Rick Santelli rant financed by the Koch family?

[Vekseid]

Find it amusing that Playboy and Comedy Central seem to be our modern moral guidance.

*snip*

But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

*snip*

They do some sleuthing through archive.org and Google cache to prove it, and in general it's quite an interesting to read. And somewhat heartening and amusing to watch it flop.

[OldSchoolGamer]

Nothing would really surprise me at this point, given how the Powers That Be are desperate to keep the current system duct-taped and chewing-gummed into working order as long as possible (not much longer now) and to avoid taking the painful but necessary steps to adapt to the coming low-carbon, no-cheap-credit, no money from nowhere reality.

[Caliban]

Find it amusing that Playboy and Comedy Central seem to be our modern moral guidance.

They do some sleuthing through archive.org and Google cache to prove it, and in general it's quite an interesting to read. And somewhat heartening and amusing to watch it flop.

Have you seen Megan McArdle's article "Playboy Dips a Toe into Investigative Journalism" in The Atlantic?
<http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/03/did_playboy_just_disappear_an.php>