The group has spent $85,125 so far at KCCI, the local CBS affiliate in Des Moines and the state’s largest network TV station. The group has run ads since late June, and recently spent $13,472 for ads running between Oct. 25 and Nov. 3. At least a portion of the ads being run in Iowa target Democratic U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell.

The election is a year away. Crossroads just has money to burn.

While Democrats continue to outpace Republicans in “traditional” fundraising — with Obama outraising all his GOP rivals and the Democratic congressional and Senate campaign committees outraising their GOP equivalents — Ken Vogel writes today that Democrats can’t keep pace with the GOP when it comes to funneling anonymous money into unaccountable independent groups with no spending limits.

“A network of the seven most important Democratic outside groups, including Priorities, raised less than $11.7 million this year,” according to Vogel. One Crossroads group spent $20 million on ads this last summer.

Here are some of the problems: Rich people are mad at Democrats for not loving rich people enough. Liberals are mad at Obama for … a host of reasons. Democrats have spent years decrying outside spending by Super PACs and organizations like them. And also, as always, the problem is people like Ben Nelson:

“There is a discontent brewing with both the super PACs and the party committees because there are donors who don’t want their money going to help the likes of a Ben Nelson, who can’t even vote to extend unemployment benefits, or some of the Blue Dogs,” said Leo Hindery, a New York investor who’s contributed more than $2.8 million to Democratic candidates and groups. “But in principal, I dislike the super PACs more than I dislike the committees, as I hate seeing either party playing the so-called PAC game.”

Meanwhile, mega-rich liberals — like George Soros — have shifted their funding from campaigns to think tanks and long-term projects designed to build liberal institutions. (This seems like a wiser investment than getting Democrats elected to the Senate, frankly.)

All of this is basically why Democrats so wholeheartedly embraced “centrist” pro-Wall Street corporatism in the first place: Republicans have a built-in donor base of rich industry tycoons, so Democrats need the support of the rest of the 1 percent.

The glitter mostly missed him. But still: Good show, glitter-bombing folks.

Less embarrassing but probably more aggravating to Rove is the growing rift between him and his wealthy political allies, the Koch brothers, that Politico’s Kenneth Vogel reports on today.

Rove is running a shadow-RNC that will flood the airwaves with ads no matter which joker the Republicans actually nominate. In order to do this, he needs a lot of money. The Kochs have a lot of money. But the Kochs and Rove are apparently not going to coordinate their campaigns this year, because they don’t get along.

Rove is driven by partisanship and has absolutely no ideology or principles beyond winning elections. He doesn’t care what the Republican candidate believes or does, as long as the Republican candidate is electable. The Kochs, driven by principled support of a political philosophy that paints their desire to make the most amount of money with the least amount of oversight as a morally righteous mission instead of your typical plutocratic greed, only want to elect conservative Republicans. In 2010, the two camps coordinated their efforts:

In the months preceding the 2010 elections, operatives working with groups that received millions of dollars in Koch-linked funding participated in twice-a-month coordinating meetings convened by Rove that drew an array of conservative groups looking to boost Republicans. Koch-backed groups included Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Limited Government and the 60 Plus Association.

They took place in the downtown Washington office suite housing the flagship outfits conceived by Rove and Gillespie — American Crossroads and its sister group Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, plus a linked group called American Action Network.

But the philosophical split made itself apparent when Rove’s groups supported John Boehner’s debt ceiling compromise, which the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity opposed. Now the Kochs and the Rove groups are developing competing voter databases and they’re launching competing campaigns to win Latino support for Republicans.

Of course, they’ll probably kiss and make up. If someone as unpalatable to conservatives as Mitt Romney or as potentially toxic to moderates as Rick Perry wins the nomination, Karl Rove will hold his nose and get to work electing him. The Kochs will do the same, knowing they have enough leverage with the party to push any Republican president around.

Rove has no great love for Rick Perry or Mitt Romney, but his raison d’etre is getting Republicans elected and viciously smearing Democrats, so he’s charging ahead without waiting for the party to settle on one of those jokers. American Crossroads, Rove’s shadow-RNC is launching ad campaigns targeted at President Obama’s campaign stops, accusing him of wanting to raise everyone’s taxes. (“The message is somewhat misleading,” ABC News says, but because “Karl Rove lies” is a “dog bites man” story, they don’t devote much ink to it.)

American Crossroads has “a fundraising goal of $240 million for the election season,” according to Politico, and anyone who doesn’t care for the management of the RNC or who doesn’t want a donation to a candidate publicly disclosed can chip in without fear of exposure.

American Crossroads will, of course, also be spending tremendous sums of money on Congressional elections. Democrats will struggle to keep up, especially with a demoralized liberal base and all of American big business basically united against them.

Anonymously funded outside groups will dominate the campaign no matter which guy the GOP primary voters land on. To them, it doesn’t matter which guy gets the nod — the Republican party will take care of its donors, as it always does.

And it’s gonna bring down this corrupt administration with bombshells like these:

The site is clearly a work in progress: while it publishes new articles each day, they come from only a few contributors. It began with some documents that set the tone: a list of union leaders who were met in 2009 by the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, and the production costs for an advertisement for Medicare featuring Andy Griffith ($404,000).

The Labor secretary met with labor leaders? Stop the electronic presses!

So many professional conservatives don’t really understand how journalism works, when it works. They really only “get” its cousin, propaganda.

I am always in favor of more document dumps and FOIA requests and damning information about our government, but the obvious purpose of Wikicountability is to foment misleading talking points.

Well, actually, the point of Wikicountability is to allow Rove’s nonprofit “educational” 501(c)(4) to maintain its nonprofit status by pretending to be doing something nonpolitical with 50 percent of the money they’ve raised from secret donors. And, yes, it is painfully ironic that a Rove’s anonymously funded independent shadow-RNC is now launching a make-believe “transparency” campaign.

It’s a half-baked idea that will either fizzle out entirely (filing FOIA requests is boring work, especially for non-professional journalists) or simply exist as yet another source of the memes and myths that make up the fever-swamp that is the alternate conservative media. If a Wikicountability piece ends up forming the basis of some overhyped pseudo-scandal that Megyn Kelly can sneer about for a week before dropping it entirely once it’s outlived its usefulness, then: Mission Accomplished.

I’m not looking for noble goals from political hacks dabbling in journalism (or scare-quotes “journalism,” no one is entirely sure of the difference anymore). But I do detect a fundamental difference between the way (most) liberals and (most) conservatives play the entire rigged game: For way too many conservative outlets, the attempt to figure out the truth about a situation takes a decided back seat to the real goal, which is “point-scoring.”

This is epitomized, of course, by Andrew Breitbart, who publishes an astounding amount of poorly written garbage on his various sites while railing about the poor standards of the dreaded MSM. But even the “respectable” right-wing sites — National Review, cough cough — regularly publish patent nonsense about creeping sharia law and the New Black Panther Party.

The problem is that right-wingers — especially campaign hacks like Rove and true believers like Breitbart — have internalized the “liberal media” attack line. In their imaginings, simple bias has mutated into active malice. So when right-wingers form their own media, they use the model that they imagine the MSM works under. Advance your cause by any means necessary.

It is such a classic right-wing hack response to seeing the successes of a site like WikiLeaks to think to yourself, “What we need is a ‘conservative version’ of that that exists to manipulate FOIA documents into compelling attacks against Barack Obama.’”

And that name! Wikicountability. Finally, a Wiki devoted to … counting things. A database of user-generated information about Count von Count. Restoring “icountability” to the White House. You get the idea.