I can't imagine being as self absorbed and mean spirited as these pricks are.

charge for the Indian's oil property for years where they stole Billions more.
They are right up there with the Bush crime family with using the government to hide their crimes and socialize their costs. They operate a cancer factory in Arkansas that willfully infects generation after generation rather than spend a little money to not pollute.

I hadn't heard this before, but it's just so fracking typical of the breed that one of the founders of the John Birch Society made his fortune working for the baddest of the commies. I wonder ... was Koch kicked out of the Russian oil biz when Stalin died? Did he start the JBS in revenge? In any case, do you have a link for this?

[link:http://interested-party.blogspot.com/2010/08/koch-brothers-from-stalin-to-beck-and.html|

The blog you referenced was a copy of the transcript of a 2010 Fresh Air program on NPR with Terry Gross interviewing the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, who had just written a long expose on the brothers' Koch and their anti government activities. The transcript was so interesting that I followed the blogger's link to Mayer's article at:
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

I have a vague recollection of this piece from back then. I don't even know if I read beyond the DU clips. Probably not, as I was using a basic Kindle 2 to read DU then, and it was almost impossible to open a linked page with it. There is so much in that article that I can't recommend it highly enough. But the following except is where Mayer pins down Daddy Koch's Stalinist connections and, for me at least, puts her finger on the origins of the shared craziness of his baby boys.

Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Koch married Mary Robinson, the daughter of a Missouri physician, and they had four sons: Freddie, Charles, and twins, David and William. John Damgard, the president of the Futures Industry Association, was David’s schoolmate and friend. He recalled that Fred Koch was “a real John Wayne type.” Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.” David Koch recalled that his father also indoctrinated the boys politically. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, and the author of “Radicals for Capitalism,” a 2007 history of the libertarian movement. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”

I really do believe that. That's what's wrong with them.

Two of the sorriest humans on the planet.

Not only would the people have affordable health care, but would stop this nonsense in its tracks.

and they will definitely call out to their nutty army of nitwits to overrun DC. GOPers hate any type of healthcare for all and only want healthcare for thee. Selfish assholes.

And I'd rather the

"... approximately 8 million people, without access to health insurance."

Crazed Cruz don't care with the rest of the teabots. Koch Brothers and their cronies are trying to overthrow the American Government thru Crazed Cruz and the rest of the crazies. Poor people are the least of their problems because they can give a rats arse about them. Look at the sequester plan, it sucks, and they want more cuts all the while giving homage to their masters.

These people are plain evil.

"People who love you and want to help you ...and also your kitty or puppy"
"Association for our Flag, our Mom's with their apple pies and for Superman"
"Society to give everybody a wonderful, sensational life and lots of Chocolate"

Well, Koch Bros. got the $$$$ and we got the numbers and the motivations to prove those greedy a*holes just that.

stock market would crash and they'd jump from a highrise to their pathetic deaths. The poor and lower middle class don't have many stock so won't be hurt as much. Unfortunately I'm only kidding and venting. I know and care for too many people who be terribly hurt. But the visualization of their jumping gives my leg a tingle...like Matthews.

shove some poor working stiff out the window in their place.

Someone posted a list a couple weeks ago. I'll print it and keep it in my pocketbook for reference.

But it was so cheap and I figure the Kochs are good enough to wipe my ass with.

says the filthy rich Koch's. Of course, they will never have to worry about health care, or even worry about seeing these people who are so far beneath them that they will not get near their neighborhoods.

The article says, "The 26 GOP-controlled states not participating in the law’s Medicaid expansion are home to a disproportionate share of low-income Americans who aren’t poor enough to qualify for the existing Medicaid program and make too much to be eligible for subsidies in the ACA’s insurance marketplaces."

Almost but not quite. As I understand it, subsidies are available for people households making between 1.3 and 4 times the poverty rate. The ACA intended that those under 1.3 times the poverty level would be eligible for Medicaid because states would be required (as a condition of continued Medicaid funding) to make all such families eligible for Medicaid. But the Supreme Court invalidated that part of the law, saying states could refuse to expand Medicaid, and many did, even though the federal government would pick up 100% if the cost for several years and 90% thereafter, and it reduces the number of doctor and (often state-supported) hospital bills that go unpaid. So low-income working people in those states are seriously getting screwed over for no reason other than extreme ideology.

Didn't the righties used to scream about death panels and killing off old granny.

Well, there are death panels and the Koch Brothers are running them! What sleaze balls. This is the same act that happened when the ACA was put out there. They organized thugs to disrupt meetings by busing people in and giving them instructions and talking points. Democracy? Ha-ha-ha. Money is the root of all evil.

The Koch brothers have it all and it still isn't enough. Daddy left them with tons of money and tons of benefits and tons of opportunities and it still isn't enough. Their sole reason for existence today is to destroy. They just don't nor will they ever get it. Everyone can't be born into a pristine life like them. They are nothing but coddled, catered to, spoiled rotten rich kids and they've carried that into their elder years.

All they live for now is to buy politicians to perpetuate their warped vision of forcing people to bend to their will. They are sick. And the politicians facilitating this on their behalf are corrupt and sick beyond the pale.

The Koch brothers are poisoners, polluters and contaminators of this planet. But as long as they keep handing out free money to depraved republicans you can forget about anyone doing the right thing by humanity.

I thought it was billions.

It's genocide really. They just don't call for the ovens. Just poison our food, deny us medicine, kill off our safety net etc.

My theory is the tea party movement is nothing more than an excuse to act like a complete douchebag.

As far as I know they haven't been involved in politics before. They're. Vast wealth has gone to funding the arts. PBS programming, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a concert hall in Lincoln Center.

Maybe they are greedy, but in the grand scheme of things, the ACA doesn't really affect them.

Why????

our children are in the street begging for jobs.

Everything that they do can result in "murder". I do not understand why they are still alive or not on trial. There is no excuse at all, even their money, that should stop them from being charged with some sort of crimes.

They want to be able to point at how many Americans this "socialism" failed to cover, and they'll be thrilled if they caused it to fail.

They want "Obamacare" to fail because they are extreme rightwingers motivated by ideology and by personal greed. The teabaggers in Congress lost their recent battle, but the war goes on. They have vast wealth at their disposal and will do whatever they can to dismantle the federal social safety net. Ultimately they want to erase not only this latest "big government" program, but LBJ's Great Society and FDR's New Deal as well.

These Bircher types were against Social Security and Medicare from the start, and want to destroy those programs.

They know they can't do it through normal legislative means, and that these programs will continue as long as there are funds to keep them going.

The only way these programs can be destroyed (and government shrunk & drowned in a bathtub) is with Huge. Budget. Deficits.

These ideological One Percenters are not fiscal conervatives. Deficits skyrocket under Republican presidents not because they embrace flawed economic theories. Deficits are absolutely essential to their agenda.


And we should never forget that.