The Kochtopus

If you missed the New Yorker article on the Koch Brothers, I recommend it for your Sunday reading. Frank Rich has a decent summary, but to get the full impact you really should read the full New Yorker piece. It's so dense, it's hard to pull quotes but here's just one:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Really. Read it all. Under the heading, know thine enemy, the gory details on how they're systematically trying to destroy every progressive gain of the last century is valuable knowledge.