Koch Crimes and Tea Party Chumps

We got a preview of how damaging an upcoming Bloomberg Markets magazine story on the Koch brothers would be last week. Salon's Justin Elliott reported that "an anonymous person or persons in the orbit of the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch try to discredit a forthcoming story in Bloomberg Markets magazine."

"Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report," he continued, "the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries."

That's right, prebuttals. They want to discredit the story before it ever even hits the newsstands. But this weekend, Bloomberg put up what Politico calls an "early glance" of the article up on their website and what's there is explosive. And detailed.

There's plenty there; illicit business dealings with Iran, bribery in Africa, India, and the Middle East, firing the company's internal investigators for not turning blind eyes to obvious wrongdoing ("They didn't know what to do with me," says one. "They were really kind of baffled that I had ethics"), and general corporate culture of lawlessness and corruption. If you want an idea of what the perfect corporate climate would be for the Koch brothers and the Tea Party, look no further. Just imagine nearly everything they're already doing, only made legal.

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The Right's Increasing Desperation to Take Credit for Bin Laden's Downfall

It's a case of hearing what you want to hear. The right is so intent on giving Bush all the credit for the death of Osama bin Laden that they're trying (and, perhaps, succeeding) on reopening the debate about torture. And, in doing so, they're practicing selective listening.

The Daily Caller:

CIA Director Leon Panetta stomped on the White House's political script when he told Tuesday night's broadcast of NBC Nightly News that the waterboarding of jihadi detainees contributed information that led to the location and killing of Osama bin Laden.

"We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation… clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees," he told NBC anchor Brian Williams.

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