Remember Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the infamous Koch founded and funded organization that, among other achievements, got the Tea Party organized and on track? Want to know just which legislators in Missouri are most in tune with AFP goals? Well, you need wait no longer. The AFP has just issued a scorecard for the 112th Congress.  The grades received by Missouri legislators, listed below (name, party and grade), is about what one would expect:

Roy Blunt (R): B

Claire McCaskill (D): D

Todd Akin (R): A+          

Russ Carnahan (D): F                          

Wm. Lacy Clay (D): F

Emanuel Cleaver (D): D-  

Jo Ann Emerson (R) B      

Sam Graves (R): B        

Vicky Hartzler (R): B  

Billy Long (R): B  

Blaine Leutkemeyer (R): B

If you want a vote breakdown, check out AmericansforProsperity.org/Scorcard. According to the DailyKos’ Meteor Blades:

AFP chose to grade congressmembers based on their votes on repealing President Obama’s new healthcare law, blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, supporting the demolition document known as the Paul Ryan budget, ending ethanol subsidies and several Congressional Review Act resolutions as well as the fiscal year 2012 appropriations bills.

This rationale explains just why Republicans get high marks and Democrats get low marks – as a progressive, I’d be very disturbed if any Democrats scored higher than they did. That said, I do have to admit that I was surprised that most of Missouri’s GOP legislators can’t get better than B grades – only uber-winger Akin qualifies for an A grade (A+ actually). They sure talk a good game and one would have expected that they would reap a bigger reward. Perhaps ethanol subsides plays a role in their scores? Also of interest is the fact that no matter how far right she tries to list, poor Claire McCaskill can’t do better than a D. I would have pegged her at C- (for centrist wannabe) myself – if only because of her efforts on behalf of Big Coal.

Via ThinkProgress’s Wonk Room:

Fifty senators – 46 Republicans and four Democrats – recently voted to deny the science of global warming and permanently ban limits on the carbon pollution that threatens the health of children and seniors. Not surprisingly, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity group lent its voice in support of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) dirty-energy amendment.

A ThinkProgress analysis finds that the senators voting for McConnell’s amendment raked in $1.8 million dollars from Koch Industries over the course of their careers. Not only did these senators ignore the will of 71 percent of voters who support the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to restrict emissions, but they put the 15 million people with asthma in their states at risk by voting to stop the EPA from limiting carbon pollution.

And guess which Missouri senator is prominent among those who make up what ThinkProgress calls the “Koch Head Caucus,” the “top ten recipients of Koch cash in the U.S. Senate”? If you guessed Senator Roy Blunt, you would be correct. Blunt has pulled in $96,700 in Koch subsidies – a sum that was evidently sufficient to tip the scales against the needs of the 511,717 Missourians who suffer from asthma. For some reason, Missouri voters saw fit to move Blunt from the House to the Senate, and now, apparently, it’s time for Daddy Blunt to resume doing business as usual in his new storefront.

Remember during the Senate campaign, when everything that might have disadvantaged Blunt’s corporate patrons was dubbed “job-killing” – no matter how tenuous the connection to jobs? I wonder how long we’ll have to wait to hear him express any concern about conditions that are potentially human-killing?  

According to the Washington Post, Carl Rove’s American Crossroads paid $4,120,921 to help buy Roy Blunt’s Senate seat. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by comparison, pumped a measly $1,110,461 into Missouri to help their pal Roy. Nothing like buying a known commodity, I guess.

Of course Blunt also owes the Koch brothers a big debt; if their AFP hadn’t fanned the Tea Party bonfires, it would have been much rougher going. From one point of view, Blunt’s race was the proof of the pudding when it comes to the preferred way to use the Tea Party. Actual Tea Party candidates who won their primaries mostly crashed and burned (think Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle and Joe Miller), proving that there is actually a limit on how many Americans will tolerate pure stupidity; but the cadres did make excellent foot soldiers for the good ol’ boys of the corporate GOP and helped to create the required media narrative.

Addendum:  I forgot to add our own Ed Martin’s name to the list of defeated Tea Party candidates – perhaps because he always struck me as a more of a political opportunist using the Tea Party for camouflage than the real thing.  He not only crashed and burned, but he seems determined to make a total ass out of himself now that the damage is done.

In spite of the claims of grass-roots angst bubbling up unassisted, it’s old news that the Tea Party was brought into being through the ministrations of a few corporate front organizations, prominent among them Americans for Prosperity (AFP). The AFP’s ties to the billionaire Koch brothers have been well documented, most recently in Jane Mayer’s excellent New Yorker article.  Mayer quotes conservative think tanker, Bruce Bartlet, to the effect that the Kochs, one-time John Birchers, have invested in the Tea Party as a vehicle for creating an ostensibly libertarian movement that, incidentally, also serves the Kochs bottom line:

… With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there-people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.

The Kochs’ man in Missouri, the State Diretor of the Missouri branch of Americans for Prosperity (AFP-MO) until his resignation in July, has been none other than one-time speaker Pro Tem of the Missouri House, Carl Bearden. The term-limited Bearden resigned prematurely from the House shortly after being accused of ethical lapses. He immediately joined the lobbying firm Pelopidas LLC, or as Bearden put it, an “influence management firm” in which he would play a “main role.”

When Bearden joined Pelopidas, he also he also “officially became the lobbyist for retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield,” a major Pelopidas client whose hobby is trying to buy Missouri’s government. Sinquefield, via Pelopidas, has focused on gutting public education and cutting taxes for the wealthy in Missouri, goals not incompatible with the Kochs’. Consequently, it’s not surprising that the AFP-MO, under the leadership of Pelopidas’ Bearden,  has used Pelopidas’ “grassroots and coalition building” services. One cannot be blamed for concluding that Carl Bearden unites the wider goals of the Kochs with Sinquefield’s specifically Missouri focus.

One offspring of that union is the Missouri Tea Party. It’s no secret that Bearden was instrumental in organizing and publicizing Tea Party rallies, as well as promoting the Tea Party presence at Town-Halls held by Democratic congress people – complete with astroturf talking points and strategies for how to “artificially inflate your numbers.” Last spring, when Claire McCaskill, looking at what she took to be the writing on the wall, declared “I absolutely empathize with the Tea Party,” the grafitti that got her so flustered was put there by Carl Bearden.

So what, conservatives chime at this point, don’t liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn.org promote progressive events. Don’t they take money from unions, wealthy liberals, even – gasp – from financier George Soros? And haven’t they played a big part in organizing progressives around issues? Unfortunately, for the “balanced” presentation favored by trad media types, the parallels aren’t really that parallel:

–One would be hard-put to find many liberal advocacy group whose raison d’etre can be linked to their donors’ bottom line as is demonstrably the case with the Koch brothers and the AFP. (See also the Mayer article and here.)

—Contrary to groups funded by the Kochs, for example, the lines between donors and liberal advocacy groups are usually highly transparent.

–Finally, although folks may disagree with progressive positions, no liberal advocacy groups have, to my knowledge, tried to pawn off false information in order to whip up their membership. I know of no liberal equivalence to last summer’s “death panels” (the claim made here at an AFP sponsored meeting), or no spurious science intended to plant doubt about proven anthropogenic climate change. Just listing all the lies promulgated by conservative “think tanks, etc. could serve as the focus of a very long post all by itself.

Manufactured though the Tea Party phenomena may be, it is undeniable that many of the participants are totally genuine. These are the angry and frightened individuals who see a changing world and cannot deal with the anxiety and insecurity it generates, as well as those generally unstable individuals who populate any fringe movement. Those recruited to the Tea Party are ripe for exploitation, and in Carl Bearden, the AFP found the right guy to to take advantage of the situation.