Fortunately, money isn’t everything, but still…
Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations.
That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit.Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign.
We have to find a way to survive this. And then he have to find a way to turn off the spigot. I’m indescribably angry about what the Supreme Court did to our democracy with their Citizens United ruling. And if rich billionaires think I’m alone, they’re badly mistaken. This isn’t a threat; it’s a confident prediction. There will be civil unrest in a large scale before long if our elections continue to be little more than pissing matches between rival billionaires and if the Republican Party continues to survive in its current form solely through the use of limitless contributions from the incredibly wealthy and ever-increasing efforts to suppress the non-white vote.
