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A secretive network of Republican donors is heading to the Palm Springs area for a long weekend in January, but it will not be to relax after a hard-fought election — it will be to plan for the next one.

Koch Industries, the longtime underwriter of libertarian causes from the Cato Institute in Washington to the ballot initiative that would suspend California’s landmark law capping greenhouse gases, is planning a confidential meeting at the Rancho Las Palmas Resort and Spa to, as an invitation says, “develop strategies to counter the most severe threats facing our free society and outline a vision of how we can foster a renewal of American free enterprise and prosperity.”

[...]

With a personalized letter signed by Charles Koch, the invitation to the four-day Rancho Mirage meeting opens with a grand call to action: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

The Koch network meets twice a year to plan and expand its efforts — as the letter says, “to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it.”

For an idea of who would attend such a meeting, see the list of donors to the RGA. That's a start. Of course, Mr. Koch is shameless about taking credit for that. Forget about digging into undisclosed contributions. Just allocate them proportionately to those who attend these little liberty get-togethers for the rich, privileged owners of our government.

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It's one thing to know in your gut how much they plot this kind of activity and another thing entirely to see it in black and white. They believe they've already won the November midterms, and are already planning for the 2012 elections. Nothing would make me happier than seeing them take a $200 million loss on their investment.

Yes, there is a class war going on, one that they're winning right now. So get out and vote, please. Because the only thing that their money can't buy is YOUR vote.

Bonus: Think Progress gives us a nice list of the 2010 attendees who cozied up in Aspen this January to bring us the midterms.

It's really good to see a publication that circulates in print and online put the Koch family in the spotlight in this weeks' cover story.

I've spent the past year researching the different tentacles of the Republican party and how the money flows, much of which I've reported here. But it never seems to slide into the mainstream. Until today, when Jane Mayer put it all together for New Yorker readers.

The only thing she missed was this: FreedomWorks is also a Koch enterprise. She started to go there, then backed off, but it's important to realize that both primary sources for teabagger funding come straight from the Koch family.

“Ideas don’t happen on their own,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. “Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993.

Citizens for a Sound Economy was FreedomWorks' predecessor. All assets were merged together, and FreedomWorks emerged as the new entity. Whether or not Koch continues to fund FreedomWorks, it unquestionably was spawned with their money and intentions.

After you read it, share it with everyone you know, because really, billionaires shouldn't be confused with angry populists and racists like they are now.

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I think it's a clear indication that the Republican reflexive obstructionism has reached absurd levels when even Chris Wallace calls you on your crap. All that pearl clutching over the deficit--something that mattered not a whit during the Bush years--now requires that Obama offset the costs of extending unemployment insurance but not for the Republican answer for all societal evils, tax cuts for the wealthy. Wrap your mind around that cognitive dissonance.

WALLACE: Congressman Pence, why is it that extending unemployment benefits has to be paid for according to Republicans but extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy which would cost $678 billion, that doesn’t have to be paid for?

PENCE: Well, let me…look, Republicans, me included, have supported numerous extensions of unemployment benefits. We’re anxious to do so again. But look….the deficit this year is a trillion dollars for the second year in a row and more. The American people have had it with runaway federal spending, deficits and debt and they want to begin to see the men and women in Washington DC begin to make the hard choices and prioritize spending. The other part of it too…

[crosstalk]

WALLACE: But you’re not answering the question. I can understand the argument: pay for the unemployment benefits. Why then not pay for the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy?

Pence weasels out of it again. Because clearly, there are no justifications for this except craven political ones. He then argues that the tax cuts expand the economy, despite the fact that the expressed concern up to this point has been reducing the deficit.

At this point, I think it's important to add a little GOP-dreaded facts into the discussion. As a method of stimulating the economy, something we all agree must be done, tax cuts don't help nearly as much as extending unemployment insurance:

Lowering taxes puts money in consumers' pockets quickly, but economists worry that with uncertainty running high, many households will choose to save rather than spend the money. While most economists would like to see the U.S. saving rate rise from its current low level of 1.2 percent, a sudden jump in savings would deepen the recession.

Many economists are pushing for targeted benefits such as food stamps or extending unemployment benefits. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, estimates that every dollar dedicated to increasing food stamps puts $1.73 into the economy. Increasing jobless insurance benefits typically gets a return of $1.64 per dollar. (here)

Obama also is expected to support tax cuts for businesses, which would raise corporate profits and may help the stock market. Unless the economy recovers quickly those tax reductions would probably do little to encourage companies to step up hiring and investment, Deutsche Bank economist Peter Hooper said.[..]

In congressional testimony last year, Zandi said tax cuts delivered the least bang for the buck, with a dollar's worth of temporary nonrefundable rebates worth $1.02 with a one-year lag. Permanent tax cuts yielded less than 50 cents of additional spending.

So by his own admission, Pence wants to do the least effective method of expanding the economy and add hundreds of billions to trillions to the deficit all the while gnashing and wailing about those irresponsible Democrats growing the deficit. Wow. Nice game if you can get it.

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Suburban Guerrilla

Rolling Stone interviews Krugman on Social Security:

In selling the idea that there's a crisis, Bush has a lot of powerful words on his side: "choice," "freedom," "ownership society." What words do you have to counter his sales job?

Scam. Three-card monte. I've been thinking a lot about flying pigs. The privateers are claiming that you can have something for nothing. They're basically saying, "Let's assume that pigs can fly." And when you say, "You know, it's not good to assume that pigs can fly," they respond by saying, "What's wrong with you? Don't you understand the enormous advantage of flying pigs?"

The only reason they talk about how wonderful an ownership society would be is because we managed to win the battle over the word privatization. The Cato Institute -- which is the intellectual headquarters for all this stuff -- founded something in 1995 called the Project on Social Security Privatization. But focus groups don't like that word, so in 2002 they changed the name to the Project on Social Security Choice. They didn't announce a name change -- they just went back and scrubbed their Web site, so there's no indication that it was ever called "privatization."

If there's no crisis in Social Security, why aren't the Democrats saying that more clearly and forcefully?

There's a lot of timidity. They're desperately afraid of seeming like "Oh, well -- we have our heads in the sand, and we're not active." I would like to see them step up to the plate and say that these claims that we're going to have a crisis sometime in the next fifteen years is just garbage. Bush is handing them an opportunity by making this the centerpiece of his agenda. Democrats should treat privatizing Social Security the way Republicans treated Clinton's health-care plan -- they should say, "This is a disaster, and we will stand against it." Social Security is simply not the biggest problem facing the government today.

Calculated Risk: Fed Chairmen never learn. Meanwhile, in the UK the gubmint is trying to rein in the bankers...

Little Green Footballs: Has seen the light!

Pulp Friction: America has become one big, crappy reality show

Pressing Issues: No terrorist angle, not news

Legal Schnauzer: A "Deep Throat" emerges in the Mike Connell plane crash

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Journalism 2009...Dana Milbank is an ass...Politico reports wingnut talking points as news...Cato rips Fox...Politico deep in the tank..."Bold Strategy"...Moonie Times to lay off 40% of 'staff'...WH Mainstream hacks object to bloggers...Watching America...Steyn/Beck's Fakes of Wrath...Celebrity Nonsense...Don't think, kill!...Ask This

It's becoming a symposium of Bush bashing by republicans lately and I thought anyone who disagreed with this President was just your run of the mill Bush Hater. It's too bad about the firewall over at The NY Times, but I'll let Duncan fill you in on what Paul Krugman says.

Duncan:

Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he's saying now...read on

I know Jim is going to read this because of technorati's link up with the WaPo. Isn't it funny how we continually think we're dealing with a good reporter when we read your column? My mistake.

Jim writes:

"In an interview last night, Eisler confirmed the contents of the e-mail and said he recently provided portions of it to the liberal Web log ThinkProgress because he thought he was dealing with a fellow reporter. The blog posted the contents of the Abramoff-Eisler communication.

FDL writes:

"The Washingtoninan hardly rises to more than a local blather sheet. ThinkProgress is the blog for the Center for American Progress. Why is Deborah Howell quite proud to tout the information she gets from the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation, but suddenly ThinkProgress is a bunch of grubby, uncouth, beer-swilling louts?...read on

WSJ: Some Conservatives are not happy with King George

There's a split happening with conservatives over the behavior of President Bush. (except of course with most of the Bush-apologist bloggers.) This article has a very different view than let's say--Power Line.

WSJ:

"From the beginning, the folks who thought it was a good idea to go into Iraq have found good reason to think that all other Bush policies, from torture to domestic surveillance, are justified," said Robert Levy, a conservative legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "This is just one in a litany of ongoing events that have separated the noninterventionist wing of the Republican Party from the neocon wing."

(via AmericaBlog)