The billionaires backing the Tea Party - amended

Update: Note the amendment on Dan Mitchell, below

First of all, a shortened snippet from the New York Times:

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. . . . the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, [want] to “reclaim the civil rights movement”

which then cuts to the chase:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it.

And?

Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans.

The New York Times gives a flavour of the kind of interests that lie behind the anti-tax Tea Party. First, read the New York Times article - it's an important and frightening piece. And if you think that is frightening, then try this one.

Finally, we thought we'd add a gratuitous photo of Sarah Palin, just to cheer everybody up.

Update 1: Dan Mitchell of the Center for Freedom & Prosperity has sent us a friendly email saying that they are not Koch-funded. CF&P are based at the Cato Institute and use their facilities, their contact lists, and ride on the back of Cato's Washington profile. The Cato Institute is Koch-funded (see this excellent article in the New Yorker on the "Kochtopus", also looking at the Tea Party, here). We're not convinced that Dan is telling the full story.

Update 2: we had a comment pointing to a tea party riposte to the NY Times article. The comment itself was too unpleasant to publish, so we deleted it, but nevertheless the riposte it pointed to is here.