WI Supreme Court Justice, JoAnne Kloppenburg
Talk about a vampire squid with its tentacles wrapped around the face of humanity. Once again, we have an example of the far reaching influence of the Koch Brothers and their insidious invasion of the democratic process in this country, as uncovered by Chris Liebenthal at his Cognitive Dissident blog.
In Wisconsin, an ad against a State Supreme Court candidate was sponsored by a group known as Citizens for a Strong America, which is one of five organizations that have dumped over $2 million into the fight to discredit judicial candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg. The ad was fact-checked by Politifact Wisconsin, and given the notorious “Pants on Fire” designation. The ad was also dismantled by Jessica Arp, a reporter for Channel 3000 in Madison.
The Citizens for a Strong America group listed a Beaver Dam, WI address, which turned out to be a post office box, but after some digging, it was revealed that the group’s website was registered to one John Connors, whose Milwaukee address is the same for Americans for Prosperity, the infamous front group funded by the Koch brothers. As Liebenthat and his friends kept digging, they also found this:
Also sharing the same address as CSA and AFP is an organization called Campaign Now. Guess what. Campaign Now’s website is also registered to John Connors. Digging a little deeper into Campaign Now’s site, one can find their contact phone number. This number happens to be the same phone number that was used by AFP to register riders on the buses to the AFP (read Koch Brothers) sponsored pilgrimage to Madison on February 15, in order to represent the Koch Industries in front of the Joint Financial Committee.
Besides sharing phone numbers and addresses, these groups also share Connors, who is listed as a On-Site Production Coordinator at the AFP/Koch Brothers sponsored Tea Party held in Wisconsin Dells in 2009.
On top of being affiliated with AFP, CSA and Campaign Now, Connors was also an intern for then County Executive Scott Walker and for the gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker, all while balancing his school career and being a senator at Marquette University.
Connors is also listed as the registrant for yet another website, this time WatchDog.org, which is ironically described as a “non-profit, non-partisan” project of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. And here’s a really shocker – Franklin Center is affiliated with – guess who- the Koch Brothers!
My, the tangled web the Koch brothers weave. This is what Progressives are faced with: a massive spider web of money and influence that has to be dismantled thread by thread. Thank goodness there are people out there doing just that to reveal the amount of corruption taking over these elections. If this is what we’re seeing over a judicial election, you can be damn sure 2012 is going monster.
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