This is not at all true. The Kochs are easily outspent by the left every year. Just look at the Sierra Club's, NRDC's, EDF's, LCV's, Center for American Progress, and other's spending every year. And these are just groups that do environment activities. Soros, Tides Foundation, Steyer, McCarthur, Packard Foundation, and other foundations spend far more than the Kochs. If anything the Kochs are playing catch up. But the CS Monitor is not interested in writing about that. They are getting pitched by Media Matters on the Kochs and those are the stories The Monitor writes.

In the interest of fairness:

The biggest spenders on lobbying are typically business-right groups. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&inde...

The top individual funders tend to be conservatives: https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?disp=D

And on the left, the biggest organizational contributers in election cycles tend to be unions (which is a significant factor behind the right's desire to break them): https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=2014

No, they just happen to be Libertarians; tending to support Republicans; hence they are the focus. HN like many blogs leans left and tends to allow far too often political hit pieces during election periods (it ruined slashdot for many)

let alone your term teabaggers clearly shows your tendencies

stories with any political connection either need flagged or a new flag, "Political"

>No, they just happen to be Libertarians

I agree. The anger should be directed towards the University, who could refuse the pledge with its associated demands. Why blame the Koch brothers for expecting their money to peddle influence? It's sort of the point. And it's only ever a problem for people who don't agree with the politics. Was having Larry Summers participate in the annual reviews at Harvard after a post in the Clinton Whitehouse corrupt? These sorts of things are inherently political.

In fact, just one article over, is this:

"Hoffman and Pincus each gave a million dollars to Priorities USA, the Democratic Super PAC. Since then, they have had the opportunity to spend time with Obama. In a private forty-five-minute meeting in the Oval Office in 2012, Pincus gave the President a PowerPoint presentation on what he calls “the product-management approach to government.”

>let alone your term teabaggers clearly shows your tendencies

It's funny that in another HN thread people are discussing "trolling" and how HN gets it right by allowing people to express dissenting views, respectfully, without being punished. Meanwhile, the parent is downvoted and the comment with a derogatory political term lives on.

And, for the record, I'm Canadian, so none of these politics are really mine.

>Why blame the Koch brothers for expecting their money to peddle influence?

That's really not the right use of the term "influence peddling", which refers to something you do when you're in a position of authority in exchange for money, i.e. it's when you sell influence.

From my perspective it sure seems like any public organization (university, NGO, foundation) that isn't explicitly conservative will trend sharply to the left over time due to the kinds of people who tend to work in those organizations. If I were donating a lot of money to a university department I'd want to maintain some control over who they hired as well.

>it's when you sell influence.

Which is exactly what the University executives did...sold influence to the Koch's. Hence, their money peddled influence.

That's still not the right usage. You could say university executives peddled influence, but you can't say the Koch brothers or their money peddled influence because they're the buyers.

_HN like many blogs leans left and tends to allow far too often political hit pieces during election periods_

You've not been coming here very long, have you?

>Tu quoque fallacy. Maybe the Kochs are an easy target because they do it at a scale never before imagined - their annual spending on their political projects easily eclipses Steyer's entire net worth...

Oh? They spend more than a billion dollars every year? Please, sign me up for your newsletter.

Their "Freedom Partners" group publicly announced a budget of $889 million for 2016.

I'm not sure what Steyer is worth, he's referred to as a billionaire so that would suggest slightly more than that figure, but it's not so far away as to require a sarcastic response.

Eh... no. The total spending of all the groups the Koch brothers support (including Freedom Partners) is $889m. But that's not what the Koch brothers are spending, that's the total spending of all the groups they support. The amount of money they spent is a tiny fraction of that number.

For more realistic numbers this is a good place to start:

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/09/opensecrets-battle-k...

This isn't an instance of the tu quoque fallacy as far as I can see, the poster isn't claiming this isn't bad, they're just claiming that the issue these issues receive in the public eye seems to be extremely politically biased (which I find hard to disagree with).