Koch Brothers

-By Sarah Blaskey and Steve Horn

May 16, 2012- Taxpayer-subsidized stealth lobbyists: Lobbyists who circumvent normal lobbying regulations and procedures to advance the corporate agenda in statehouses nationwide on the taxpayer dime.

If Washington DC is the new Versailles, run by corporate overlords and their lobbyist-hired guns, then the 50 statehouses are its paternal twins. That is, while they look different in form, they share the same genetic function as avenues for the fulfillment of the corporate agenda.

April 26, 2012- Americans for Prosperity announced its biggest ad buy yet on Thursday: $6.1 million attacking President Obama.

The ad will hold the president “accountable,” AFP says in a press release, for “sending billions of taxpayer dollars to ‘green energy’ companies overseas, even while Americans suffer with rising energy prices and a lack of jobs.”

“Billions of taxpayer dollars spent on green energy went to jobs in foreign countries,” the narrator says. The ad cites money that went to a solar plant in Mexico, an electric car company in Finland and to build traffic lights in China. “Taxpayers are paying to send their own jobs to foreign countries.”

The ad will run for two weeks in battleground states Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. AFP says it will also hold rallies and “educational townhalls” throughout the country.

Attack Ad funded by Americans For Prosperity
(think tank founded and funded by the Koch Brothers)

The old, white, rich men who are buying this election.

-By Frank Rich

April 22, 2012- If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

-By Scott Keyes

-By Paul Blumenthal

March 30, 2012- WASHINGTON -- On Friday evening, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a ruling that could begin the process of revealing the identities of secret donors to groups connected to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers.

The court ruled in Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission that the FEC rules that restricted campaign donor disclosure are not valid and must be changed to provide for disclosure.

"We are very happy to see the judge got it right," says Paul Ryan, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog that was a part of the team challenging the FEC rules.

-by Jane Mayer

March 30, 2012- A new and highly aggressive multi-million-dollar anti-Obama ad campaign has started airing on television stations in eight key political swing states—but for now at least, the funders are staying hidden in the shadows.

-By Matt Sledge

March 13, 2012- Don't cry for the sugar daddies. Rick Santorum may be down and Rick Perry may be out, but the billionaires and millionaires who bet big on them have plenty of other politicians to bankroll -- especially those running for powerful seats at the state level, like governorships in swing states.

The donors pumping money through federal super PACs in the post-Citizens United universe have in many cases also given extensively at the state level, according to a report from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Showering local politicians with money has been easy to do for decades, especially in states immune to the tighter post-Watergate campaign finance laws that tried to rein in spending on presidential and Congressional races.