Rachel Maddow's summary here of the deep, wide divide between the Tea Party groups and the so-called "mainstream" Republican party is interesting, but what's more interesting is how the tea party groups themselves are imploding.

First, there was the FreedomWorks meltdown and split with Dick Armey, which has worked itself up to a silly crescendo with the tale of the Hillary Clinton sex-with-a-panda video. Then, there was yesterday's mess with the Tea Party Patriots and their depiction of Karl Rove as a Nazi.

Now we have news of some housecleaning over at Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed groups pushing their corporate agenda of privatizing everything and killing government services with an axe and a hatchet. It seems they've turned the hatchet on themselves.

AFP president Tim Phillips wouldn’t comment on specific personnel moves, though he generally cast the cuts to his group, which now has about 190 employees, as an anticipated back-end result of a major election-year ramp up.

“The vast majority of it reflects a field effort that increased dramatically in late 2011 and 2012, and then it comes down to a more long-term sustainable size,” Phillips said. “Washington is an artificial hothouse as far as how folks move and how organizations change. A year or two years is an eternity working for the same organization in Washington D.C.”

But the departure of AFP’s chief operating officer Tracy Henke, which occurred around the time of Charles Koch’s holiday party criticism of AFP, was acrimonious, according to sources.

Henke and other departing AFP staffers signed nondisclosure agreements, and she did not respond to requests for comment, but she appears to have completely left the Koch network of groups.

That’s in contrast to other top AFP officials who recently left the group to join or start other new groups regarded as part of the Koch family, including Cobb’s Association for American Innovation and Phil Kerpen’s American Commitment.

The moves fit a pattern the Koch operation has pioneered of creating — and channeling millions of dollars to — political groups since it began increasing its political involvement.

According to Tracy Henke's LinkedIn bio, she's now with H&H Advisors, a political consulting firm. That's a polite and corporate way of saying she's out on her own, and it doesn't seem like a very amiable split. Henke is a veteran of the George W. Bush administration who worked for John Ashcroft and as Kit Bond's policy advisor. She also has ties to the Abramoff scandal. It could be that Henke's most serious sin was her work lobbying on behalf of the Rockefeller family foundation in favor of the CLEAR Act in 2009. How could the Kochs possibly have someone who acted as a paid shill for climate change and carbon tax proponents, after all?

Do you think she was let go because she was too moderate? After all, American Commitment, Phil Kerpen's new, fully Koch-funded venture, is hardcore right-wing with an extra strong dose of hot love for coal, oil and gas while denying climate change and hating unions. The one thing it seems to be missing is the usual hard core right wing war on women aspects, but the Kochs fund Concerned Women for America to cover themselves on that front.

According to Politico, there is the possibility that the Kochs are going to retreat from campaign politics and stick to policy-building via think tanks like Cato, Heritage, Franklin Center and others:

If they continue an expansion into electoral politics that helped spawn the tea party and push the GOP to the right, they could find themselves on a collision course with Karl Rove, who has pledged to raise big money to boost more centrist or “electable” GOP candidates. But if they begin steering cash away from ads and political organizing and back toward the free-market libertarian ideological and policy spheres, that could diminish their role at the ballot box.

Early indications suggest that they’ll continue playing in politics but will tweak their approach to reflect 2012 lessons.

There's no way the Kochs are retreating from electoral politics. All of their moves indicate a round of "creative destruction" and reorganization toward redoubling their efforts. American Commitment is only one of their new projects. There is the John Hancock Committee for the States, currently overseen by Eric O'Keefe but with assistance from the Ryun brothers of American Majority fame. The most recent Donors' Trust reports show large sums of money going into that operation, alongside another called Empower Texans. Generation Opportunity, referred to in the Politico article, is another front group for the Kochs aimed at young voters, with leadership apparently connected back to the tobacco lawsuits in the 90s.

Meanwhile, over at FreedomWorks, there's no doubt about their direction. It's not toward the center. It's farther right --so far right, we'll start thinking of Karl Rove as the party moderate.

The only soul-searching going on with Republicans, whether of the corporate type like Rove or of the super-corporate type like Americans for Prosperity, is how far right they think they can go.

Rachel Maddow is a great commentator and host, but she is a bit too glib about what's going on right now with the right wing. There's a lot of sound and fury, but it's just cover for the alignments they're making for 2014. Stay on guard.

Asked the biggest difference between himself and George W. Bush, Texas governor and new Republican White House front runner Rick Perry answered, "I went to Texas A&M. He went to Yale." Which isn't far from the truth. After all, their pronouncements on policies and personal beliefs are eerily similar. And when it comes to donning the executioner's hood in the death penalty mecca that is Texas, Rick Perry and George W. Bush are almost indistinguishable.

As the Washington Post documented, Governor Perry is America's reigning death penalty champion, exceeding the body count of his predecessor in Austin:

In his nearly 11 years as the state's chief executive, Perry, now running for the Republican presidential nomination, has overseen more executions than any governor in modern history: 234 and counting. That's more than the combined total in the next two states -- Oklahoma and Virginia -- since the death penalty was restored 35 years ago.

Perry's apparent enthusiasm for Texas' popular death penalty process doesn't end there:

He vetoed a bill that would have spared the mentally retarded, and sharply criticized a Supreme Court ruling that juveniles were not eligible for the death penalty. He has found during his tenure only one inmate on Texas's crowded death row he thought should receive the lesser sentence of life in prison.

If this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. During the 2000 campaign, Americans were introduced to another Texas governor who was unapologetic about condemning his state's residents to death.

George W. Bush carried out 152 executions during his days as Governor of Texas, sparing only one death row inmate after his routine 15 minute clemency review. Even those similarly adopting Jesus as their favorite philosopher could expect no leniency from Bush. When his allies on the religious right pressured him to spare murderess turned jailhouse born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker, Governor Bush displayed his trademark resolve - and compassion. As Time recounted in 1999:

Tucker Carlson of Talk magazine described the smirk Bush wore as he mimicked convicted murderer turned Christian Karla Faye Tucker begging, "Please don't kill me," something she never actually did.

Bush's seeming bloodlust towards criminal defendants almost derailed his 2000 presidential campaign. During his second debate against Al Gore in October 2000, Bush was asked about his position on hate crimes laws in the wake of the brutal dragging death of African-American James Byrd in his home state of Texas. His disturbing response - accompanied by a sickening grin - produced gasps among the audience:

"The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what's going to happen to them? They're going to be put to death. A jury found them guilty. It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death."

Even the tone-deaf Bush sensed he had crossed the line. In the third debate, he wisely retreated, acknowledging he was "not proud" of Texas' number one ranking in executions.

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During his 2004 campaign, Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn declared, "I favor the death penalty for abortionists." Four years later, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin famously refused to condemn an abortion clinic bomber as a "terrorist." Last week, a GOP mayoral candidate in Jacksonville joked that bombing an abortion clinic "may cross my mind." Now, deadly serious Republican lawmakers in Nebraska and Iowa are pushing legislation that would in essence legalize the murder of abortion providers.

Less than two years after the assassination of Dr. George Tiller and less than two weeks after South Dakota Republicans shelved a similar bill, Nebraska state Senator Mark Christensen has introduced an even more onerous version in LB 232. As Mother Jones explained:

Unlike its South Dakota counterpart, which would have allowed only a pregnant woman, her husband, her parents, or her children to commit "justifiable homicide" in defense of her fetus, the Nebraska bill would apply to any third party.

"In short, this bill authorizes and protects vigilantes, and that's something that's unprecedented in our society," Melissa Grant of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland told the Nebraska legislature's judiciary committee on Wednesday. Specifically, she warned, it could be used to target Planned Parenthood's patients and personnel. Also testifying in opposition to the bill was David Baker, the deputy chief executive officer of the Omaha police department, who said, "We share the same fears...that this could be used to incite violence against abortion providers."

Meanwhile in Iowa, two new measures backed by House Republicans could together enable "the justifiable use of force against abortion or family planning providers." In violation of the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade ruling, House File 153 would ban abortion by mandating the state must protect "life" from the moment of conception. House File 7 would provide civil and criminal immunity for citizens using "reasonable force, including deadly force, to protect themselves or a third party from serious injury or death or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." Together, the Iowa Independent explained, the two bills could enable the very kind of necessity defense for anti-abortion terrorists a Kansas judge rejected for Tiller murderer Scott Roeder:

If passed into law, the two bills -- House File 7 and House File 153 -- would offer an unprecedented defense opportunity to individuals who stand accused of killing such providers, according to a former prosecutor and law professor at the University of Kansas, and are something that might have very well led to a different outcome in the Kansas trial of the man who shot Dr. George Tiller in a church foyer.

If terrorism is defined as "as the deliberate murder of civilians or destruction of property in order to achieve a political objective," the wave of attacks on American abortion providers certainly qualifies. After the 2003 capture of Atlanta Olympic Park and Birmingham family planning clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, then Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed, announcing "this sends a clear message that we will never cease in our efforts to hunt down all terrorists, foreign or domestic, and stop them from harming the innocent."

Shelley Shannon, one of the nation's most notorious anti-abortion extremists, agreed with Ashcroft.

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(click here to see Mark's very revealing video about the phony terror alerts back in the Bush years)

This is a big deal because it's coming from the horse's mouth. Tom Ridge admits in his new book what we've known for a long time and what has been reported years ago.

Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.

Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.

"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector," Ridge is quoting as writing in "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again."

Some of Bush's critics had repeatedly questioned whether the administration was using warnings of a possible attack to blunt the political damage from the unpopular Iraq war by shifting the debate to the broader "war on terrorism," which had wide popular appeal.

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He later publicly acknowledged that much of the information underpinning the new alert was three years old, stoking Bush critics' charges of political manipulation.

Ridge also charges that he was often "blindsided" during daily morning briefings with Bush because the FBI withheld information from him, and says he was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings.

Here's what Ridge's book says:

Former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is releasing a book on September 1 titled, “The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again.” U.S. News’ Paul Bedard reports that, in the book, Ridge reveals that he considered resigning because he was urged to issue a politically-motivated security alert on the eve of Bush’s re-election:

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

This was first reported way back when by the Washington Post in 2004:

The mixing of anti-terrorism policy with the 2004 presidential campaign is becoming destructive. It is creating a vicious cycle of hype, skepticism and mistrust that puts the country's security at risk.

The dangers of politicizing terrorism were clear in this month's announcement about potential attacks on financial centers in the New York area and in Washington. When Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge disclosed the threats on Aug. 1, he faced immediate skepticism about whether the intelligence was valid. Sadly, the Bush administration had helped create this climate of public suspicion by overusing its elaborate, color-coded system of terrorism warnings. After a terrorism advisory by Attorney General John Ashcroft last spring was pooh-poohed the same day by Ridge, some people wondered whether these warnings were being used for political effect.

Bush used the terror alerts to win the election against John Kerry and it's a breach of his oath of office as far as I'm concerned.

And don't forget about the release of the Osama Bin Laden tape right before the election. As we were getting closer to Nov. 4th, Kerry was picking up momentum before this happened.

On October 29, 2004, at 21:00 UTC, the Arab television network, Al Jazeera, broadcast excerpts from a videotape of Osama bin Laden addressing the people of the United States, in which he accepted responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks, condemns the Bush government's response to those attacks and presents those attacks as part of a campaign of revenge and deterrence motivated by his witnessing of the destruction in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982.

John Kerry admitted as much on MTP:

Senator John Kerry said on Sunday that the attacks of Sept. 11 were the "central deciding thing" in his contest with President Bush and that the release of an Osama bin Laden videotape the weekend before Election Day had effectively erased any hope he had of victory.

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Dan Froomkin has a great post up about the newly released torture memos and he knows this is only the beginning.

The full extent of what was done in our name remains unclear, and there are still big gaps in our understanding of how it all came to pass. Just how many people were detained by the U.S. government in the so-called “war on terror”? How many of them should never have been held in the first place? How many of them were mistreated, and how badly? Did torture and abuse produce valuable information? How much did it embolden our enemies? How many people knew what was going on? Where in the chain of command does the responsibility lie? Why didn’t more people object? How direct was the link between what happened in the offices of the president and vice president and the cells of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How willful was the administration’s corruption of the law?

And it’s not just torture and detention. When it comes to warrantless surveillance, for instance, what little we know about the program as it still exists today is still considerably more than we know about the program as it operated before the revolt in Bush’s own Justice Department. What were we doing from 2001 to 2004 such that even John Ashcroft couldn’t bring himself to approve it any longer? How many people have been wiretapped without a warrant? What happened to all the data?

The public overwhelmingly wants some sort of official inquiry. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, nearly two thirds of Americans support an investigation into the treatment of terror suspects during the Bush administration – although they are split on whether it should be conducted by an independent panel or by federal prosecutors.

Journalists have a special role here. Not only can we keep chipping away at the truth – but we can and should remind members of the public, over and over again, about all the facts that remain hidden from them, including information about acts committed in their name that had -- and continue to have -- profound moral and legal implications. We should also remind Americans that our moral stature on the globe has been -- and will remain -- seriously damaged until or unless there is some sort of process of reckoning and accountability. And while there’s no need for journalists to get involved in partisan battles, when the question at hand is whether the nation will avert its eyes or face up to the truth, it’s entirely appropriate for journalists to take a stand.

NiemanWatchDog is having a series devoted to these questions. Journalists, please do your jobs.

It would be good to see them face charges for their torture policies. We can only hope the new administration feels the same. (h/t Avedon):

In early December, in a highly unusual move, a federal court in New York agreed to rehear a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft brought by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. (Arar was a victim of the administration's extraordinary rendition program: he was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 while in transit through Kennedy Airport and deported to Syria, where he was tortured.) Then, on Dec. 15, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld by four Guantánamo detainees alleging abuse there—a reminder that the court, unlike the White House, will extend Constitutional protections to foreigners at Gitmo.

Finally, in the same week the Senate Armed Service Committee, led by Carl Levin and John McCain, released a blistering report specifically blaming key administration figures for prisoner mistreatment and interrogation techniques that broke the law. The bipartisan report reads like a brief for the prosecution—calling, for example, Rumsfeld's behavior a "direct cause" of abuse. Analysts say it gives a green light to prosecutors, and supplies them with political cover and factual ammunition. Administration officials, with a few exceptions, deny wrongdoing. Vice President Dick Cheney says there was nothing improper with U.S. interrogation techniques—"we don't do torture," he repeated in an ABC interview on Dec. 15. The government blamed the worst abuses, such as those at Abu Ghraib, on a few bad apples.

High-level charges, if they come, would be a first in U.S. history. "Traditionally we've caught some poor bastard down low and not gone up the chain," says Burt Neuborne, a constitutional expert and Supreme Court lawyer at NYU. Prosecutions may well be forestalled if Bush issues a blanket pardon in his final days, as Neuborne and many other experts now expect. (Some see Cheney's recent defiant-sounding admission of his own role in approving waterboarding as an attempt to force Bush's hand.)

Constitutionally, Bush could pardon everyone involved in formulating and executing the administration's interrogation techniques without providing specifics or naming names. And the pardon could apply to himself. Such a step, however, would seem like an admission of guilt and thus be politically awkward. Even if Bush takes it, civil suits for monetary damages could still proceed; such cases, though hard to win, are proliferating. Yet most legal scholars argue that a civil suit would not the best approach here. Neuborne calls it an "excessively lawyer-centric" strategy and says judges are extremely reluctant to award damages in such cases. Conservative legal experts like David Rifkin (who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations) argue that no accounting is necessary, since the worst interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, have already been abandoned and Obama is expected to make further changes.

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at-Largely: John Ashcroft claims Japanese waterboarding is different from American waterboarding.

Comments from Left Field: Attention Men! Stay out of the Congo

Outside The Beltway: Land of the free ...uh, imprisoned

Hello, Negro: "It is absolutely critical that Obama's negatives go up with Republicans." So says, the Republican marketing man behind the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

Bats Left Throws Right: Goin' Medieval

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Networks win Pennsylvania in a landslide!...Murdoch's Newsday deal is bad news for New York...What election sexism?...Villagers still pedaling 'maverick' baloney...There's the truth, and there's NPR truth...Two 'blue collar' media big shots put their heads together...Why the Pentagon talking heads piece in the NYT had no legs. But then, why would we expect Fake News programs to report on their fake news? At least, not everyone went along with the sham...FCC chief says Comcast's network practices need scrutiny...Terry McAuliffe fluffs Fox...Michelle Malkin and warbloggers get everything wrong -- again

ABC News reported this week that a group of so-called “Principals” — including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — met dozens of times in the White House to “discuss and approve” specific interrogation techniques to be used against suspected terrorists.

The AP moved the ball forward on this story today.

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

So, Bush was “insulated.” It’s quite a concept. I’m trying to imagine the president walking through his White House asking his chief of staff, “Hmm. Dick, Rummy, Colin, Tenet, Ashcroft, and Condi are all huddled together. What’s that all about?” Only to hear in response, “Don’t worry about it.”

It’s vaguely reminiscent of the “out of the loop” defense utilized during the Iran-Contra scandal. Everyone around the president was engaged in criminal behavior, but we need not blame the president directly because he had no idea what was going on and no clue what the top members of his White House team were doing.

How reassuring.

Download | play Download | play (h/t BillW)

And we knew they knew and we were right. ABC News aired a segment on their daily news show that after a five month investigation, they could say that Bush's most senior officials not only knew about the torture they were inflicting on suspected terrorists, but decided down to the last detail exactly how much torture to inflict.

The discussions in the White House were top secret and sources say, involve some of the President’s most senior and influential advisors, principals of the National Security Council. In dozens of private talks and meetings, sources said that a handful of top advisors discussed specific high-value al Qaeda prisoners and exactly how those prisoners would be interrogated. Whether, for example, they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding. The discussion about the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, sources said, the interrogations were almost choreographed, down to the number of times the CIA could use a specific tactic. Former CIA director George Tenet, in an interview last year with ABC News told Charles Gibson,

“It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States.”

It also was discussed and approved in meetings by the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a group that included Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, John Ashcroft.

There's your war crimes tribunal list right there. While ABC brings up two terrorists that were connected to 9/11--implying that even though our country's leaders have dragged us down to torturing people, at least they directed it at bad men who committed the worst tragedy on American soil--but what they fail to connect are names like Maher Arar, Khaled al-Masri, Bisher al-Rawi and Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. Names of innocent men who were guilty of nothing more than being Muslim and were renditioned and tortured for information they could not provide.

So while it is a small comfort that a MSM is actually acknowledging and validating things that the liberal blogosphere have been yelling about for years, it is but a incremental step towards the truth that all Americans must know.

Martini Revolution: President Bush: Hypocrite and miserable failure.

Making conservatives cringe since 1977: Maybe when Senator McSame visits Annapolis he'll explain why he's left so many veterans behind.

BAGnewsNotes: Coming to a cubicle near you

The Liberal Journal: Dean working toward a Florida resolution

Balkinization: John "Torture" Yoo issued his controversial and lawless opinion in his own name. But John Yoo did not have the legal authority to issue this opinion . . . unless either Jay Bybee and/or John Ashcroft signed off on it.

HOLY CRAP: The King of America...Navy Chaplain fired...New Baptist John McCain returns to his old Episcopal high school...The lingering effects of anti-abortion terrorism...Get Rich for Jesus...Sympathy for the devil...Demon Rum...John McCain, Jew Counter...