So it looks like Fox will pay Dominion $787 million in hush money, just like Donald F. Trump paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet. No admissions of any crime, just more money exchanging hands. It's good old American capitalism at its finest. If something can be bought, it will be bought. The rich get richer, the rest get screwed. And so it goes.
Modern political campaigns have been inundated with a large number of connected dark money groups, thanks to Citizens United. A result of this proliferation of laundered money propaganda machines is that they’ve become “compartmentalized”, flooding us with campaign ads for and against candidates, with each group having its own little specialty.
A couple of weeks ago, the Koch network’s Art Pope affiliate, the John Locke Foundation, held a brainstorming session to fight Gun Store Owner Ted “I Never Met a Trump Attempted Coup I Didn’t Like” Budd’s declining poll numbers. Their internal polling was showing the race tied, with Cheri Beasley leading with seniors and college-educated voters and Budd under-performing on a generic ballot.
Salon is out with a report this morning concerning a 2019 memo from Republican strategist Frank Luntz, The memo, called “The War on the Successful” was obtained by Salon and is coming to light now because of ProPublica’s recent reporting on the fact that the 25 wealthiest Americans paid little or no taxes from 2014 to 2018.
Earlier in the week, we saw a ragtag group of shrill evangelicals, right-wing “Don’t Tread on Me” freedom mongers, and air-headed anti-vaxxers and multi-level quack health promoters create a stir on Facebook and lobby the NC legislature to “reopen” NC for business in the middle of a pandemic - a call for reopening that is coming at a time when the US has been hitting new records for daily deaths from the crisis - 4,591 people died Thursday, bringing the US total to more than 33,000 killed by the pandemic.
[Previously posted in the comments; additional info added.]
We haven't heard anything about Art Pope for awhile, so I checked the Rose's stores website to see how the pandemic is impacting Pope's main business - there's no mention of it.
I started covering Art Pope 12 years ago, when he decided North Carolina couldn’t survive without his guiding hand. At the time, Mr. Pope was just beginning his quest to take over our state, after having earlier lost his election bid for lieutenant governor. Unable to convince voters to elect him, he set out to buy the influence he couldn’t earn. And he did just that.
Reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Center for Media and Democracy have been analyzing 30 gigabytes of documents hacked from the Koch network and the Bradley Foundation, showing their plans for consolidating conservative power in five states - Colorado, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. Raw Story has a summary and links to the articles and other background. And, yes, Art Pope's involved. Read on ...
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