AstroTurf

Think Progress informs us that a big oil front group, connected to the American Petroleum Institute, is trying to plant anti-EPA questions at the Missouri State Fair.

The Missouri Energy Forum, another API organization, sent an e-mail alert yesterday afternoon urging its staffers and activists to attend the Missouri State Fair to press public officials about opposing environmental regulations. The Missouri Energy Forum suggests that its supporters ask Rep. Blaine Leutkemeyer (R-MO) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) about the EPA’s new ozone regulations, because such regulations will supposedly “hurt Missouri’s farmers and business’s [sic].”

Here is the screen grab of the call to action by the “Missouri Energy Forum”:

Using my Tea Party crowd estimate conversion chart, there were about 7 approximately 71,000 angry Republicans (not counting paid staff) at the Capitol this morning for the Americans For Prosperity protest against Ike Skelton.

The grassroots support for the AFP's "November is Coming" tour is truly overwhelming.

Organizers of yesterday's "Energy Citizens" rally weren't that interested in regular citizens attending their rally, but they sure didn't have a problem admitting the oil company employees bussed in to learn why oil companies don't want to reduce their polluting ways. KMOX:

About three hundred people, most of them refinery workers from ConocoPhillips in Roxana,  packed a ballroom of the Ballpark Hilton to hear speakers blast the bill as bad for businesses and consumers.

H'ray, populist outrage!

Tomorrow, the American Petroleum Institute's "Energy Citizens" campaign will be holding a rally in St. Louis to illustrate oil companies' and other polluters' opposition to federal cap-and-trade legislation.  The event at the Ballpark Hilton is designed to "put a human face" on the companies' lobbying campaign.

Two weeks ago, a similar "Energy Citizens" event in Houston generated national headlines when energy companies bussed in employees during the work day to hear a corporate executive explain why climate legislation is bad news.

A leaked memo from the API's president explained the intent of the campaign.  Via Grist.org:

The Economic Freedom Alliance, a right-wing business organization whose members include the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, is currently running billboards and online ads attacking Claire McCaskill, Ike Skelton, Russ Carnahan, Emanuel Cleaver and Lacy Clay. The ads, which some of you may have seen on billboards or online, accuse the Democratic members of Congress of "killing jobs" because they've been supported by labor organizations and support the Employee Free Choice Act.

The ads are based on a "thoroughly discredited study" funded by the "corporate-friendly, anti-union 'Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs" and "based entirely on decades-old data from a handful of Canadian provinces."

On the same day that Carl Bearden is offered up as one of the most disgusting examples of the money-driven influence peddling at the Capitol...

...Carl Bearden is listed as the point of contact for the "Tea Party at the Capitol" --ostensibly a grassroots movement of outraged citizens.

Something to think about between now and next Tuesday when "thousands" of Bearden's friends storm the capitol to rekindle that revolutionary feeling.