News Flash! Five months after Yasha Levine and I broke the story linking the rightwing billionaire-PR nexus between FreedomWorks, the Koch family, CNBC, Eric Odom and the Tea Party movement, the Washington Post finally caught up with us. In an article in today’s Sunday edition, the WaPo repeats our allegation that billionaires are posing as “grassroots” groups to oppose anything that isn’t in the billionaires’ interests, including health care reform and mortgage relief for homeowners: (more…)

Matthew Vadum, the rightwing butterball savaged in The Daily Show last year for race-baiting, doesn’t like me very much. But he ain’t the type who keeps it to himself. Nuh-uh. America’s favorite little waffendwarf read my last post about him, and fired back an email that can only be described as “Chihuahua-esque” in its yapping-factor. Behold:

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You never know what bizarre creatures you’ll stir to action when you go after a corrupt beast like Megan McArdle. But what I saw after my expose on McArdle in yesterday’s Alternet was like sending a bathyscaph down to the deep ocean floor and stirring up the encrusted rot: suddenly these H.P. Lovecraft creatures swim into view, monsters whom you never knew existed–giant bear-trap jaws with little mosquito lamps dangling in front of their teeth…

I’m going to share two such creatures who wrote me yesterday in defense of their heroine, Megan McArdle. First, a creepy rightwing midget named Matthew Vadum. (more…)

Just when you think you’ve seen so much hypocrisy that nothing can shock you, along comes Megan McArdle. McArdle, who blogs for the Atlantic Monthly, presents herself as a principled libertarian, fiercely denouncing any attempt to provide any sort of government-funded health care, because as she argues, big government is bad, bad, bad. She’s written some truly appalling things over the years as a shill for big corporate interests, recently defending Goldman Sachs because, as she wrote, “financial meltdowns offer no villains.” (more…)

My article on Megan McArdle’s taxpayer-subsidized childhood, published in today’s Alternet, is kicking up an entertaining shitstorm. It’s Jiffy Pop time here in Harlem, I tell ya! I learned a lot of things so far, but by far the most shocking is this: Ezra Klein don’t know English grammar.

Ezra Klein, the liberal blogger at the Washington Post, switched sides in his debate with McArdle over health care, by turning against me in an article today headlined “Is Megan McArdle Right About Everything?” Yup, I been done in by my own ideological kin, folks. That would be fine, but here’s the problem: Ezra Klein needs an English TA. Especially when he tries using that silly High English Diction so popular with teacher’s pet types. (more…)

Thanks to the slam dunk investigative piece by your humble correspondents, Rick Santelli was forced to cancel his appearance on the Daily Show last night, leading to this massively-blogged segment ripping Santelli and CNBC a gigantic bleeding asshole. If words could be giant foam hands with pointing index fingers, then these words would be jabbing annoyingly into the ears of every Michelle Malkin/Freedomworks/rightwing tool who tried to cover up their half-baked “grassroots tea party” flop. As the stadiums of foam index finger-waggers chant, “You! You! You!” As in “the whole fucking country is laughing at you idiots!” Ah-ha-ha-hahahahahahaha!!! (more…)

If you’re wondering why disgraced pseudo-rebel Rick Santelli and his pals at CNBC kept strangely quiet about the hundreds of billions in bailouts right up until a couple weeks ago, when the government finally extended its bailout program beyond the corporate world and to regular American citizens, there’s a simple explanation. Rick and his coworkers at CNBC have been living high on the government bailout hog. Yup, “Slick Rick” Santelli and his fair-weather free-market comrades are nuthin’ but old-fashioned welfare queens pimping a newfangled libertarian hustle to cover it all up.

Since last October, CNBC’s parent company General Electric has taken at least $139 billion in government-backed loan guarantees to keep GE Capital Corp from going belly-up and taking the whole company, including Rick Santelli, with it. (more…)

Our article last Friday exposing the familiar old rightwing corporate machine behind the fake “tea party” protests, and Rick Santelli’s highly questionable role as the one-man MC for the protests’ launch event, wound up crashing the tea party’s mojo, and forcing Santelli to issue a giant apologia on CNBC’s site. It’s titled “I Want To Set The Record Straight,” but it should be called, “I want to keep my shitty second-fiddle job and not get thrown out of my 2,500 square foot house.” You can hear Rick’s pain as the spiked CNBC legal department butt-plug is shoved deeper and deeper in, paragraph after paragraph… especially this one line that will have Santelli sleeping on his stomach for months, where he bleats: “I hope that the President and the final stimulus plan succeed.” Thank you sir, may I have another! (more…)