This morning, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published an explosive investigative piece detailing the role of the Koch family in orchestrating not only the Tea Party movement, but much of the modern right-wing infrastructure. The brothers David and Charles Koch, heirs to the oil and chemical conglomerate Koch Industries, have founded or funded dozens of conservative or libertarian publications, think tanks, and attack groups. Their father, Fred Koch, similarly fueled the paranoid right-wing movements of the fifties and sixties through his financing of the John Birch Society.

Mayer’s piece builds off the original reporting conducted by ThinkProgress since the very beginning of the Tea Party movement. Here’s a review of what we’ve reported:

– In April 2009, ThinkProgress revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by David Koch, was helping to plan dozens of the first national Tea Party rallies. Americans for Prosperity staffers organized events, from making reservations, to providing talking points and signs, to calling activists to encourage them to participate.

– In August 2009, ThinkProgress obtained an exclusive memo from a Tea Party group supported by Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. The memo outlined various ways for Tea Party activists to intimidate Democratic lawmakers and disrupt their town hall meetings on health reform. ThinkProgress published half a dozen articles exposing the role of Koch-funded groups like “Patients United” in encouraging opposition to health reform. For instance, in Virginia, a Koch-funded operative Ben Marchi assisted a birther who followed Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) around, yelling at him at town hall meetings.

– In May 2009, the Wonk Room published a detailed history of Tim Phillips, an astroturf lobbyist Koch appointed to run his Americans for Prosperity front. Phillips had served as a business partner to Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed.

– Writing in the Boston Globe, ThinkProgress commented on the similarities between David and Charles’ Tea Party movement to their father’s efforts to attack President John Kennedy through the John Birch Society.

– The Wonk Room reported on thirty years of Koch Industry environmental front groups. The timeline showed how Koch tried desperately to smear the cap and trade system set up to address acid rain with a “grassroots” group without a single grassroots member.

– At Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) “House Call” rally, ThinkProgress produced a video report exposing Koch for paying for dozens of buses for anti-health reform activists to reach DC. We also captured the picture of a large banner comparing health reform to the Holocaust.

– The Wonk Room investigated Koch Industries’ role in the effort to repeal AB 32, the landmark California climate change clean energy law. The Wonk Room’s video report revealed how Koch Industries’ reliance on high-carbon Canadian crude would become less profitable if similar laws like AB 32 are enacted around the country.

– ThinkProgress reported how a variety of right-wing fronts supported by the Koch family and its political deputies not only helped overturn nearly a hundred years in campaign finance law in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, but also is lobbying aggressively against the DISCLOSE Act, which would provide transparency into the campaign spending for plutocrats like the Koch family.

– The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson reported extensively on the multiple climate-denying campaigns orchestrated by the Koch family. Johnson has lampooned some of the Koch family’s more ridiculous attempts at billionaire populism.

– ThinkProgress partnered with Climate Progress to investigate David Koch’s funding of the Smithsonian Institute. We spoke to the Smithsonian director, who continued to express gratitude to Koch, and whitewashed Koch’s role in distorting public knowledge of climate science. Similarly, we have long chronicled the “Swift Boat” style attack campaign conducted by Koch’s various anti-science fronts.

– The Wonk Room reported on how Koch-backed groups and media outlets spread the myth that the so-called “Climategate” e-mails showed that scientists had concealed climate data from the public.

Mayer’s article sheds light on many other ways in which the Koch family has intertwined its business interests with its investment in right-wing groups. She also exposes a serious conflict of interest with David Koch’s position as a board member to the National Cancer Institute, an honor granted to him by President Bush. Mayer notes that while David Koch has been “casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a ‘known carcinogen’ in humans.”

Earlier today, a federal trial judge in D.C. suspended all federal funding of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research during ongoing litigation, claiming that such funding is illegal. According to Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, such funding violates the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds for “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed”:

ESC research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed. To conduct ESC research, ESCs must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESCs from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo. Thus, ESC research necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo.

Despite defendants’ attempt to separate the derivation of ESCs from research on the ESCs, the two cannot be separated. Derivation of ESCs from an embryo is an integral step in conducting ESC research. Indeed, it is just one of many steps in the “systematic investigation” of stem cell research. Simply because ESC research involves multiple steps does not mean that each step is a separate “piece of research” that may be federally funded, provided the step does not result in the destruction of an embryo.

Essentially, Judge Lamberth claims that all ESC research cannot be funded because it requires scientists to build upon previous research that involved the destruction of an embryo, but it’s difficult to square this decision with Supreme Court precedent. Under Chevron v. NRDC, judges are normally supposed to defer to an agency’s reading of a federal law unless the agency’s interpretation is entirely implausible, and the Obama administration quite plausibly read the Dickey-Wicker Amendment to only prohibit federal funding of the actual destruction of an embryo — not federal funding of subsequent ESC research.

Indeed, Lamberth’s decision moves the law to a worse position than it was during the Bush administration. President George W. Bush allowed federal funding for research on existing embryonic stem cell lines, but would not allow new lines to be created. Today’s opinion even forbids such entirely uncontroversial research.

Last week, the right-wing group Stop Islamization of America announced that former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich was a “confirmed” speaker for the group’s September 11th protest against the proposed Park 51 Islamic center near ground zero, in New York City. Other speakers included former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, right-wing media tycoon Andrew Breitbart, and, notably, the far-right Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders, best known for his self-described “hate” towards Islam.

Last week, however, Gingrich spokesperson Joe DeSantis told Politico that the Gingrich — who has been an outspoken opponent of the Islamic center — “is not scheduled to be at this rally. He is not speaking.” DeSantis said Gingrich’s staff had only agreed to send a video message, not make an appearance, but that too has now been canceled, but Gingrich won’t say why:

But a spokesman for Gingrich, a possible 2012 presidential candidate, told The Hill that the former leader of the House had never confirmed his appearance. Instead, one of Gingrich’s staff had agreed to send a video message from him to be shown at the Sept. 11 rally.

That has since been canceled.

“The confusion is at least partially our fault,” said Joe DeSantis, a spokesman for Gingrich. “A staff member mistakenly promised a video message, though not an appearance. However, we are not sending a video. We informed them earlier this week.”

DeSantis did not comment on why Gingrich was no longer planning to send a video message to the rally, and attempts to contact the organizers of the rally were unsuccessful.

Given Gingrich’s extreme rhetoric on the issue and self-appointed leadership role in the opposition, it’s surprising that he would pass up this opportunity.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is also listed on the event’s website as an “invited speaker,” but a spokesman for King said he was not planning to attend because he “will have so many 9/11 commemorations [to attend] in his district.” King has also spoken out against the Islamic center, but his rhetoric has been more temperated than Gingrich’s, and he even publicly condemned the former Speaker for “making a Nazi comparison” about the center. “It was wrong,” King said of Gingrich’s comment that the center’s organizers are “radical Islamists” who are seeking “supremacy,” much like “Nazis.”

However, protesters will still hear from Wilders, who tweeted, “I booked a flight and a hotel. Great feeling. Important speech. No one can stop me. No mosque at ground zero!” On Wilders’ website, he touts the would-be appearance with Gingrich, calling the duo “two eagles” who will come together to heighten awareness and stop the mosque.

As a state senator, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli consistently “supported bills that would have treated abortion clinics as ambulatory surgery centers and required them to meet hospital-type regulations with regard to equipment and space,” but none of these bills ever became law. Now that he is Attorney General, however, Cuccinelli has decided that he does not need such legislative authority to act. In an opinion issued late last week, Attorney General Cuccinelli determined that the state already has the power to do what State Senator Cuccinelli failed to accomplish in the legislature:

In addition to applying regulations governing medical facilities and health care providers in general, the relevant agencies are authorized to impose regulations particular to abortion services. … In this circuit, the parameters within which states may constitutionally regulate first trimester abortion services were articulated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Greenville Women’s Clinic v. Bryant. The Court upheld South Carolina legislation and regulations that, in essence, extended the rules already imposed on facilities offering second trimester abortions to establishments in which five or more first trimester abortions were performed. The regulations at issue concerned licensing requirements; staffing rules; specified drug, equipment and laboratory availability; detailed record keeping and reporting duties; maintenance, safety and emergency policies; sterilization procedures; and design and construction standards.

At the very least, Cuccinelli’s opinion opens the door for Virginia to enact the very same kind of restrictive regulations that are already the law in South Carolina. Moreover, as Igor Volsky points out at the Wonk Room, Cuccinelli’s opinion could lead to even more aggressive use of the kind of “so-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) legislation that’s been passed in states across the country.” In a nutshell, TRAP laws attempt to cut off a woman’s constitutional right to choose an abortion by driving up the cost of the procedure through intentionally burdensome regulations.

Last week’s opinion is also only the latest example of Cuccinelli suddenly discovering that the law must agree with whatever his personal views are on an issue. When Congress enacted a health care law that Cuccinelli disagrees with, he immediately concluded — contrary to the Constitution and a wealth of legal precedent — that the law must be unconstitutional.  When the EPA began long-overdue steps to prevent global warming, Cuccinelli suddenly decided that EPA’s actions were illegal. When a UVA scientist conducted research contradicting Cuccinelli’s global warming denialism, Cuccinelli suddenly found that he has the legal authority to pursue a witchhunt against that professor. When a federal judge struck down Arizona’s unconstitutional anti-immigrant law, Cuccinelli responded two days later with an opinion authorizing Virginia to mimic Arizona’s failed law.  And, of course, it goes without saying that Cuccinelli forbids any kind of action which protects gay Virginians.

In other words, either the law magically bends to fit Ken Cuccinelli’s whims, or Cuccinelli doesn’t really care what the law says — he’ll just claim it does whatever he wants it to do.

John Kasich, the “former state senator, congressman, Fox News talk show host, and financial firm manager” running on the Republican gubernatorial ticket in Ohio, has taken to calling the Ohio budget a “disaster,” and plans to reinvigorate the state’s economy by completely eliminating both its income tax and its estate tax. But when asked how much his tax plan would cost the state in terms of lost revenue, Kasich admitted that he has absolutely no idea, as the Toledo Blade reported:

Ask specifics about how and when he’d follow through with his plan and where he’d reduce state spending to offset the potential loss of revenue, and the path becomes less clear. “All the specifics on this are all being constantly worked,” he told The Blade in a recent interview in his downtown Columbus campaign headquarters. “I will lay out a program whenever I feel I’m satisfied with the program, when we understand the revenue, when we’ve worked this effectively,” he said.

Kasich was even more forthcoming about his cluelessness two weeks ago, saying “people want to know the details of my plan. I don’t have the revenues.” The Wonk Room pulled up tables from the Ohio Department of Taxation to find just how much of a hole Kasich is ready to blow in his state’s budget.