Lee Fang has documented how Americans for Prosperity and other right-wing astroturf groups are rewarding "volunteers" for their time and effort. The video above documents the gas giveaway, where there's not even a volunteer effort required to get $1.84 gas.

AFP is hosting events at gas stations across the country to provide gasoline to motorists for the price of $1.84 per gallon. The group is paying for up to fifteen gallons for 100–150 drivers at each station, telling them that the $1.84 price symbolizes the price per a gallon before Obama took office in 2009.

A CBS news affiliate in Iowa reports that at least one driver, Louis Lumpkin, said that the free gas would make a difference on his vote for president.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I tend to think that guy Louis might have already made his mind up before the cheap gas. But then I might put too much faith in people's ability to think for themselves, sometimes. As Fang points out, the whole thing is powered by the very people who actually do more to manipulate and drive gas prices up than any president ever could.

The way to an iPad, gift card, or other nifty goody is to phonebank for the billionaire of one's choice. There's plenty of billionaire largesse to go around. If you want to call Jewish voters for 50 hours, you can get a 32 GB ipad. That works out to about $14 per hour or so. The billionaires funding that giveaway are associated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, chaired by the likes of Sheldon Adelson.

Sheldon Adelson, of course, has a deep vested interest in seeing President Obama lose this election. If that were to happen, it's likely that Mitt Romney would have no option but to call off the DOJ investigation into Adelson's casino activities, including alleged money laundering and bribery.

One billionaire not often mentioned is Barre Seid, the uber-rich surge protector manufacturer who is widely believed to have distributed the anti-Islam (and anti-Obama) DVD sent to voters just before the 2008 general election. Seid has a foundation, but when he wants to fund political activity that might not be in line with his foundation's mission, it seems that he turns to Donors' Trust, the Koch-founded, Wisconsin-based anonymous donors fund.

Just last week, a scurrilous DVD was mailed to millions of voters in swing states. Of all the junk mailed out in this election, this was possibly the worst. "Dreams From My Real Father" alleges that Barack Obama's dead mother was a porn star and his father was really Frank Marshall Davis, a writer living in Hawaii who had links to the Communist Party. The entire narrative is based on Jerome Corsi's 2011 work of fiction marketed as fact. This isn't anything new for Corsi, whose lying days go back to the Swiftboat smear, and he's been the go-to for fantasy smears ever since.

The film's director is Joel Gilbert, principal at Highway 61 Entertainment. While his IMDB bio doesn't include this piece of information, Gilbert is also a contributing editor at FamilySecurityMatters.org, a member of the Frank Gaffney family of Islam-hating websites falling under the umbrella of his Center for Security Policy.

It isn't cheap to do a million-plus run of DVDs, package them, buy a mailing list, and send them out. It's fairly expensive, but someone paid whatever it took to not only produce this crappy movie, but actually send it out to people. We could point to lots of different players, from DeVos to Koch to Adelson to Seid and indeed, it may have been all of them pitching in. That is something we'll likely never know unless there's an actual audit of these bogus nonprofits and their billionaire funders.

But what is known may be enough. There is no low too low, no slime too deep to wallow in, nothing too dirty for these billionaires to spend money on. Whether it's buying favorable blog posts, iPads, or smear movies, they're willing to make that investment in order to hopefully achieve the return they expect: election of Willard Mitt Romney to the office of President of the United States.

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You have to wonder when people will begin to notice that Sean Hannity's incessant attempts to paint Barack Obama as a flaming radical by associating him with various supposed extremists is actually a classic case of projection.

After all, there's no one in the mainstream media who has quite the array of running associations with far-right nutcases that Sean Hannity has—going back to the days when he palled around with white supremacist Hal Turner, and continuing through his ongoing sponsorship of wackos like Birther extraordinaire Jerome Corsi. Most notably, Hannity continues to promote and support another WorldNetDaily nutcase, Jesse Lee Peterson.

Last night, however, even a Fox Democrat like Kirsten Powers found it too hard to contain herself when seated next to Peterson. As Ellen at NewsHounds points out, Powers completely derailed Hannity's planned Obama-bashing segment by turning to Peterson and demanding he explain himself for his recent declaration that most women are "little whores".

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See, this is why they say that satire is dead. In a sane and normal world, this would be a real news story, and not a satire:

In a stunning development one day after the release of Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, by Dr. Jerome Corsi, World Net Daily Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first printing run of the book, as well as announcing an offer to refund the purchase price to anyone who has already bought either a hard copy or electronic download of the book.

In an exclusive interview, a reflective Farah, who wrote the book's foreword and also published Corsi's earlier best-selling work, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak out Against John Kerry and Capricorn One: NASA, JFK, and the Great "Moon Landing" Cover-Up, said that after much serious reflection, he could not go forward with the project. "I believe with all my heart that Barack Obama is destroying this country, and I will continue to stand against his administration at every turn, but in light of recent events, this book has become problematic, and contains what I now believe to be factual inaccuracies," he said this morning. "I cannot in good conscience publish it and expect anyone to believe it."

When asked if he had any plans to publish a corrected version of the book, he said cryptically, "There is no book." Farah declined to comment on his discussions of the matter with Corsi.

A source at WND, who requested that his name be withheld, said that Farah was "rip-shit" when, on April 27, President Obama took the extraordinary step of personally releasing his "long-form" birth certificate, thus resolving the matter of Obama's legitimacy for "anybody with a brain."

"He called up Corsi and really tore him a new one," says the source. "I mean, we'll do anything to hurt Obama, and erase his memory, but we don't want to look like fucking idiots, you know? Look, at the end of the day, bullshit is bullshit."

But of course, it is a satire:

UPDATE, 12:25 p.m., for those who didn't figure it out yet, and the many on Twitter for whom it took a while: We committed satire this morning to point out the problems with selling and marketing a book that has had its core premise and reason to exist gutted by the news cycle, several weeks in advance of publication. Are its author and publisher chastened? Well, no. They double down, and accuse the President of the United States of perpetrating a fraud on the world by having released a forged birth certificate. Not because this claim is in any way based on reality, but to hold their terribly gullible audience captive to their lies, and to sell books. This is despicable, and deserves only ridicule. That's why we committed satire in the matter of the Corsi book. Hell, even the president has a sense of humor about it all. Some more serious reporting from us on this whole "birther" phenomenon here, here, and here.

Apparently, Farah is taking it about as well as you'd expect a paranoid right-wing crank to: He's threatening to sue:

Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of World Net Daily Books, which published Corsi’s work, said he never spoke to the magazine and that the book is “selling briskly.”

“I have never spoken to anyone from Esquire. Never uttered these words or anything remotely resembling them to anyone. It is a complete fabrication,” Farah told The Daily Caller. “The book is selling briskly. I am 100 percent behind it.”
...

Farah said he is considering “legal options” against the magazine for posting the story .

“Let me say this very clearly: There is not a single word of that report that is true. I assume it is a very poorly executed parody. In any case, I have begun exploring our legal options, since this report has all the earmarkings of a deliberate attempt at restraint of trade, not to mention libel.”

Of course he's sticking to his guns. Farah -- who advised Donald Trump to jump aboard the Birther bandwagon and who devoted his National Tea Party Convention speech to a defense of Birtherism, -- is deeply invested in the story. And it's in the nature of conspiracy theorists never to give up in the face of devastating evidence, but rather to transform that evidence into further proof of their conspiracy theory.

Gee, I wonder if Sean Hannity will ask Corsi about this the next time he has him on his Fox show.

All this is coming on the heels of the news that Corsi's book was written with the help of far-right white nationalists. Just yesterday, as Eric Hananoki at Media Matters reported, one of the nation's most prominent white nationalists popped up and claimed credit for having helped assemble portions of the book:

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There is someone who even tops Donald Trump's Birtherism and that's Jerome Corsi of WND.

A QUESTION OF ELIGIBILITY
Nordyke numbers expose Obama document fraud? Newly found details about birth registration show president's certificate out of sequence

It's been said that there's a sucker born everyday and that makes people like Jerome Corsi a ton of cash. Conspiracy theories seem to be recession proof. Maybe each state that has budgetary problems should start a phony Obama conspiracy and sell books, t-shirts and mugs based on it. Lou Dobbs can then go from state to state and just ask the questions that everybody wants answers to.

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Well, we've always known that Sean Hannity has a penchant for nuzzling right up next to conspiracy theories from folks like noted Birther Jerome Corsi and promoting them in a secondhand fashion without completely diving off the deep end, as his early-evening colleague at Fox is inclined to do.

But last night, defending Donald Trump for his admission that he believes in the Obama birth-certificate theories, Hannity dove right in and embraced his inner Birther. It was something to behold.

Terry Krepel and David Shere at Media Matters have the complete rundown:

HANNITY: What do you think about this birth certificate issue? I mean, it has not been my main issue, but it kind of does get a little odd here after a while. Can't they just produce it and we move on?

REP. MICHAEL BURGESS (R-TX): Well, obviously, there's some value to the White House not producing it. I don't know what that could be. This easily could be ended, could have been ended a couple of years ago. I don't know --

HANNITY: Jerry, that's a reasonable position. Is he right?

JERRY SPRINGER (talk show host): Well, no. I'll tell you why.

HANNITY: Release -- do you have your birth certificate?

SPRINGER: No, I finally -- well because I was born in England, and it was during the war, and really, I had to go through a whole process for my Social Security -- because I'm on Medicare now. I had to finally get --

LEEANN TWEEDEN (model and Fox Sports host): You had to track it down, and you did, right? And you had to produce it, right?

SPRINGER: But i found it. I found it. I found it. But because I was born in England, I can't be president anyway.

The best moment came when Springer tried to point out the obvious -- no previous candidate for the presidency had faced these kinds of questions about his citizenship, and it is no coincidence that it happens to be the first African American president. Hannity hastily sprang into action -- block that point!

SPRINGER: But you know what, I understand why there's a resistance to it.

HANNITY: Why?

SPRINGER: Because isn't this interesting? Of all our 43 presidents, of the 43 presidents --

HANNITY: Don't bring up race. Do not bring up race. Do not bring up race. It is a constitutional requirement.

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It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the wingnuts tried to maliciously and deceitfully connect the Fort Hood shooter to the Obama White House. We just didn't expect it would take less than 24 hours.

And of course the perpetrator is the reliably wrong conspiracy-meister Jerome Corsi, writing at WorldNetDaily:

NEW YORK – Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama's transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.

The Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University published a document May 19, entitled "Thinking Anew – Security Priorities for the Next Administration: Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force, April 2008 – January 2009," in which Hasan of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine is listed on page 29 of the document as a Task Force Event Participant.

Media Matters has the facts:

However, Corsi himself acknowledges that there is no evidence that "the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition" -- indeed, the Task Force was initiated in April 2008. Moreover, while Hasan was listed as one of approximately 300 "Task Force Event Participants" in the report's appendix, HSPI has reportedly said he was not a "member" of the Task Force, and was listed because he RSVP'd for several of the group's open events.

Why, we can hardly wait for the next Glenn Beck episode.

The fact that it is crap, of course, guarantees that Glenn Beck et al will run with it. We can now look forward to a “the Fort Hood killer advised the Obama transition team” meme -– shortened to calling him “an Obama adviser”.

This is, naturally, just par for the course for Corsi:

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Sean Hannity hosted not one but two whole segments last night devoted promoting the new book by Jerome Corsi -- godfather of the Swift-Boating of John Kerry -- titled America For Sale, which is basically an extended black-helicopter-style conspiracy tome straight out of the Patriot movement of the 1990s, updated for the new century.

This is a classic case of conservatives mainstreaming extremist ideas. I haven't read all of Corsi's book yet, but it differs very little in ideas and content and overall thesis from the kinds of books you could buy at militia-meeting tables in the '90s.

I haven't yet found whether Corsi decided to include his recent reportage for WorldNetDaily detailing the nefarious Obama conspiracy to round up conservatives and imprison them in concentration camps. Hannity managed to not bring up that point last night.

But yes, that's what Corsi wrote:

Text:

The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.

Funny, I still have a Militia of Montana book that outlines this very same nefarious plot being concocted by Bill Clinton.

As Steven Thomma explained for McClatchy:

In truth, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has proposed a bill that would order the Homeland Security Department to prepare national emergency centers — to provide temporary housing and medical facilities in national emergencies such as hurricanes. The bill also would allow the centers to be used to train first responders, and for "other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security."

Of course, Corsi and Hannity aren't the only ostensibly mainstream conservatives peddling this paranoiac fearmongering: So is Michelle Bachmann, among others:

"There is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service," Bachmann told a Minnesota radio station.

"And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

It's also cropping up quite a bit at Tea Party gatherings. That's where you find outfits like the "Oath Keepers," whose organization is built around resisting citizen roundups.

Why, exactly, does Sean Hannity so avidly promote Jerome Corsi and his conspiracy theories anyway? Look at his record:

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Lou Dobbs has gone and done it again:

On his radio show -- broadcast from the anti-immigration organization Federation for American Immigration Reform's "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" legislative advocacy event -- Lou Dobbs interviewed WorldNetDaily staff reporter Jerome Corsi, who Dobbs described as "a pretty good guy to talk to" about immigration issues. Corsi is a consistent promoter of the conspiracy theory -- previously advanced by Dobbs -- that President Obama has yet to produce a valid birth certificate; the author of falsehood-laden books about Obama and Sen. John Kerry that Dobbs' CNN colleagues panned as "discredited;" and has a history of making bigoted comments, some of which he later apologized for.

The piece documents Corsi's long history of promoting conspiracy theories, including most recently the "birther" nonsense, but more famously the "Swift Boat" garbage that sank John Kerry's candidacy.

Perhaps even more germane is that, beyond the "birther" conspiracy theories, Corsi has most recently been promoting the theory that President Obama is planning to round up conservatives and put them in concentration camps.

This willingness to abet the most insane wingnuttery is yet another drop in the bucket of evidence that CNN needs to give Dobbs the boot if it ever hopes to salvage what little credibility it has left.

A new site called DropDobbs.com is a joint effort by various progressive organizations -- including Media Matters, America's Voice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Council of La Raza -- to demand CNN make the change:

Over the years, Lou Dobbs has consistently used his CNN platform to spread hatred and fear. He played a critical role in skewing the immigration reform debate in 2006, leading to the derailment of that effort, and his obsession with the issue of immigration and with defeating immigration reform continues unabated. Adding to his repertoire of hate and fearmongering, he has recently aligned himself with the “birther” conspiracists and their racially tinged attack on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. From his CNN platform, he has bolstered the claims of those on the fringe by asserting repeatedly that President Obama has failed to produce adequate proof that he was born in the United States. His recent focus on the birth certificate conspiracy issue has reinforced what immigration reform proponents have long known — that Dobbs has a long history of the worst kind of pandering by promoting hate and ethnic and racial division.

Timothy Karr at HuffPo has a thoughtful piece on what we can start to do to confront the flood of toxic garbage that is spewing out of right-wing media these days. Lou Dobbs is only one of the most prominent problems.

Digby discusses the Corsi book and how the press reacts to it:

Rutten says this is all about making money, and I don't disagree that there's probably some money to be made by the wingnut welfare recipients in the food chain. But money isn't the motive of the people who buy those books in bulk. They are making an investment in Republican politics. And the most telling thing about it is that one of the most mainstream Republican figures in the country -- so mainstream that she regularly appears with her Democratic operative husband on Meet the Press with their two daughters at Christmas time --- is giving her imprimatur to a book written by a known delusional, right wing racist. On that side of the dial the separation between the mainstream and the violent fringe isn't even one degree.

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As long as the villagers are in agreement that the only people who are truly beyond the pale in American politics are on the left, then this will continue. Mary Matalin will still be considered a perfectly respectable person by both the "right" and the "left" (as if there's any discernible difference among the cognoscenti) and there will be no professional or social repercussions. Meanwhile even staid, old organizations like the ACLU suffer from the myth of being some sort of far left fringe organization and Democratic politicians run for cover when the right wing publicly "tars" them with guilt by association.

This is an ongoing problem that we see being played out once again in a national election. And I don't think the progressive movement has fully come to grips yet with just how powerful this image of scary left wing freaks still is in the national imagination --- or how thoroughly the right's extremist views have been accepted by the political establishment. It's something...read on.

Jerry Wexler, RIP: I'm proud and grateful that Jerry was a friend of mine, beginning the day in 1975 he called me, out of the blue, and said, "I like the way you sing. Let's make a record." I couldn't have been more surprised and thrilled if I'd received a phone call from God. I'd grown up listening to Jerry Wexler-produced records. He's one of the reasons I'm a musician. He took me to Muscle Shoals, Alabama and we did an album for Warner Brothers. Being around Jerry was a constant joy. He was a walking encyclopedia of popular American music, especially R&B and jazz. Aside from his important contributions as a genuine musical pioneer, and his unique talents as a producer, he was a wonderful raconteur, a man of exquisite taste, a tough businessman, but a gentleman, and a soft touch for musicians.

I could ask him something like, "tell me about Solomon Burke..." and he'd do an hour of lively, informative and often hilarious commentary on that subject and related topics, one story sparking another. I spent countless hours with him in New York before and after our project, in Alabama while we were recording, and on many occasions in the succeeding 30 years, pestering him to talk about his life in music, which he was always happy to do. I learned a lot. About his experiences with everyone from Ray Charles, to Willie Nelson, to Wilson Pickett, to Aretha Franklin, to Bob Dylan, and on and on. The last time I spoke with him several weeks ago, I opened the conversation by asking how he was doing. "How the hell you think I'm doing," he replied..."I'm 91...!!" What an honor it was for me to have had the opportunity to work with Jerry Wexler. I lost a friend. American music lost one of the greats.

Thought Theater: Compare & Contrast: Family Values and the 2008 election

Frameshop: What America needs to hear about Jerome Corsi, and the denialists riding the slime machine.

Pam's House Blend: Do your homework or Teach might pop a cap in your ass.

The Big Picture: Financial Innovation