...leaves on Sunday for Vail, where he'll attend the Koch brothers' summer seminar.
Koch Industries is a Kansas-based energy conglomerate owned by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the backers of conservative causes, including Americans for Prosperity. The Koch brothers hold conferences twice a year, keeping the guest lists and details largely under wraps.The Kochs have tried to keep their "seminars" secret because people tend to show up, protest and say damaging (but true) things about the union-busting billionaires -- that is, if they can sniff them out.
The last one was held in Palm Springs, Calif., in January. McDonnell has attended at least seven of the seminars, the last in Aspen.
We'd love to know who else is going to this weekend's Kochapalooza. If you're stuck with a Governor Gone Wild, call and find out where he or she will be on Saturday and Sunday.
Meanwhile, Mahablog has a great summary of a Robert Greenwald opinion piece in the Guardian about the Kochtopus:
Robert Greenwald writes about the way the Koch brothers use money to plant falsehoods in our collective brains and thereby manipulate public opinion. You know the story — they pay “experts” in the think tanks they support to crank out “authoritative” arguments for the crackpot ideas the Kochs want to put over on the public. And these crackpot ideas become conventional wisdom in media, repeated over and over without critical evaluation, and soon most Americans have been properly indoctrinated into believing whatever the Kochs want us to believe.
Now, this isn’t new, and it isn’t just the Koch brothers. In fact, the Koch brothers are relatively new to the propaganda biz. The Heritage Foundation, for example, was founded in 1973 with money from Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors.
The Koch boys are just adding to a propaganda-catapulting infrastructure built by the previous generation.
The right-wing echo chamber became so effective that sometime in the 1980s genuinely progressive ideas were shouted out of mass media and the nation’s public political discourse. For many years the only opinions expressed in mass media were degrees of conservatism (this includes the media figures frequently called upon to represent liberals, but who were actually moderate conservatives).
