Tag: Koch Industries

  Home to a sizable military and evangelical constituency, Colorado’s 5th is one of the most conservative congressional districts in the country. U.S. Rep. Doug...

The 2012 election season has seen a surprising uptick in the number of employers willing to wade into voter intimidation gray areas by notifying their employees that their jobs depend on who wins the White House. The not so subtle message: Vote the way your boss wants you to vote.

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee today called for a subpoena of White House records regarding the half-billion dollar taxpayer loan guarantee of Solyndra, a move Rep. Diana DeGette, the ranking Democrat on the panel, blasted as “an act of irresponsible partisanship.”

Mother Jones today posted a story by Brad Friedman linking to audio secretly recorded at the Koch brothers conservative confab and so-called “dark-money fundraiser” at the Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch near Beaver Creek in June.

LONGMONT-- The right and left protesters and counter-protesters gathered here off a sprawling suburban four-lane road and around a wall-less field house at the Boulder County Fairgrounds agreed on at least two things: that the group hosting the gathering, Americans for Prosperity, is suffering an image problem and that government subsidies to oil and gas companies have got to end.

In the eyes of the American public, Wichita-based Koch Industries is coming to stand more for right-wing string-pulling than for its blockbuster oil and gas business. For years, David and Charles Koch spent millions mostly behind the scenes to advance anti-environmental and anti-labor policies and to attack Democratic candidates for office. In the last two years, however, their expenditures have routinely made news. In the wake of the high-profile standoff in Wisconsin-- where Gov Scott Walker was caught explaining to a prank caller impersonating David Koch his plans to break public employee unions-- Koch Industries has dedicated time and money to mitigate fallout from the politics of the men in charge. The company's website includes an op-ed and a video defending Koch politics. Today comes news that the company has been buying up anti-Koch web addresses as part of its new brand-management strategy.

Coloradans blame market speculation and oil companies for high gas prices, and the vast majority say the best way to bring prices down is to crackdown on market manipulation, according to a poll released Tuesday.

A legislative specialist with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute says activists protesting the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas may be sincere in their intentions but have “a clear misunderstanding of the functioning of markets.”

Colorado Common Cause will hold a rally Sunday in Avon to protest a Vail Valley retreat this weekend set up by conservative political donors Charles and David Koch.

As the journalism industry limps along and public broadcasting comes under attack, the Koch brothers-- multimillionaire conservative-politics string-pullers-- have taken aim at the Center for Public Integrity, a twenty-year-old nonprofit investigative organization dedicated to making institutional power more transparent. The Center this month posted an influential piece on Koch lobbying activities to which Koch has responded with a targeted campaign of online ads that seek to discredit the Center's work. It's just the latest phase in the digital-era media war that has dealt repeated blows to unprepared pillars of professional journalism.