Which came first, the dim viewers or the dim teevee talking heads?

Remember, you heard it here last: NBC's election whiz Chuck Todd likes to tweet! (When these people open their mindless traps, do they realize the cameras are on?)

by Ken

Warning: By the time we're done with this dispatch from our "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Dept., you may have a powerful impulse just to shoot the damned teevee to put it out of its and your misery.

It's an obvious chicken-and-egg situation: Which came first, the hordes of dim-witted viewers, or the dim-witted telepundits who pander to, or perhaps just wallow in, their dimness? If you haven't already read it, you owe it to yourself to click through immediately to Digby's post yesterday "Misinformation Superhighway," in which she tracks what she describes as, for want of a better word, a "conversation" on MSNBC on the housing slump and the economy, featuring three people you really want to hear on the subject: Chuck Todd, Ron Insana, and Melissa Francis.

Here's a sample:

Chuck said we are just now focusing on housing. Ron pointed out that it's been a problem since the bubble burst. Chuck then wondered if the new slump is the government's fault for propping up the housing market over the last 18 months when we should have "taken our medicine" earlier and allowed nature to take its natural course. (Presumably, Todd is not one who would be swallowing that medicine himself, being a well compensated television celebrity and all.) Melissa said that it depends on your political persuasion if you believe that, although she didn't explain why. Then she said it was terrifying that Nouriel Roubini tweeted that we are going into a double dip recession --- because of the tweeting not the prediction. Chuck said he likes to tweet.

I don't want to spoil the fun, but still to come is fun with consumer spending, and tax cuts, and people buying big-screen TVs instead of houses, and how small-business owners either can or can't (pick your "expert") get loans. Warning: It's only funny when Digby tells it. In real time, watching it must be like . . . well, let's let Digby wrap it up, after noting that Chuck thanked Ron and Melissa "for the kind of eye-opening conversation that everyone's having around their kitchen tables":

It was eye-opening all right. In the same way that watching a car wreck is eye-opening.

ON A SERIOUS NOTE, DO READ JANE MAYER'S
NEW YORKER REPORT ON THE "KOCHTOPUS"

Charles and David Koch

Speaking of preying on a colossally dim-witted public, David Koch, the front man for the operation, has called Koch Industries, the family-owned conglomerate run basically by his older brother Charles, "the largest company that you never heard of."

Thanks to the company's increasingly aggressive libertarian-themed political and "charitable" operations, which by miraculous coincidence happen to jibe uncannily with the financial interests its far-flung but petroleum-centered businesses, and have included just about bringing the Obama administration down, the Kochs and their panoply of front organizations (two in particular to watch for these days are the Mercatus Institute and Americans for Prosperity), are getting a lot more attention. And Jane Mayer's deeply researched and widely read discussed New Yorker report, "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging war against Obama," has put them at least briefly in the limelight.

I'm trying to gather some thoughts about the subject, but I really do encourage you to read the piece itself. I can throw numbers at you, and some facts, and some eye-popping quotes, but to understand the scale of the Kochs' campaign to destabilize our nominal democracy, you really need the full accumulation of detail.

Just to give you a tease, Mayer writes about a study released last spring by the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which found that "from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups."

Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies -- from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program -- that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus. . . .

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."

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