Dirty-energy money bought this dirty ad trickI was going to echo and elaborate on Pam Spaulding’s excellent piece on Mitt Romney’s throwing their token openly gay guy under the bus almost before Romney’d hired him. (As Ari Fleischer and others wonder, why have the guy as your foreign-policy spokesman if you won’t let him speak, even during a time when foreign policy events have dominated the news more than at any other time so far this year?)

But then I ran into an ad, the graphic for which sits at the top of this page. (Don’t click on the URL, but feel free to mouse over it.) And I felt I should comment on that.

You see, this ad is by the well-heeled Tea Party sponsors, ALEC allies, and other very prosperous Americans who call themselves “Americans for Prosperity” or AFP — and by that, they mean making sure their own 1% or less of the population gets more prosperous by ripping off the rest of us.

First off, the quoted statement dissing Obama’s green energy investments comes from that extreme right-wing joke of a sheltered workshop for otherwise-unemployable hacks, Investor’s Business Daily, which as can be seen here has a long history of spewing factually-challenged Republican talking points like the Obama “apology” that wasn’t.

Second off, who provides most of the backing for AFP? Why, the dirty-energy moguls, of course:

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a group fronting special interests started by oil billionaire David Koch and Richard Fink (a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries). AFP has been accused of funding astroturf operations but also has been fueling the “Tea Party” efforts. [1] AFP’s messages are in sync with those of other groups funded by the Koch Family Foundations and the Koch’s other special interest groups that work against progressive or Democratic initiatives and protections for workers and the environment. Accordingly, AFP opposes labor unions, health care reform, stimulus spending, and cap-and-trade legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air pollution that they create. AFP was also involved in the attacks on Obama’s “green jobs” czar, Van Jones, and has crusaded against international climate talks. According to an article in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, the Kochs are known for “creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names,” that “make it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington.” AFP’s budget surged from $7 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2010, an election year. [2][3]

Now that you know what their ads look like, what they’re really about, and what sort of sludge they’re feeding your conservative brother-in-law, you can craft a way to counter their nonsense. Go forth and do so.