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As Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was about to sign their union-busting right-to-work-for-less bills into law, Chris Matthews spoke to UAW President Bob King and the State Director of the Michigan chapter of Americans for Prosperity's Scott Hagerstrom. Matthews attempted to get Hagerstrom to come clean about who "signs his paycheck" and despite repeated badgering from Matthews, refused to acknowledge that AFP is just a front group for the Koch brothers.

He just works for a grass roots organization, like the Red Cross don't you know! And they have lots of donors. He didn't want to talk about their one big one though. Here's more on Hagerstrom and his remarks back in February of 2011 from Think Progress: Koch Front Group Americans For Prosperity: ‘Take The Unions Out At The Knees’:

In a speech earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference, Americans For Prosperity-Michigan Executive Director Scott Hagerstrom revealed the true goal of his group and its allies like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) efforts. Speaking at CPAC’s “Panel for Labor Policy,” Hagerstrom said that AFP really wants to do is to “take the unions out at the knees”:

HAGERSTROM: It’s easy to go out there and fight taxes and increased regulation, you know we send out an action alert on taxes to AFP and we get thousands of people to respond. You send out one on a more complicated issue and it just doesn’t quite resonate…We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.

Taking “the unions out at the knees” has long been a goal of the Koch brothers and their many front groups. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Kochs worked with other anti-labor billionaires, corporations and activists to fund conservative candidates and groups across the country. Now after viciously opposing pro-middle class policies for years, Koch Industries is trying to eliminate the only organizations which serve as a counterweight to the well-oiled corporate machine.

Sadly they managed to succeed in that goal today in Michigan. Sourcewatch has more on Americans for Prosperity here and the fact that they are indeed just a front group for the Koch brothers here.

This interview has a bunch of right wing blogs worked up of course, the usual suspects that I'm not going to link to, calling Matthews "unhinged" and claiming he "berated" Hagerstrom because he asked him time and again who funds AFP. If they think this is Matthews coming "unhinged" they must not watch the show much, because this is pretty mild by his standards. There are times that stuff can be annoying out of him. This wasn't one of them.

The AFP chair was on there pretending he's got the interest of those workers in Michigan at heart and that they're just some grass roots organization instead of an AstroTurf front group who only care about a race to the bottom on wages so their rich donors can squeeze some more blood out of the working class.

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Dave already touched on the protests and police response to the Michigan right to work for less law that their legislators decided to go ahead and jam through in a lame duck session. Here's more from Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) who did his best to describe the legislation for what it is -- a right to freeload.

Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) Speaks Out Against "Right-to-Work" Legislation:

In this clip, State Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) explains his opposition to House Bill 4054, a proposal to make Michigan a "right-to-work" state. The proposal was pushed through the House in one day without a single committee hearing and without taking a single word of testimony.

These Republicans all love personal responsibility unless it means an opportunity to sock it to the paychecks of everyday working Americans and to bust a union. I'm not sure if the tide can be turned back through legislation or ballot initiatives which reverse or invalidate all or at least part of what just happened here, but I would suspect that is the next move we'll see from labor to try to counter this.

Here's more from the AFL-CIO on this rotten legislation: Breaking: Michigan Senate Passes ‘Right to Work’ For Less Bill:

The Michigan State Senate just passed the “right to work” for less bill. The House passed a similar bill earlier today and Gov. Rick Snyder (R) says he will sign the legislation that rolls back workers’ rights.

The measure passed on a 22-16 vote Thursday after hours of impassioned debate. Four Republicans joined all 12 Democrats in opposition.

After months of claiming “right to work” for less was not on his agenda, Snyder changed course this week and began a rapid push to move the bill through the legislature. The Nation’s John Nichols writes that the Michigan action is “part of a bold anti-labor move launched in coordination with a Koch Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity project to ‘pave the way for right to work in states across our nation’.”

GOP legislative leaders had plotted behind closed doors with Governor Snyder, to have Michigan join the traditionally lower-wage states that decades ago enacted “Right-to-Work” laws to thwart the rise of a labor movement that promoted civil rights, women’s rights and economic justice.

The Michigan State AFL-CIO released the following statement:

....The only ‘freedom’ gained for Michigan workers will be the freedom to make less, the freedom to be disrespected at work, the freedom to struggle to pay their bills and the freedom to be left out of the American dream. This bill is a blatant attempt by the richest in Michigan to silence the voices of working families in our democracy, build their own power, and make the growing gap between the rich and everyone else even bigger.

Should Snyder sign this legislation, he will join a list of other governors – John Kasich, Scott Walker, and others – who have signed over the future of their respective states to big corporations and CEOs, making a decision to leave working families behind. Regardless of what might happen, working people have made it clear they will continue to fight for our vision of a better, stronger Michigan and work to hold elected leaders accountable.

More than 3,000 union members and workers' rights advocates rallied against the legislation and for several hours police shut the doors to the Capitol, keeping protesters out of the House and Senate galleries. Several people were maced as they tried to enter.

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Now that it appears Republicans' backs are against the wall on whether taxes are going to go up for the wealthiest among us one way or the other, Bill Kristol decided to double down on his remarks that Republican Party shouldn't "fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires." I don't think he got the Koch brothers' approval for the claim he made this Sunday, which is that there are a lot of "tea party" guys that "don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes."

Tell that to their leaders Bill. That seems to be all they care about. These AstroTurf groups know who they're beholden to and who is funding them. Of course he qualified that by saying they'd accept it because it would lead to the "grand bargain" they're all pining for and tax rates being lowered later as part of that deal. So I don't think he's completely off the reservation as Bob Woodward asserted here. The truth of the matter is, Republicans are not bargaining from a position of strength right now, and Kristol and the rest of them know it, whether they're willing to admit it or not.

Here's the exchange from Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: And let me explain what came out of the meeting on Friday, is the idea, is a two-step compromise, that there is a down payment and there's talk about $50 billion, perhaps, by the end of the year and, then a promise with triggers they would achieve a grand bargain -- heard that word before -- next year, major tax reform, major entitlement reform.

Bill Kristol, how realistic is that two step approach.

KRISTOL: I think it is pretty realistic. I think -- and I think Republicans are going -- there will be a deal by December 31, and I believe Republicans will yield a bit on top rates. I mean, President Obama ran twice on this platform and he won last I looked, both presidential elections.

He's...

WALLACE: What was the reaction - you made a lot of news last week when you said it wouldn't kill Republicans to raise the top rate. In fact, as you know, you were favorably cited not by name, by the president during his news conference. I'm sure that shot your credibility...

KRISTOL: That was bad. That was a bad moment. But you know you've got to persevere, even when these things happen.

WALLACE: What was the reaction among Republicans?

KRISTOL: The private reaction one Republican congressman was honestly, including very conservative ones, was, I don't know, do we really have to give anything - I guess maybe we do. Maybe it was good that you said that, because we need to cut a deal.

He won two elections. He didn't raise rates correctly in 2009 because we were in the midst of a horrible downturn. Republicans won a huge off year election in 2010 and were able to bargain to a status quo deal. I just don't think Republicans have the leverage, or that it's worth using all their - whatever leverage they have, to maintain rates at 35 percent instead of 37 or 38, especially if you can take it up to millionaires.

I just don't think it's economically as a matter of policy important enough.

Then the big deal has to be big tax reform with lower rates, I think.

WALLACE: 30 seconds left, Bob. And this was the subject of your book. How optimistic are you that they make a deal and avert the fiscal cliff?

WOODWARD: well, let's hope they do. But they are going to burn Bill Kristol's Tea Party card hearing him talk like this. You are off the reservation.

KRISTOL: You know, a lot of the Tea Party guys don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes, honestly.

WALLACE: But are you optimistic.

WOODWARD: Well, you have to - because if this isn't fixed we're going to have a global catastrophe.

WALLACE: On that happy note, thank you. See you next week.

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From this Friday's Real Time With Bill Maher, Bill's annual election reel, "In Memoriam."

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[h/t ThinkProgress]

Over the past few weeks we've seen a lot of employers telling their employees they need to vote for Mitt Romney if they expect to keep their jobs. The most recent stories come via Koch Industries, ASG Software, and Westgate Resorts.

It turns out they may have been listeners on this conversation, which took place on June 7, 2012. The NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business) held a conference call with Mitt Romney and members. At the end of the call, Mitt concluded his remarks with this:

I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.

He just squeaked through with that tossed off reference to agreeing with him or President Obama, but the implication was pretty clear, wasn't it?

Make your employees vote like their jobs depend on it.

Kind of sounds like the iconic threat: "We have ways of making you talk."

NFIB is not exactly a neutral player in the whole electoral landscape. You can find out more about them at NFIBexposed, but they're basically a US Chamber of Commerce for privately held companies, large and small. I'd give long odds that every listener on that call was a Romney campaign contributor.

Many thanks to In These Times for being patient enough to discover this. Everyone should share this with people so they understand how far the right is willing to go to intimidate people into electing Mitt Romney.

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From this Sunday's Meet the Press, Robert Gibbs called out former GE CEO, Jack Welch for embarrassing himself along with the other "jobs report truthers" who were touting that there was some grand conspiracy theory at work with the latest report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even Chuck Todd had a few words about the fact that it's a "bad trend" when we've got conservatives out there getting traction with this nonsense.

But of course, since right-wing flame thrower Newt Gingrich was invited to the table, the waters on whether this sort of behavior ought to be tolerated or not were muddied up a bit, with Gingrich touting a far right, Koch-funded lobbying group and their "survey" as proof that "small business" he supposedly speaks to, don't believe the economy is getting any better. I believe this is the same group Chris Hayes and his panel mentioned on his show today and they said they were created because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wasn't far enough to the right to suit them.

Dan Froomkin has more on that here -- NFIB Exposed: 'Voice Of Small Business' Is A Front, Group Charges.

What's really disgusting is that the likes of Gingrich keeps getting invited to these panels and treated like he's some senior statesman, instead of the shyster that he is, but then, he's far from alone when it comes to the list of terrible guests for these shows.

As Driftglass pointed out about this week's show, "The Gingrich Rules continue to remain in effect."

Transcript below the fold.

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Here we go again with more dirty tricks from Republicans trying to steal another presidential election -- Tea party groups work to remove names from Ohio voter rolls:

Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old Democrat who lives in central Ohio, was startled a few weeks ago to open a letter that said a stranger was challenging her right to vote in the presidential election.

Monroe, who was recovering from cancer surgery, called the local election board to protest. A local tea party leader was trying to strike Monroe from the voter rolls for a reason that made no sense: Her apartment building in Lancaster was listed as a commercial property.

"I'm like, really? Seriously?" Monroe said. "I've lived here seven years, and now I'm getting challenged?"

Monroe's is one of at least 2,100 names that tea party groups have sought to remove from Ohio's voter rosters.

The groups and their allies describe it as a citizen movement to prevent ballot fraud, although the Republican secretary of state said in an interview that he knew of no evidence that any more than a handful of illegal votes had been cast in Ohio in the last few presidential elections.

"We're all about election integrity — making sure everyone who votes is registered and qualified voters," said Mary Siegel, one of the leaders of the Ohio effort.

Some Democrats see it as a targeted vote-suppression drive. The names selected for purging include hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. [...]

The tea party groups, scattered around the state, have joined forces under the banner of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project. It is an offshoot of True the Vote, a Texas organization that has recruited volunteers nationwide to challenge voter rosters and work as poll watchers.

True the Vote was founded by Catherine and Bryan Engelbrecht, a couple who run an oil field equipment manufacturing firm in Rosenberg, Texas.

In Ohio, election records show, one of the project's top priorities has been to remove college students from the voter rolls for failure to specify dorm room numbers. (As a group, college students are strongly in Obama's camp.)

Voters challenged include 284 students at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, 110 at Oberlin College, 88 at College of Wooster, 38 at Kent State — and dozens more from the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Lake Erie College, Walsh University, Hiram College, John Carroll University and Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college near Cleveland.

So far, every county election board that has reviewed the dorm challenges found them invalid.

Here's more from ProPublica on True the Vote -- A Reading Guide to True the Vote, the Controversial Voter Fraud Watchdog.

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From this Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes, his Story of the Week where he discusses the disconnect between the ultra-wealthy campaign donors who we saw asking painfully ridiculous questions to Mitt Romney during that secretly recorded fundraiser of his from earlier this year, and the lives of the rest of us. As Chris asked, how different would our politics look if the Romney's of the world were forced to sit down with and listen to rooms full or ordinary workers day after day instead of these out of touch, wealthy plutocrats who do not share the same concerns as most of the country.

Hayes: This is what plutocracy looks like:

The video of Mitt Romney talking to donors that Mother Jones posted last week is an incredible artifact from an entire culture and civilization that exists in our midst, but which we hardly ever get to see: the world of the high-end donor. And, whoo boy it is not pretty. The first thing that jumps out is that a lot of the questions are really inane.

In fact, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney having to sit there and politely smile and nod as donors pick through their salad and tell him that what he really needs to do to win is "take the gloves off" or "show your face more on tv"—something he's been doing more or less non-stop.

The folks in the room all but advise Romney to simply tour around the country reading passages of Ayn Rand novels out loud at his campaign rallies and hectoring the idiotic masses to bow before their obvious superior. Romney, who is many things, but not a total fool, gently explains that that probably is not the best way to go about attempting to win over the Obama voters he needs to be elected. Almost none of the advice Romney gets during the tape is very good, some of it's terrible.

That's not novel, of course, everyone who watches politics closely thinks they have the secret insight that will win the election. Unlike the millions of other political junkies and backseat drivers, this small coterie of folks, by sole virtue of their wealth, gets to impose their invaluable insights on the actual candidate. It would be like the head coach of the Giants, Tom Coughlin, having to spend most of the week between games meeting with the opinionated fans who call into sports talk radio with their theories about how the Giants should be blitzing on every down, or lining up two quarterbacks under center.

This is the power of money not just in politics, but in society more broadly: the power to make people listen to your ideas no matter how dumb or uninformed. The other thing that stood out to me was just how under siege, persecuted, and victimized these extremely wealthy people appear to feel.

Keep in mind we're talking about a fundraiser that cost $50,000 a plate. Fifty thousand dollars also happens to be the median household income in the U.S. So the kind of wealth you need to have to be in the room with Romney is the kind of wealth that means you can just pony up as much money as many Americans make in a year to listen to Mitt Romney trash talk the very people who make in a year the same amount you just ponied up for dinner. Read on...

From Ring of Fire Radio, Mike Papantonio talks about the long game of the billionaires who have taken over the Republican Party. Gaius Publius at AmericaBlog has more on that in his post here -- GOP is a party of WASPs led by 70-year-old impotent white guys:

Back to that point about the billionaire takeover of the Republican Party. You're watching history, folks. Papantonio said it one way on his Ring of Fire radio show (sorry, no public link, but the show was this one if you're a subscriber).

Mike goes less far than I do. This is entirely my own:

The Koch-like billionaires are running a coup on the Republican Party, taking control away from party regulars. "Tea Party"–branded politicians are their heavily financed foot soldiers.

Yes, there are Tea Party citizens in the world, with actual tea-bag beliefs.

But "Tea Party" politicians are a Koch Bros Joint, running a hostile takeover against the Boehners and McConnells, the Romneys and McCains.

No party regular who just "wants to win the next election" will have a place in the new Republican Party. They have to serve daddy first, the party second.

In other words, "Daddy" has plans. Those "ten billionaires" are playing the long game, not the short one.

Why did the Koch crowd not care that they lost the Senate in 2010 by running Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell? Why do they not care what Paul Ryan does to Mitt Romney's chances this year?

Because for now, the government isn't the prize. The Republican Party is. It sure looks like they're taking it step by step, consolidating each territory first before invading the next.

They'll take the government (Bob Rubin, watch out; your Midwest billionaire brothers are acing you out of the game). But not quite yet; they're getting their pieces in place, their ducks in a row.

This is exactly like their recent takeover of the already-slavish Cato Institute. The illusion of independence is meaningless to them — they now want direct control.

Which means they're preparing for a bigger move down the road. Trust me.

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If anyone who subscribes to HBO has not watched their new series on Sunday night, The Newsroom yet, I'd recommend trying to catch up now, with their latest episode and who it upset just being one of the reasons: Sen. Mike Lee Takes Issue With HBO’s ‘The Newsroom’:

HBO’s new drama “The Newsroom” has been the target of critical derision since its premiere. Now a sitting senator is taking issue with the show.

Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) called HBO co-president Richard Plepler on Monday, after “The Newsroom” mentioned Lee in its latest episode. Reporting on the rise of the Tea Party, the show’s anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, said “the centerpiece of Lee’s stump speech is repealing the 14th amendment.” McAvoy called it an “applause line” that will win Lee his primary by double digits.

Lee’s office, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, says the senator supported “clarifying” the interpretation of the constitutional amendment, but didn’t support its repeal. And Lee’s opponent in 2010, Bob Bennett, failed to make it to the primary after the Utah Republican Convention.

The senator’s office told the paper that the network is free to criticize Lee, so long as it does so accurately. “Lee obviously understands he is a public official and open to criticism,” Lee spokesman Brian Phillips said, “but this particular mistake was especially egregious and deserved to be corrected.”

Phillips told TPM that Lee believes HBO “responded positively” to his issue with the episode, but declined to comment further.

As someone who is a political junkie and who watches the kind of shows they're parodying here, I've really enjoyed the new series. It's been a mix of what you hope might happen if some conservative commentator finally got fed up enough with the Republican Party that they've been a member of to start speaking out about it, combined with a lot of really interesting side stories with all of the characters involved surrounding that anchor, the people who work for him, his old girlfriend who returns to the scene as his new producer and the new found conflicts with the station owners now that he's decided he actually wants to report the news rather than playing it safe and worrying about ratings.

The time frame for the show is set a couple of years ago, with the fictional anchor responding to both the BP oil disaster in the Gulf along with Arizona first passing their anti-immigration law and the rise of these "tea party" Republicans and their pay masters, the Koch brothers.

And for anyone else who isn't sure yet if they'd like to take the time to watch the series if you do have HBO and haven't caught it yet, here's the opening scene from the first episode.

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