ThinkProgress first reported that corporate front groups run by lobbyists were orchestrating the radical anti-Obama tea party protests held yesterday. One of the front groups that mobilized the protests is Americans for Prosperity, an organization funded by oil industry money and run by Tim Phillips, a former partner in Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm. On Monday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted these these “astroturf” campaigns were meant to appear as a grassroots, spontaneous protests.

Speaking at a tea party protest in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) mocked Krugman’s assertions:

RYAN: Earlier this week, a columnist from the New York Times wrote about these events and I want to read you a few quotes. What we have here today is an astroturf event, a fake grassroots event. These rallies don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. What do you all think about that? [audience boos]

Watch it:

Ironically, the very event at which Ryan mocked the idea of astroturfing was one of the many tea parties organized by Americans for Prosperity.

In addition to arranging for buses to bring people to the Madison tea party, Americans for Prosperity staff wrote press releases to publicize the event, coordinated logistics, and even distributed talking points. Matt Block, the Wisconsin state director for Americans for Prosperity, shared the stage with Ryan, delivering one of the keynote speeches.

As critics have pointed out, Ryan and other GOP lawmakers are embracing the lobbyist-backed tea parties in a bid to return to the failed policies of the Bush administration. Ryan, the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, offered the Republican alternative budget last month. His budget not only cost $225 billion more than the Democratic plan, but gave the average CEO $1.5 million in tax breaks.

President Obama announced this afternoon in a written statement that the Justice Department is releasing memos from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) between 2002 and 2005 which “speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects.” In his statement, Obama laid out his reasoning for making the memos public and announced that his administration would not seek to prosecute individuals who “who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice”:

First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program – and some of the practices – associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world.

Attorney General Eric Holder issued a parallel statement in which he not only promised not to pursue prosecutions but also to provide representation “in any state or federal judicial or administrative proceeding brought against” any CIA employee who acted “reasonably” upon the advice of the OLC. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) responded to the release by reiterating his desire to hold a “Commission of Inquiry” into the Bush administration’s use of torture in order to gain a “thorough accounting of what happened.” Read the memos here.

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report requested by the Bush administration that warned of the rising threat of right-wing extremism. The political right has been up in arms over the intelligence assessment, falsely claiming it is an assault on conservativism.

Today on MSNBC, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) used the release of the DHS assessment to advance his well-documented anti-Muslim agenda. King told Joe Scarborough that, instead of discussing the threat of anti-government radicals, DHS should focus on the threat emanating from “Muslims” and “mosques” at home:

KING: [Napolitano] has never put out a report talking about look out for mosques. Look out for Islamic terrorists in our country. Look out for the fact that very few Muslims come forward to cooperate with the police. If they sent out a report saying that, there would be hell to pay.

Scarborough agreed: “Oh, it would be blowing up!”. Watch it:

King often likes to blame “mosques” for terrorism. In 2007, he claimed that it is “unfortunate” that the U.S. has “too many mosques,” a remark that was swiftly condemned by Muslim groups:

Unfortunately, we have too many mosques in this country. There are too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully. We should be finding out how we can infiltrate.

Unfortunately, these types of remarks unfairly targeting Muslims are commonplace for King. He has previously claimed that Muslims are “the enemy among us.” “[Y]ou could say that 80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists,” he said in 2004.

Furthermore, King suggested that DHS under Napolitano’s leadership is trying to downplay the threat of “Islamic terrorists.” Perhaps he should do his research before making such an outlandish claim.

The Chicago Tribune reports today that Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is considering running for Illinois governor, saying his interest is the result of “so much corruption in our state.” Responding to reports that Gov. Pat Quinn (D) will raise income taxes to patch a crippling budget deficit, Kirk suggested shooting Quinn:

“I think that the decision to raise taxes by 50 percent in Illinois is political suicide,” Kirk said of Quinn’s proposal to raise the tax rate to 4.5 percent from 3 percent, coupled with an increase in the personal deduction. “I think the people of Illinois are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes by that degree.”

Last June, Kirk mistakenly referred to then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as “Osama,” saying that he supports a policy “where if we see Obama there’s a shoot-on-sight order.”