Big Donors are Not Getting What They Want for Their Money

First, small donors appear to be more polarized than the CEOs and the top .01 percent. All those donors are relatively polarized, with donors clustered around the party medians, but the wealthier folks are somewhat less so. Second, the 30 wealthiest donors in the country are actually pretty moderate, at least judging from this measure. Apart from some extremists like George Soros and the Koch brothers, most exist between the party medians. … This presents an interesting conundrum. We know Congress has grown more polarized over the past three decades. And we know that the very wealthy are donating more and more each year. But the very wealthy aren’t necessarily that polarized. If they were buying the government they wanted, they’d be getting a more moderate one than we currently have.

— Seth Masket, on the mischiefsoffaction.com blog.

Republicans Never Saw This Coming: Sen. Kay Hagan Owns Her Support for Obamacare

Sen. Kay Hagan, D-NC

You know what’s at stake. Only six wins this fall for Republicans leaves them to rule the Senate. If that happens, House-passed bills outlawing contraception and abortion, promoting guns, and cutting food stamps even for children will be the law of the land. And those 50 votes to defund and rescind Obamacare? Done deal.

That’s why states where Democratic senators seem at risk are drowning in dollars from those who profit if Republicans are in charge. Can you blame the Koch brothers for spending millions through their front group, Americans for Prosperity, on ads to tip these races? They’ll earn back billions if their legislation — like a bill to charge people for using solar panels instead of burning the fossil fuels that are heating our planet but lining the Kochs’ pockets — passes.

Pundits, at first stunned by a Democrat not playing by the GOP rules, are realizing the brilliance of Hagan’s move.

North Carolina, where Sen. Kay Hagan (D) is up for re-election, could be drawing the most outside money.

Voters in North Carolina have already been bombarded with 15,000 television political advertisements thanks to the U.S. Senate race…

The cost of those ads is a whopping $6.3 million, and nearly all of them have been paid for by outside groups, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project.

Many of the ads criticize Hagan’s vote for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a strategy chosen by Republican consultant Karl Rove and the Kochs after the healthcare.gov website’s rocky launch last October. But the overall success of Obamacare’s first enrollment period leaves fewer one-issue voters who will go to the polls just to get rid of the ACA’s supporters.

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Koch Brothers Set to Spend Unprecedented ‘Dark Money’ on Midterms

$125 million

Amount the Koch brothers’ main political arm intends to spend on an aggressive ground, air and data operation benefiting conservatives in the midterm elections. “The projected budget for Americans for Prosperity would be unprecedented for a private political group in a midterm, and would likely rival even the spending of the Republican and Democratic parties’ congressional campaign arms,” according to Politico.

$27 Million Down the Drain? Doh!

Bad news for whoever is writing the checks at Americans for Prosperity (AFP). The Koch brothers’ political organization has spent $27 million since last August, with millions more planned, on ads attacking Senate Democrats who voted for healthcare reform and who are up for re-election this year.

A new poll shows they are likely wasting that cash.

Poll: Support for candidates who voted for the health-care law has improved dramatically

Support for candidates who voted for the health-care law has improved dramatically in recent months, a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday shows.

The survey found respondents almost exactly split on the question of whether they would be more or less likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supports the Affordable Care Act, with 34% saying they would be more likely to vote for the candidate and 36% saying they would be less likely to do so. Some 27% said it would not make a difference.

That’s a significant jump in support levels from November—a month after the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance exchange that serves 36 states—when just 21% said a candidate’s support for the law would make them more likely to vote for them, compared to 37% who said it would make them less likely to do so. A much larger percentage—40%—were indifferent.

AFP’s ads are termed “misleading” by neutral fact-checkers, and “absolutely false” by Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

The organization put all its eggs in the “Obamacare will be hated” basket so if the public approves of the reforms and the costs of coverage decrease, the Kochs lose. Some Republicans have sniffed the wind and moved away from criticizing Pres. Obama over the Affordable Care Act to criticizing him over every other initiative instead.

Koch Brothers Order Rachel Maddow to Read Their Talking Points on the Air

Raw Story:

On Friday night, Rachel Maddow delivered a blistering reply to a letter from attorneys representing billionaire conservatives Charles and David Koch. While she has always been willing to make corrections on the show, she said, the Kochs’ current quibble is about a matter of actual verifiable fact and as such needs no correction.

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Republicans Don’t Care About Sexual Harassment

54%

Proportion of Republican voters who said they were unconcerned that Herman Cain settled two sexual harassment claims while he was a lobbyist with the National Restaurant Association, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The poll was taken in between the third and fourth women coming forward with similar experiences of Cain.

Faux Outsider: Cain Was a Lobbyist In Bed with Big Tobacco

If you’re having trouble grocking Herman Cain, a recent article in the New York Times will make your mental light bulb shine.

Cain, who has been the next Reagan since he won the straw poll at Florida’s Presidency 5 confab in September, says his main virtue is that he is an outsider to politics. And while it’s true that Cain has never held elected office, he is only an outsider in the Jack Abramoff sense of that word.*

…the role that helped propel Mr. Cain into politics was that of an ultimate Washington insider: industry lobbyist.

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