In recent years, billionaire oil magnates David and Charles Koch have bankrolled the Tea Party movement, Republican candidates, and efforts to deny the existence global warming. But less noticed have been their series of twice-yearly strategy coordination meetings for wealthy right-wing donors. These secret confabs have attracted Republicans like Govs. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Rick Scott (R-FL), as well as former Fox News Channel talker Glenn Beck, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and executives from the oil, banking, and health insurance industries.

The most recent meeting attracted two newcomers: Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. Between them, the Las Vegas casino-owner and his wife have reportedly plowed $10 million into a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC and have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican party committees and candidates already this cycle.

A Center for Public Integrity report suggests this may just be the beginning:

Adelson has recently indicated strong interest in backing other GOP allied groups, say fundraisers familiar with his giving. In 2010, Adelson wrote a seven figure check to Crossroads GPS, a non-profit advocacy group that doesn’t have to disclose its donors publicly which was co-founded by GOP super consultants Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

The story quotes unnamed fundraisers “familiar with Adelson,” the American Crossroads super PAC and the 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS, as expecting Adelson to “pump a few million dollars more” into one of the Crossroads groups this year, to help defeat President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. They also say Adelson is also considering writing a check to the American Action Network, former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)’s non-profit, to help preserve the Republican majority in the U.S. House.

Between the Kochs and the Adelsons, voters around the country should expect to see what voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida have seen in recent weeks: a seemingly unending stream of dishonest attack ads, paid for by billionaire-funded super PACs and tax-exempt organizations.

With veteran GOP operative Karl Rove at its back, and a little help from the Citizens United decision, the conservative PAC American Crossroads and its 501(c)(4) counterpart Crossroads GPS bombarded the airwaves with over $16 million in attack ads this campaign season. With 5 days to go until the election, American Crossroads announced $6 million worth of ad buys yesterday in its final blitz to defeat Democrats. But, while a GOP victory might be the Crossroads groups’ top priority, one ad proves that accuracy is certainly not.

This season, Crossroads created a one-size-fits-all ad slamming targeted Democrats for supporting the Recovery Act. Running in different races across the country, the ad claims that while whichever state’s “economy is reeling,” whoever the Democrat happens to be is “making [the economy] worse” by supporting the “stimulus boondoggle.” Confident that this “fill-in-the-blank” issue ad fits every state, Crossroads ran the ad against Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D) in North Dakota. “North Dakota’s economy is reeling and Congressman Earl Pomeroy is making it worse,” the ad warns.

Watch it:

The ominous ad, however, fails to mention one important detail: North Dakota’s economy is not reeling. In fact, it’s booming. This summer, North Dakota saw employment rise from 362,100 in December 2007 to 371,300 last month — a record in job creation for the state. Indeed, along with Alaska, North Dakota is the only state “to have created jobs since the onslaught of the Great Recession.” And with the highest rate of personal income growth and the nation’s lowest unemployment rate of 3.7 percent — well below the 9.6 percent national average — this state’s economy “sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits.”

But truth in advertising isn’t exactly Crossroads’ modus operandi. According to Factcheck.org research, American Crossroads regularly makes “false and misleading claims” in their “blizzard” of attack ads in states like Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Nevada, Missouri, and New Hampshire. And while American Crossroads must disclose its donors, Crossroads GPS is a 501(c)(4) organization and therefore does not have to. Thus, like its “kissing cousin” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Crossroads GPS can take advantage of legal loopholes to inject massive funds into this year’s election without ever having to disclose its funders.

Pomeroy’s campaign ripped into Crossroads today for the “phony,” “cookie-cutter” ad. “Next time Karl Rove wants to funnel secret money to North Dakota to influence our elections, he ought to visit our state first or at least pick up one of our newspapers,” said Pomeroy’s spokesman Brenden Timpe. “If he did, he would know that North Dakota’s economy is doing quite well thank you very much, and Earl has been a strong partner in that progress.”

Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation today, former Bush advisor Karl Rove defended “flooding our politics with money from people who don’t want people to know they’ve contributed,” as host Bob Schieffer put it, saying his Crossroads GPS group and other conservative organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on this year’s elections without disclosing their donors. The network of special interest groups led by Rove is expecting to raise $250 million to influence this years’ elections, almost all of it from millionaires and billionaires.

But as ThinkProgress reported last week, Rove sang a different tune in 2004 when he said, “I’m against all the 527 ads and activities,” referring to a tax designation of some outside political groups, including his own American Crossroads. “I don’t think they’re fair. I don’t think it’s appropriate. They’re misusing the law. They all ought to stop,” he said at the time. Today, Schieffer confronted Rove with the video ThinkProgress highlighted, asking him, “so why is it that if they were so bad back then that they’re so wholesome now?” Watch it:

Rove responded by saying “I wish we had a different system,” but that his group and the others were merely a response to the “liberal groups” which “have been using undisclosed money for years and years and years and years,” he said, pointing to unions. But as Schieffer and others have noted, unions’ memberships and agendas are well known and public, while the agenda and motives of Rove’s wealthy donors are unclear and hidden. Moreover, Rove ignored the fact that President Obama took a strong stance against secretive outside groups supporting his 2008 campaign, marginalizing Democrat-aligned groups.

But when Scheiffer asked Rove — who at that point had stated that we need “a different system” at least three times — whether he would commit to working towards a stronger campaign finance regime, Rove dodged, declining to commit to anything or say what a “new system” might entail:

SCHEIFFER: If you feel so strongly about it would you pledge this morning that you’ll work to have new campaign laws where we make all of these contributions transparent and we’ll know who is giving them?

ROVE: I’m for a new system, Bob. I’m focused on 2010. Right now I’m focused on trying to level the playing field. When you have an organization that spends $87 million. It’s announced it’s spending $87 million. We’re the big player but we don’t like to boast about it. That’s the amount of disclosure. We’ve tolerated this for decades. The system may need something else.

Rove did pledge, however, that his groups will act as a conduit for billionaires to secretly funnel money into American politics for years to come, saying his Crossroads groups will “serve as a permanent counterweight to the activities of the labor unions and these liberal groups.”