The New York Times reports on the Kochs' recent conference in Palm Springs, Calif., during which the Kochs reportedly discussed strategy for the next election cycle:

They have not yet decided whether to intervene in Republican primaries, people involved in the discussions say. But the brothers want their network to play a bigger role in cultivating and promoting Republican candidates who hew to their vision of conservatism, emphasizing smaller government and deregulation more than immigration and social issues. They are also seeking closer control over groups within their network, purging or downgrading those that did not deliver last year and expanding financing for those that performed well.

Also in attendance at the conference were Republican superstars like Dr. Ben Carson, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and John Kasich, the Times reports.

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In public, of course, prospective newspaper buyers continue to pretend that they are primarily interested in purchasing newspapers either to 1) preserve a venerated civic institution and objective journalism or 2) to seize an honest, straightforward business opportunity.

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The Times reports:

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North Dakota has also been in the news for another reason recently. What was it, again? Oh, right, it passed the most restrictive antiabortion laws in the country. Including a law specifically aimed at shutting down the state's lone abortion provider. It passed this law knowing it was unconstitutional.

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The Anonymous action, carried out in support of public sector unions fighting to save collective bargaining rights against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting efforts, was not a hack. Rather, the hacker collective orchestrated a denial-of-service attack, or a DDOS,  encouraging users to repeatedly access the website until it's too overwhelmed to function. The Koch sites were successfully but only temporarily brought down. Rosol is the first and only defendant charged in the attack. Via Pearce:

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Now, these are unverified rumors that should be taken with a grain of salt if not a whole dollop. The Tribune Co. won't comment on any specific offers they've received, although a source there says, "We've gotten a ton of interest. That was one of the reasons for hiring the outside financial advisors, to sift through the unsolicited interest." [...]

Another rumor, passed along by a member of the L.A. Times Editorial Board, no less, has the Koch Brothers helping to finance a bid by "Papa Doug" Manchester, himself a right-wing multimillionaire who in 2009 bought the San Diego Union Tribune and promptly turned it into a propaganda organ for San Diego development.

Like many newspaper companies, Tribune Co. has faced hard times in recent years, complicated by the difficult reign of Sam Zell, who took the company into bankruptcy.

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From CPI:

A $4.5 million grant to the George Mason University Foundation makes up nearly 15 percent of the university foundation’s revenue for 2011. The school is the largest recipient of Koch foundation money since 1985, and it houses several free-market and libertarian research centers including the Institute for Humane Studies, which received $3.7 million from the Koch foundations.

The D.C.-based American Legislative Exchange Council received $150,000 to help finance its activities, including meetings where corporate representatives draft model legislation with state legislators. The Koch brothers have decades-long connections with ALEC, which gave the brothers the Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award in 1994.

Among the other groups the Koch brothers donated to were the Heartland Institute, the climate change-skeptical think tank, which received $25,000; the Federalist Society, which got $260,000; and the Ayn Rand Institute, which took in $100,000.

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According to a report by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman at Politico, the union counteroffensive is setting its sights on fighting conservative state leaders in next year's gubernatorial elections, particularly in the Midwest. Via Politico:

The AFL-CIO has already built up sizable campaign operations in Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada and Wisconsin – the site of a titanic 2012 gubernatorial recall fight – in addition to Ohio and Michigan, union officials said. The labor giant deployed new staff to those states about a year ago as part of what AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka has called the “permanent infrastructure” of national unions.

... Labor leaders have vowed to make Snyder regret signing the “right to work” law he approved this week. Beyond Michigan, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett have appeared vulnerable in polling.

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Don’t believe that for an instant.

It’s true their political investments didn’t exactly pay off this time around.

“Right now there is stunned disbelief that Republicans fared so poorly after all the money they invested,” said Brent Bozell, president of For America, an Alexandria-based nonprofit that advocates for Christian values in politics.

“Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle,” Donald Trump tweeted. “Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.”

Rove’s two giant political funds — American Crossroads (a Super PAC) and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (a so-called nonprofit “social welfare organization” that doesn’t have to report its donors) — backed Mitt Romney with $127 million spent on more than 82,000 television spots. Rove’s groups spent another $51 million on House and Senate races. Ten of the 12 Senate candidates they supported lost.

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“This is pretty much a union-gutting operation,” Matthews said about the state's legislation. “You work for the Koch brothers. They don’t like unions. Why are you working for them?" Hagerstrom replied: “I work for Americans for Prosperity. This is not about the Koch Brothers.”

Matthews fired back: “Who’s paying your salary?" Hagerstrom kept repeating: “I work Americans for Prosperity."

"What’s that?" Matthews asked.

Watch:

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Well, the voters spoke in November and dramatically voted down Proposal 2, but then this right to work discussion just continued to escalate and was becoming very divisive. So the way I viewed it is, it's on the table. It's a hot issue. Let's show some leadership. So I stepped up to say when I review it, I think it's a good thing. It's about being pro-worker. It’s about giving freedom of choice to workers.

Watch a clip of the interview via MSNBC below.

UPDATE 1.50 p.m. (EST): The Michigan House has approved both right-to-work bills, pertaining to both public and private sector workers, and the legislation will now be sent to Gov. Rick Snyder, who vowed he would sing the bills into law.

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Snyder’s announcement last week that he’d support right-to-work has taken the sheen off his carefully cultivated image as a pragmatic alternative to hard-charging GOP counterparts in Ohio and Wisconsin. But it secures a dream of the anti-union Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose associates are well-represented among Snyder’s donors, and whose economic agenda has been ascendant within the modern GOP.

“I think he was being a puppet for larger interests outside of the state,” United Auto Workers vice president Cindy Estrada told Salon Monday afternoon.

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Perhaps you saw him in the documentary, "Koch Brothers Exposed," pushing back against the billionaire Tea Party funders, and their bankrolling of attempts to roll back voting rights and to resegregate a school system in North Carolina.

Or maybe you saw him on cable television, explaining the NAACP's support for marriage equality, or leading the charge to save the life of Troy Davis, an inmate put to death for a crime many believe he did not commit. Then there's the new NAACP report, co-produced with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and the Indigenous Environmental Network, issued on his watch, about the dangers of climate change and coal-fired power plants.

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When the 2012 campaign began, the lousy economy made President Obama vulnerable. Republicans were favored to take back the Senate, given retirements in conservative states. Republican billionaires — the Koch brothers, Adelson and others — put up big money in the effort to have it all. Instead the president swept to victory, and Democrats gained seats in the Senate and the House.

Many factors contributed. Republicans learned once more the shortcomings of a stale, male, pale, Southern-based party in a nation of diversity. The GOP “legitimate rape” caucus helped give away two Senate seats. But too little attention has been paid to the new emerging reality. This was the first class warfare election of the new Gilded Age — and the middle class won big.

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The Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the Koch brothers, sent out a press release Thursday marking the election of House GOP leadership with a reminder that they had all signed.

It lists these key House Republicans as who signed on:

• John Boehner – Speaker of the House
• Eric Cantor – Republican Majority Leader
• Kevin McCarthy – Republican Majority Whip
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers – Republican Conference Chairman
• Greg Walden – National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman
• James Lankford – Republican Policy Committee Chairman
• Lynn Jenkins – Republican Conference Vice-Chair
• Virginia Foxx – Republican Conference Secretary
• Tim Scott – Sophomore Class Liaison to Leadership

“It is heartening to see that for the second congress in a row the House of Representatives will be led by a team that is publicly committed not to use climate as a guise to grow government,” said AFP Director of Policy James Valvo in a statement.

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Yet according to photo and video evidence captured during a protest against Keystone XL pipeline construction in Texas last week, there appears to be an actual neo-Nazi among the ranks of construction workers (see image above).

"[A] Keystone XL construction supervisor was on scene directing workers and police while wearing a helmet covered questionable symbols: a Swastika and confederate flag," noted the Tar Sands Blockade group, which is spearheading resistance to the TransCanada-owned pipeline -- a project that threatens water supplies and ecosystems, expands U.S. reliance on oil and promises to further line Koch brother pockets.

Ron Seifert, an activist and spokesperson for the Tar Sands Blockade, confirmed the veracity of the racist symbol image. "It's very real, not tampered with at all. I was there," he told Salon. Footage from the protest (see below) -- during which Green Party nominee for president Jill Stein was arrested -- also captures the Nazi-helmeted man.

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Both states have a policy called merit retention, where voters can decide whether to keep or vote out judges at the end of their terms.

In Iowa, Justice David Wiggins won retention, despite a campaign by social conservative groups to push him out for his ruling to strike down a ban on gay marriage in 2009.

The Des Moines Register reports that Bob Van Der Plaats, head of Iowans For Freedom, the group behind the campaign, said that although Wiggins kept his seat, it was by a small enough margin that he shouldn't be celebrating. “I think the courts understand that people of Iowa still have a voice if they chose to go outside their constitutional boundaries.”

In 2010, Van Der Plaats and other conservative groups succeessuflly ousted three of the other seven judges who had ruled  unanimously on the gay marriage law.

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The disenfranchised millions won't be a random sample of Americans; they'll overwhelmingly be poor and minority voters. And as investigative reporter Greg Palast explains in his latest book, "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps," they will have been taken out of the game thanks to a coordinated campaign devised by the likes of Karl Rove and funded by America’s super rich -- people like the Koch brothers, hedge fund titan Paul Singer, and Texan corporate raider Harold Simmons, among others — to keep voters, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, from the polls.

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This January, as the Iowa Caucuses were underway, Menards began encouraging employees to take an at-home online "civics" course that characterizes the economic policies of President Barack Obama as a threat to the success of businesses such as Menards, and by extension, to the employees' own well-being.

FBI Investigation

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The New York Times has dubbed it "the global billionaires’ club" -- and for good reason. At least of two of the apartments are under contract for more than 90 million dollars each. Others, more modest, range in price from 45 million dollars to more than 50 million dollars. The mega-rich have been buying these places “looking for a place to stash their cash,” a realtor from Sotheby’s explained to the Times. “A lot of what is happening,” she said, “… is about wealth preservation.”

Simultaneously, the powers-that-be have just awarded Donald Trump the right to run a golf course in the Bronx that axpayers are spending at least $97 million to build -- what “amounts to a public subsidy,” says the indignant city comptroller, "for a luxury golf course." Good grief – a handout to the plutocrat's plutocrat.

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