson calls them tribes. David Kochel, who oversaw Mitt Romney’s Iowa operation and who helped get Sen. Joni Ernst elected in November, leads one tribe. A.J. Spiker and Steve Grubbs, who are backing Sen. Rand Paul, each represent their own tribes. Christie’s backers—Jeff Boeyink and Chuck Larson—represent tribes, too. The allegiances to the tribe are sometimes closer than the allegiances to the candidates. This came through clearly in a conversation with one operative who said of a talented volunteer, “He’s not with Bush, he’s with me.”….

Noticably absent from this scrum: Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul. Those guys are saving their energies for Sunday, when the NYTimes reports “An invitation-only group of 2016 hopefuls will travel to a resort near Palm Springs, Calif., for the Koch brothers’ annual winter seminar, kicking off the so-called Koch primary…”

Everybody get rrrrready to rrrrrrrrumble…

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Big GOP Doings

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gop head table toles

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Notorious suck-up Ben Smith, currently of Buzzfeed, published an unbelievably up-sucking ‘beat sweetener’ on “How Reince Priebus Reinvented The Political Party“:

… Priebus — a careful, trim 42-year-old from Kenosha, Wisconsin — will run unopposed for a third term this week at the RNC’s Winter Meeting in San Diego. When he is done with that term, he will be the longest-serving RNC chairman in modern history. (His staff has done the math.) He has done this with almost no personal profile. Most people in Washington still can’t pronounce his first name. (It rhymes with “pints.”)

Yet Priebus has transformed the RNC from an organization whose reach and braggadocio regularly exceeded its grasp into a trim, effective piece of party infrastructure — in his terms, “the common denominator of the political universe.”… The RNC’s salvation is, ironically, the campaign finance regime that many Republicans oppose. And its pillars are data — the law gives it a singular role in passing voter data to other party groups; its remaining influence over the primary process whose outcome it no longer controls — and, above all, money…

Because of complex laws around coordination, the resources the Republican National Committee buys can be used and reused, passed around among Republican campaigns. Soft-money groups cannot share and coordinate like this. So instead of going to war with deep-pocketed outsiders like the Koch brothers, Priebus has found a role in their ecosystem. When it comes to data, for instance, the committee has — through an arrangement involving a new private company — essentially made itself the partner of a Koch-backed data company, i360, initially seen as a rival…

So, Priebus has proved his genius-osity by… selling his party to the Kochs directly, without all that fan-dancing burlesque of propriety common to lesser mortals. Truly, you can’t spell “Reince Priebus” without “RNC PR BS“!

And now comes the first result of this strategery, as reported by NYMag:

For some reason, the Republican party wants to limit the amount of time its colorful cast of 2016 candidates has to attack each other on the national stage. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has said, “We’re not going to have a 23-debate circus,” and on Wednesday the committee announced its next convention will be held a month earlier. While candidates are usually nominated in late August or early September, in 2016 Republicans will gather in Cleveland from July 18 to 21. “The convention will be held significantly earlier than previous election cycles, allowing access to crucial general election funds earlier than ever before to give our nominee a strong advantage heading into Election Day,” Priebus explained…

This also gives the Democrats an extra month to point out the specific flaws of the Repub candidate chosen to ride on the hood of the clown car, but then: spoilt for choice.

Apart from contemplating the delights of Cleveland in mid-July, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: One Important Common Factor

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… They’re all douchecanoes.
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What’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?

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La Koch-a Nostra

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As Team WIN THE MORNING points out, in a post-Citizens United world, the Koch brothers have figured out the game more quickly than everybody else in either party and they’re playing it even more skillfully. Why bother with buying national party machinery when you can just bring your own people in to run things?

The Koch brothers and their allies are pumping tens of millions of dollars into a data company that’s developing detailed, state-of-the-art profiles of 250 million Americans, giving the brothers’ political operation all the earmarks of a national party.

The move comes as mainstream Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are trying to reclaim control of the conservative movement from outside groups. The Kochs, however, are continuing to amass all of the campaign tools the Republican National Committee and other party arms use to elect a president.

The Koch network also has developed in-house expertise in polling, message-testing, fact-checking, advertising, media buying, dial groups and donor maintenance. Add mastery of election law, a corporate-minded aggressiveness and years of patient experimentation — plus seemingly limitless cash — and the Koch operation actually exceeds the RNC’s data operation in many important respects.

“The Koch operations are the most important nonparty political players in the U.S. today, and no one else is even close,” said a top Republican who has been involved in the last eight presidential campaigns.

Two years ago the Kochs worked with the Drive The All New Reince Priebus and ended up with Mitt Romney, somebody that even they didn’t have enough money to buy the White House with.  This time around, the plans seems to be to just cut out the RNC middleman and exercise that free speech directly with your own party apparatchiks.

Heading into 2016, the Koch network — under the auspices of Freedom Partners — has in many ways surpassed the reach and resources of the RNC. And, unlike the party, it isn’t bound by rules requiring it to maintain neutrality in primaries. Though the network has yet to engage in primaries, that could be the next logical step in its progression from apolitical think tank consortium to aggressive privatized political machine.

The best president money can buy, tanned field-tested, and ready. Of course this is the logical endpoint of “private sector solutions to public sector problems” and all that messy democracy crap, right?

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Long Read: “GOP digital revamp sees mixed results two years after report”

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Speaking of Adam Smith’s “conspiracy against the public… “* Jon Ward, at Yahoo News, “RNC’s deal with Koch political operation raises questions about illegal coordination“:

The most important thing that Republicans did over the past two years to improve their data and technology came at the end of August.

That’s when Data Trust, the private company that functions as an offshoot of the Republican National Committee, announced that it would begin sharing information from its voter file with i360, the entity created by the Koch brothers to house its own voter file and data analytics tools.

For the first time ever, the two biggest voter-file-gathering operations on the right would be working together. They would remain independent of each other, but benefit from the information-gathering work of each other’s volunteers. The data flows would go both ways, and the RNC would for the first time have access to the outside groups’ data…

The sharing agreement between the RNC and the Kochs was not easy to arrange. The RNC had legal questions about whether a party committee and an outside group could share voter data without violating federal law. Democrats, in fact, still accuse them of violating the law and have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.

The suit argues that the RNC and the Kochs “appear to be illegally coordinating through the ongoing exchange of non-public strategic campaign and party data, resulting in millions of dollars in prohibited contributions from Super PACs and corporations to Republican campaigns and parties.”

Getting the two sides to cooperate was also an obstacle, insiders told Yahoo News. One source at a party committee referred to it as a “power struggle” between the two groups over who would control data collected by volunteers and paid staff on the ground…

While relations between the RNC and the Koch empire have outwardly improved, theirs remains an uneasy truce. The data-sharing agreement gives the central party a boost, allowing it to make up data-gathering ground it had lost to outside groups, but it also strengthens the Koch empire by giving its analytics firm an array of information the Republican Party has gathered on voters. What the Koch groups do with that data going forward is not something the RNC has any control over, and vice versa…

* “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” — The Wealth of Nations

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Long Read: “Can Scott Walker Unite the Republicans?”

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Robert Draper’s GQ profile of famed Kochsucker/governor Walker has been getting some notice, mostly for its rather odd style. To me, it reads as though Draper couldn’t get a grip on his subject because Walker is that genuine political rarity: a pure sociopath, uncomplicated by the usual attendant narcissism. A predator, like the shark, both primitive and uniquely fitted to his environment, Walker seems to move through his career calculating every opportunity with none of the normal worries about self-presentation or his place in history. “Darwinian” might be just the right word:

“One of the problems I see with Republicans nationally—well, three,” said Scott Walker as he munched on a piece of white string cheese. “They’re always against Obama, so they’re not optimistic. I try to be optimistic and visionary. Second, they talk in terms that most people can’t relate to. Fiscal cliffs and sequesters don’t mean anything to most people. I talk about whether your kid coming out of college is gonna have a job. And third, they don’t get out much—and I’m around the state quite a bit.”

At the moment, Walker was in the farming community of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. We were having this conversation at the end of the local Dairy Breakfast, an unabashedly cornball state pastime wherein thousands of rural folks congregate on a dairy farm to eat pancakes and cheese served up to them by their local politicians. Walker had spent the past hour handing out cartons of milk, posing for occasional pictures, and peppering the air with jittery patter like “Nothing better than Dairy Breakfast!” and “Couldn’t ask for better weather!” The farmers who talked to him addressed him as Scott. Most of them seemed not to notice him at all. This was odd enough, given that Walker is a sitting governor in the heat of a contentious reelection battle, and odder still considering that should he win reelection (and Walker is anything but a lock to do so), he’s likely to be running for president a few months from now. But Walker is more than just another upwardly mobile officeholder. He is a national symbol of Darwinian partisanship—one who has led a frontal assault on unions and by extension the Democratic Party, weathered a bitterly waged recall effort, and is currently dogged by a hazy but persistent waft of scandal that could engulf him at any moment. He is, arguably, the most conservative governor in America—a guy who, should he survive the spirited reelection challenge he now faces, could emerge as proof that appealing with uncompromising intensity to the passions of archconservatives can still win you elections in purple states. Or, in defeat, Walker could provide the latest cautionary tale of GOP intransigence. This was the man serving food at the Dairy Breakfast. He wore jeans, a windbreaker, and a white Izod shirt, and aside from his extreme paleness and his bleary-yet-fixed rhinoceros gaze, he bore an uncanny resemblance to every not-famous Caucasian male the world over.

To linger in the company of someone so nondescript and yet so powerful is a confounding experience. Walker’s friends maintain that he possesses that enviable guy-you’d-like-to-have-a-beer-with quality Americans seem to seek in presidents. I wouldn’t say that; Walker strikes me as approachable and well-mannered but not particularly chummy. Meanwhile, his adversaries assert that he’s a heartless automaton: At the Milwaukee County Courthouse, where he served for eight controversial years as its budget-slashing county executive, local reporters nicknamed him “Cyborg.” I wouldn’t go that far, either. Scott Walker is instead a hugely successful career politician (“I used to always tease him, ‘Someday you’re going to get a real job,’ ” his wife, Tonette Walker, told me), a consummate professional in a business that calls for mingling with the commoners as well as courting billionaire donors and gutting adversaries; a man who is both calculating (again from Tonette Walker: “Scott’s a planner”) and at the same time, for a politician, anyway, strikingly unambiguous and unselfconscious.

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Long Read: “Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire”

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Where there’s muck, there’s money, goes the old saying — and, in the case of the Kochs, where there’s money, there’s muck. The current generation of profiteers has its roots in the original Gilded Age, when their grandfather (local rail baron & newspaper owner) started the family fortune by misappropriating government resources and stealing from his competitors. Charles and David have remained true to their clan’s history of dishonesty — among their many violations, they were sued for stealing from Native American tribal oil fields as recently as the 1990s. (That seems to be when the brothers decided they couldn’t count on the Birchers-cum-Libertarians to protect them politically, so they started the process of taking over the entire Republican Party.) Tim Dickinson reports for Rolling Stone:

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they’ve cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today’s GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year’s midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Koch Industries is headquartered in a squat, smoked-glass building that rises above the prairie on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. The building, like the brothers’ fiercely private firm, is literally and figuratively a black box. Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America’s second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company’s stock response to inquiries from reporters: “We are privately held and don’t disclose this information.”

But Koch Industries is not entirely opaque. The company’s troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.

Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch’s pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers.

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Long Read: “Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire”Post + Comments (63)