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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSugar Daddies The old, white, rich men who are buying this election. By Frank Rich
If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama. It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmonss crosshairs.Sugar daddieswhom Ill define here as private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this election cycleare largely a Republican phenomenon, most of them one degree of separation from Karl Rove and his unofficial partners in erecting a moneyed shadow GOP, David and Charles Koch. At last look, there were 25 known sugar daddies on the right (or more, if you want to count separately the spouses and children who pitch in). Youve likely heard of Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas tycoon who is Benjamin Netanyahus unofficial ambassador to the GOP. But you may be less familiar with Irving Moskowitz, the bingo entrepreneur who funnels his profits into East Jerusalem settlements. Or Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund master of flash trading who poured a clandestine $1 million into ads attacking the ground-zero mosque and nearly another $3 million into a scale-model railroad in his Long Island mansion. Or Steven Lund, the co-founder of Nu Skin, which became direct selling sponsor of the Romney-run 2002 Winter Olympics after having spent much of the nineties settling complaints over false advertising and other unscrupulous practices with the Federal Trade Commission and six different states attorneys general.
What these sugar daddies specifically want from Mitt and his party, besides the usual conservative bullet points (codified in Paul Ryans tax-cutting, government-shredding budget), is clear enough: the widest possible regulation-free berth for any vulture businesses they have a hand in, from nuclear waste to health nostrums, from new houses to financial products created from those homes subprime mortgages.
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/11085-sugar-daddies
via:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/23/1085715/-Frank-Rich-has-a-MUST-READ-piece
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Sugar Daddies The old, white, rich men who are buying this election. By Frank Rich (Original Post)
kpete
Apr 2012
OP
"...we could have killed Obama" "...the president is firmly in Simmons's crosshairs"
tularetom
Apr 2012
#3
Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)1. Rich old white males who never accepted the progress we have made.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)2. Frank Rich once again tells it like it is... K&R nt
tularetom
(23,664 posts)3. "...we could have killed Obama" "...the president is firmly in Simmons's crosshairs"
Maybe it's time for the Secret Service to stop fooling around with hookers and check up on Mr Simmons.
safeinOhio
(32,688 posts)4. Sugar Daddies, now
firmly in the 2012 political lexicon.