New documents prove that Charles Koch, just like his father, was an active member of the John Birch society and the Tea Party is essentially an offshoot of that organization.

The folks over at Progressive Inc. and the Center for Media and Democracy are publishing new information from uncovered documents that prove Charles Koch was an active member of the Kansas John Birch society even up through the civil rights era.

Here is just a little of what The Progressive writes about the findings: 

Charles Koch was not simply a rank and file member of the John Birch Society in name only who paid nominal dues. He purchased and held a "lifetime membership" until he resigned in 1968. He also lent his name and his wealth to the operations of the John Birch Society in Wichita, aiding its "American Opinion" bookstore -- which was stocked with attacks on the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and Earl Warren as elements of the communist conspiracy. He funded the John Birch Society's promotional campaigns, bought advertising in its magazine, and supported its distribution of right-wing radio shows.

The reactionary ideas learned from his father and stoked by his ideological ally in Wichita, Bob Love of the Love Box Company, were not simply passing fancies of the young scion of an oil fortune. The tools of the trade he absorbed in his late twenties and early thirties appear to continue to animate some of his actions decades later, as with his 2014 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming those who criticize him are "collectivists." The echoes of his past role reverberate along with the millions he and his brother David Koch have spent fueling a John Birch Society-like "Tea Party" peopled with right-wingers like Birchers of decades past who contend against all reasoning that the president is a communist. David Koch himself has claimed President Obama is a scary "socialist." These roots run deep in the Kochs. 

In many ways, the playbook deployed by the Kochs today through myriad organizations resembles a more sophisticated (and expensive) playbook of the John Birch Society back then. Even the recent announcement of the Kochs to give a $25 million gift to the United Negro College Fund (with strings attached requiring the recruitment of free market African American college students) echoes that past. In 1964, in the face of criticism for its assault on the civil rights movement, the John Birch Society also funded a scholarship program to give college funds to African Americans who were not active in the civil rights movement, according to documents the Progressive.org/Center for Media and Democracy has obtained. 

It has been pointed out repeatedly that the modern Tea Party is simply a reboot of the same organization famous for its numerous communistic conspiracy theories, anti-civil rights stance, and homophobic mindset.

This organization almost doomed the Republican party in the 1960's and it looks like the modern day reincarnation is ready to do the same in 2014.

New poll shows the Tea Party at its lowest numbers yet.

Courtesy of CBS News:  

The tea party was an important factor in the 2010 elections, but its support may be waning, according to a new CBS News poll. Today, just 15 percent of Americans say they are supporters of the tea party movement - the lowest since CBS News began asking about the tea party in February 2010. The tea party reached its highest level of support (31 percent) in November 2010, soon after the midterm elections. 

The movement may be losing some of its core constituency -- Republicans. 32 percent of self-identified Republicans now consider themselves supporters of the tea party - down 10 points from February and a decline of 23 points from July 2010, the summer before the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives. The percentage of Republicans who identify as tea party supporters is now among the lowest in CBS News Polls.

I am not even sure we needed a poll to tell us this, especially after Teabagger candidates got shellacked this week.

A Salon article explains that the Tea Party has really NEVER been any different than the rank and file Republicans, and now that the name has lost its Libertarian luster they will retire it, and move on to another outraged "grassroots" movement to energize their base.

Especially now that their name is becoming synonymous with lawbreaking.

The Tea Party was always an astro-turf organization bought and paid for by Koch brother operatives. The only question is will people be caught off guard by the NEXT fake conservative political movement?

This may have seemed like a controversial episode of the Newsroom last year, but I imagine that the majority of Americans would now agree with it 100%.

I imagine that most of us here at IM were cheering when the Jeff Daniels character, Will McAvoy, made those statements, however there was still an angry and energized minority of Americans who thought the comparison to the Taliban seemed unfair.

Somehow I have to imagine that that minority is even smaller in light of what is happening right now in Washington.

Eric Zuesse. an investigative historian has written a long and incredibly detailed explanation for how this American Taliban was able to take control over our government, as well as who funded them over at HuffPo.

Here is a portion I thought you might find interesting:

Sarah Palin had resigned her Governorship of Alaska, in order to become rich quickly via speaking tours and book deals; and on August 7th at her Facebook page she issued her "Statement on the Current Health Care Debate," and said that if Obama's health plan were to pass, people "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." (The phrases 'death panel' and 'level of productivity in society,' weren't in any proposed legislation, but came from Palin's own imagination.) The extremely conservative audience at aol.com was online-polled about this, "Do you agree with Palin's characterization of Obama's health plan as 'evil'?" and within a few days 200,000 respondents entered their opinions, 59% saying "Yes," and 41% "No." When asked "In general, what's your impression of Palin?" 50% said "Mostly positive," and 42% said "Mostly negative." Newt Gingrich on ABC TV's "This Week," on August 9th, was asked his opinion of Palin's Facebook statement, and Gingrich said he agreed with it, because Obama and the Democrats were planning "euthanasia" for old people. Despite ABC's strong Republican tilt, their George Stephanopoulos pointed out that there was nothing of that kind in any proposed legislation, but Gingrich went right on charging that this was the Democrats' intent. The thrust of Republicans and of the healthcare lobbyists and their "grass-roots" fronts was unmistakable: Obama's plan was to euthanize old people, and it was evil. Sometimes, major media were even compelled to correct misrepresentations of their own news reporting that was spread by Koch-allies.

The article of course is much more detailed, and I think everybody needs to read it. However I want to remind all of you that during the time mentioned above Sarah Palin was NOT the bedraggled used up skeletal harpy that we see today, Back then she was the Queen of the Tea Party and had tons of media attention paid to her every ridiculous utterance.

It was citizen journalists who eventually turned her into a laughingstock and rendered her all but impotent. And it is that same kind of grass roots reporting, and dissemination of information, that will ultimately prove to be the downfall of the Tea Party.

We can do this, but we have to be diligent, aggressive, and tireless.

Don't forget the other side, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Caller, and others, all have the backing of big business to pay their bills and to help them push their agenda.

All I have is you.

(Oh, and coffee. I have coffee too.)

On the heels of an anti-Obamacare rally with only a handful of supporters, the Right Wing throws a Benghazi conspiracy rally with much the same result.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

The first anniversary of the Benghazi tragedy was supposed to be the time for conservatives around the country to descend on the Capitol by the thousands, demanding that Congress reveal the truth. Less than one hundred bothered to show up. 

The “Justice for Benghazi” rally was meant to be a joint effort between the Patriots4America and Special Operations Speaks — two groups that have for months now been hammering establishment Republicans for what they see as not enough action to unveil what really happened in Benghazi, Libya last year. Special Operations Speaks was behind a series of ads and petitions demanding that Speaker of the House John Boehner appoint a special committee to investigate the supposed Obama administration cover-up of its involvement in the attack and the deaths of four Americans including Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. According to organizers, as many as 5,000 people were expected to show up on the Hill and make their voices heard. 

At the 12:30 PM start time for the rally, though, there wasn’t very much rallying going on. Instead, there were only a handful of people gathered near the open lawn that was meant to be barely containing thousands of supporters. Many of them were hiding from the ninety-five degree weather in the shade, jostling to have their picture taken with former Rep. Alan West (R-FL) who was there for an earlier event. Several of those milling about lamented that technical difficulties had prevented the organizers from setting up their audio equipment until the time when the protest was supposed to begin. 

Even among those near the rallying point, not everyone present was even there for the rally itself. Several standing on the curb of the nearby traffic circle were there to support the thousands of motorcyclists who had intended to drive by en masse as a counter to a protest of how Muslim-Americans have been treated since 2001. Due to permit issues, however, the motorcycles only drove by at a rate of one every few minutes, leaving the onlookers to mingle with the Benghazi protesters.

Okay this stuff is killing me. I laughed so hard reading this, especially after the abysmal showing for the anti-Obamacare rally, that I almost teared up.

So, to be clear, hardly anybody shows up to support the repeal of Obamacare, only a handful show up to seek "justice for Benghazi." and an occasional biker rides by to protest a Muslim rally.

I do not think I could dream up a better metaphor for what is going on with the conservative movement these days. I truly believe that if it were not for the astro-turf support from the Koch brothers and others, these fringe groups would simply blink out of existence in a day or two.

The video that the Koch brothers and Tea Party do no want you to see, and the book they do not want you to read.

Courtesy of Americans Against the Tea Party: 

Her name is Claire Conner, and she’s written a book called “Wrapped In The Flag” that the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party don’t want you to see! 

According to her website, 

“Claire was twelve years old when her parents dove into the world of paranoid politics, a world dominated by the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist, anti-federal government movement. “We’re taking back the country” was the Birch mantra. 

Claire’s parents were the first two Birch members in the entire city of Chicago. Her father, Stillwell J. Conner, became a National Council member and remained in top leadership for thirty-two years. Her mother was a partner in all things Birch.” 

Claire’s new book is about the unholy coalition of Tea Party, libertarians, huge corporations, violent gun-nuts,, the religious right and the revamped John Birch Society. 

“Extremism broke my family,” Claire says. “I don’t want it to break my country.”

It is no secret that the Tea Party was wholly dreamed up and funded by the Koch brothers, and has been used to destabilize our government and render it virtually impotent. 

Understanding who is funding the group, that their agenda dates back to the John Birch society, and that the model for their astro-turf organization comes from the cigarette companies, might help us to fight them and wrest control of our country back from those who would turn it into a wasteland.

That is if it is not already too late.

Report exposes fact that Tea Party groups are really a astro-turf organizations that were originally funded by tobacco companies. In other words they serve as camouflage for big business interests and have NOTHING to do with individual freedoms.

Courtesy of  an exhaustive research paper published earlier this year:

Background 

The Tea Party, which gained prominence in the USA in 2009, advocates limited government and low taxes. Tea Party organisations, particularly Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, oppose smoke-free laws and tobacco taxes. 

Methods 

We used the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, the Wayback Machine, Google, LexisNexis, the Center for Media and Democracy and the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org) to examine the tobacco companies’ connections to the Tea Party. Results Starting in the 1980s, tobacco companies worked to create the appearance of broad opposition to tobacco control policies by attempting to create a grassroots smokers’ rights movement. Simultaneously, they funded and worked through third-party groups, such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of AFP and FreedomWorks, to accomplish their economic and political agenda. There has been continuity of some key players, strategies and messages from these groups to Tea Party organisations. As of 2012, the Tea Party was beginning to spread internationally. 

Conclusions 

Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that spontaneously developed in 2009, the Tea Party has developed over time, in part through decades of work by the tobacco industry and other corporate interests. It is important for tobacco control advocates in the USA and internationally, to anticipate and counter Tea Party opposition to tobacco control policies and ensure that policymakers, the media and the public understand the longstanding connection between the tobacco industry, the Tea Party and its associated organisations. 

In other words the Koch brothers, and other big businesses, used the model already put into place by big tobacco companies when they were trying to manufacture fake grassroots resistance against laws restricting smoking in public places or the introduction of cigarette taxes that they knew would impact their ability to make money.

All they had to do was give it a shiny new name, access the same easily manipulated group of dipshits, and the next thing you know they had a new political "grassroots" movement willing to jump through whatever hoops you held up for them, so long as they kept inspiring their anger with words like "freedom," "traditional values," and "communism."

And THIS is the group now keeping the Republicans on a short leash and fro all intents and purposes holding out country hostage

Are Right Wing trolls paid to sabotage on-line conversations and defend certain causes and political figures? You betcha!

This from Alternet:

Reading comment threads on the Guardian’s sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there’s little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilized than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterized by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.

Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it’s a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible - which appears to be the point.

The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and traditional progressives tend be more willing to discuss an issue than these right-wing libertarians, many of whom seek instead to shut down debate.

So what’s going on? I’m not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I’m suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organized, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organized by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”. This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star”. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance. In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m(13). A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.

Now I have no idea if the trolls that come here have any affiliation with the "American Majority."  But if one company like that exists, it stands to reason that there are undoubtedly others.

What I do know is that there have long been some EXTREMELY dedicated Palin defenders coming to this site who seem to have little more to do with their time than to leave comments here, and on other blogs, that attempt to refute what I say in my posts, attempt to hijack the conversation and change the subject, or viciously attack the people who regularly comment here.

They use an interesting variety of methods:

There are the concern trolls:  "I have been a fan of this blog for years, but THIS time Gryphen has gone too far and I am NEVER coming back here again. GOOD-BYE!"

There are the trolls who always attempt to change the subject to their percevied failings of Obama: "Sure Sarah might not know much about foreign policy, but at least she is not going around the world and apologizing to Europe on America's behalf like the man-child currently in office."

There are trolls who try to make the comment thread seem an unwelcome place to visit: "You know obviously Anonymous at 3:45 is an ignorant inbred moron who probably wishes his mother had aborted him because he doesn't even respect his OWN God given right to exist.  Communist liberal, Christian hating scum!"

There are trolls who might let a criticism of Sister Sarah go, but simply MUST defend her family at all cost: "While I agree that Sarah Palin will never be President, there is NO evidence that Track did anything illegal," or "I personally know the Palins and they are a closed knit loving family, and you are all jealous." or "I hate Sarah Palin just as much as ANYBODY but her children should be off limits.Come on we are better than this!"

Then there are the messages that are just to me, and the commenter knows I will probably not post them: "So Jesse is this another one of your icebergs coming?  You are so pathetically jealous of Sarah's success that you can't stand it!" or "Boring!  When are you going to post something new?  This is the same old crap everyday." or "You secretly want to have sex Sarah don't you, you gay Nazi bastard?" (I seriously have received that last message at least three times now. Except I softened the language because it is early.)

Do any of those examples sound familiar to you?

Now another favorite technique is when I REALLY write something controversial, such as my posts about Bristol moving to Arizona, and the trolls see that I am being confronted by the REAL commenter's and simply pile on.  So what might elicit a handful of negative responses now brings in dozens, making it difficult to figure out who is really upset, and who is just taking advantage of a perceived weakness.

Now you might believe that the idea of paid internet trolls is a little far fetched, but don't forget that John McCain himself set the precedent during the 2008 campaign.

The reason that I have long suspected that there are trolls paid to visit this site, is because of how quick they are to jump on a story that they don't like, and how often similar phrases or words (like man-child) show up in different threads. (I once posted a story and noticed a spelling mistake.  In the twenty to thirty seconds it took me to correct that mistake, somebody had left a comment disagreeing with me which contained a LINK to help refute my position.  They literally had a link ready for when I made a post on that topic!)

So the next time that you read a comment that seems rather aggressive or hateful you have to ask yourself, is this simply somebody who disagrees with Gryphen?  Or is this somebody who is paid to start trouble over here?  And what does THAT say about the impact that this blog must be having on certain people?