The cash behind the Real Distortions

Mostly lost in the smattering of news stories that the Pope people scratched out yesterday with their new and absurdly misleading TV ad defending the reactionary General Assembly was a fairly remarkable fact: These folks plan to drop a cool half-million bucks on TV ad buys.

You got that? Two ”nonpartisan” nonprofits are just casually going to fork out $500,000  over the next few weeks to put TV ads all over North Carolina. It appears they’re even going so far as to buy ads in Norfolk so as to try and cover the northeast corner of the state as well.

How is this possible? How could a pair of groups with modest-sized staffs just happen to have a half-million simoleons lying around?

The answer, almost assuredly is this: The money wasn’t just lying around; it was sitting in a Pope and/or Koch bank account (at least originally) and is now simply being funneled through Civitas and AFP so as to make the whole exercise less egregiously offensive.