It’s unsettling because there’s a mystery tied to it. The vehemence of the call to action– the high-intensity language and the plea for round after round of million-dollar donations– seems poorly matched with the threat to the Kochs and their friends posed by the nation’s conservative Democratic president.

Three years after Obama’s inauguration, the Kochs and all of their Beaver Creek friends are still winning the class war by a long shot. Their interests and ideologies dominate Washington.

“Regulation” remains an evil word even in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, record Big Oil profits, and a finance industry spree of gambling and fraud born on Alan Greenspan’s unfettered Wall Street– a spree that brought the world economy to its knees and dealt out rewards to the high-flying architects of the disaster and jobless penury and loss to working class people all over the world.

Obama’s cabinet has been stacked with as many Wall Street beneficiaries and protectors as has been any recent administration. Longtime deregualtion champ Larry Summers stayed on board as chief economic adviser for two years, which he spent working mainly to reward the unrepentant finance industry. This month it has become clear that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is seeking to wring real cash for the victims of the great securitizations ponzi scheme, doesn’t stand a chance up against the Obama administration and the banks.

On larger economic questions, Obama’s priorities have dovetailed with the priorities of the right. The national policy now in effect is one of deficit-reduction austerity measures that will cut programs for the middle class while continuing to hand out tax breaks to corporations and to the billionaires looking to wage the mother of all battles against him from places like Beaver Creek.

Is there some major environment and energy policy Obama plans to take up?

This week Obama decided to pull back new national smog standards proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The decision bewildered medical and environmental experts.

Cap and trade? The chances of any version of that legislation becoming law in the United States under Obama, should he win another term, are negligible. Obama proved unable to bring the force of public opinion to bear on that matter when Americans still loved him. Republican officeholders who want to continue in their political careers are not allowed to believe in climate change and those men and women now hold a majority in Congress and will likely continue to do so for some time with or without the Kochs waging their mother of all battles.

So where comes the great threat to the Koch brothers and their fellow travelers?

Obama has continued or expanded nearly all of the controversial hawkish homeland security policies of the Bush era, refused to hold anyone in the government accountable for abuses of power, and won no significant reductions in the country’s out-of-control but nonetheless par-for-the-course military budget.

Is the threat for the oil-tycoon Kochs tied to the fact that the fossil fuel age has reached its peak? Is it that climate change is real? Is it that wind and solar and hydrogen power are becoming more efficient and more attractive to growing numbers of people? If so, none of that will change, even if another Texas governor becomes president and, in a mass rally of fasting and prayer on the National Mall, asks Jesus to bestow special blessings on the fuel sources of the 19th and 20th century.

Does the great threat the Kochs fear stem from social change? Is it that gay people can now get married in New York or that abortion remains legal in the United States? Obama was no champion of the former and has had no effect in stemming the historic legislative attack Republicans have waged on women’s health and privacy rights connected to family planning in Congress and in state capitals from coast to coast. Meantime, the military is lifting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell once and forever, and the fate of the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act now lies with the courts.

What do the Kochs hope to win with their mother of all battles?

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Energy and chemicals billionaires Charles and David Koch have taken to Colorado’s high country in recent years (last year they were in Aspen) to raise big bucks for the Tea Party movement and develop a plan for toppling President Barack Obama in 2012.

This summer’s top-secret, tightly secured and heavily patrolled meeting near Vail drew Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Perry, who only reluctantly acknowledged his attendance after the fact. It also drew protesters from various progressive groups who gathered at Avon’s Nottingham Park at the base of the resort.

While the full audio and transcript is available on the Brad Blog, the highlight seems to be this comparison by Charles Koch between the late Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and Obama:

“But we’ve been talking about — we have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months. For the life or death of this country. So, I’m not going to do this to put any pressure on anyone here, mind you. This is not pressure. But if this makes your heart feel glad and you want to be more forthcoming, then so be it.”

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Colin Powell served as Secretary of State during a time of swift and far-reaching change, both for our nation and the world. His tenure began just a few weeks into the new millennium. Nine months later, the September 11th attacks occurred. In the days and weeks that followed, Secretary Powell provided a calm, steady, and hopeful voice as Americans sought to understand the threats we faced and the uncertain future that lay ahead.

In fact, on the day of the attacks, Secretary Powell was in Lima, Peru, attending a special session of the Organization of American States to adopt the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a critical instrument for strengthening public institutions and helping democracy deliver real improvements to people’s lives. When he heard that the planes had hit the Towers, he told his staff that they’d be returning to the United States immediately – and then he returned to the session to cast our nation’s vote in favor of the charter.

Guess what she didn’t mention.

Still, for years the Shiite-led Iraqi government, which has a great deal of antipathy toward the anti-Iranian organization, has wanted access to the MEK facility. The United States has resisted, for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that the military feared the Iraqi security forces would abuse the camp’s inhabitants. And today, in an evident exercise of sovereignty under the Status of Forces Agreement, Iraqi police breached Camp Ashraf and ran wild. The Washington Post has what it claims to be video from inside the camp. It’s ugly.

The Post quotes an MEK member saying the camp is currently “under siege.” Defense Secretary Bob Gates visited Iraq today. Does Gates know about this? Could he stop the assault? Or are these the wages of Iraqi sovereignty?

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said the department assigned its robbery and homicide division to investigate the death, but the spokesman said that was because of Mr. Jackson’s celebrity.

“Don’t read into anything,” the spokesman told reporters gathered outside the Bel-Air house. He said the coroner had taken possession of the body and would conduct an investigation.

I think we can agree that the Iranian regime benefits from the media rush to memorialize, explore and reflect upon Michael Jackson and his legacy. Cui bono and all that … (Here’s where human rights liberalism really does collapse its differences with conspiracy-theory-prone neoconservatism. I’m Spencer and I’ll be your host this morning.)

Is it possible that the Iraqi election experience had something to do with Iranian expectations of an election? If critics of the war can for just a moment move beyond their own deeply held opinions about the invasion of Iraq — that this was a war of choice fought on false premises to lower gas prices or whatever — and examine the effect of that war on the region as a whole, they might see a connection to the current turmoil in Iran. After all, one of the intellectual arguments in favor of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was, in the words of Dick Cheney, to place “a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future.”

I think a case can be made that Barack Obama’s election as president has also raised expectations of the democratic process in countries around the world. It is certainly possible that we are seeing an Obama effect in Iran as young people there look to replicate the excitement and enthusiasm of young people here during last year’s election. But any honest assessment of events in Iran would also have to consider the effect of having a functioning democracy right next door — a democracy that millions of Iranians have seen for themselves as they make religious pilgrimages and conduct business in Iraq. Iran has had a tremendous influence on Iraq these last few years, usually to the detriment of peace and security there. Perhaps the current protests in Iran are evidence that influence doesn’t just cross the border in one direction.

I’ll play ball. But the evidence presented for the proposition that Iraq’s nascent democracy (let’s be charitable) influenced what’s happening in Iran is that (a) there’s a nascent democracy in Iraq, (b) Iran is next to Iraq, (c) Iranians make “religious pilgrimages and conduct business” in Iraq and (d) there’s something amazing and hopeful going on in Iran. By contrast, no Iranian on the #IranElection hashtag, for instance, has mentioned Iraq as an inspiration for the demonstrations, nor has any leader of the opposition cited their Iraqi neighbors as a model or a source of guidance. Instead, they talk about internal, domestic provocations provided by Ahmadinejad and the clerical regime. If we’re going to go by, say, business ties, Iran’s main trading partners are China, India, Germany, South Korea, France, Russia and Italy. Which of those countries inspired the Iranian protests we’re seeing now?

If there’s additional evidence for believing that Iraq’s nascent democracy is influencing the Iranian opposition, I’d consider it, but assertion isn’t a compelling argument. It’s probably best to look to what the Iranian opposition is actually saying if we’re to understand it.

Over the Memorial Day recess, Mudd met with senior staff members of the Homeland Security panel whose interest was primarily how he would handle issues of intelligence sharing with state and local police units. When, near the end of a two-hour session, they went over Mudd’s CIA positions from 2001 to 2005, it became apparent that questions about harsh interrogations, renditions and allegations that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda would have to be explored, according to a person at the session who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

“Since he was deputy director of the counterterrorism center, he was going to be asked whether interrogation produced useful intelligence, and if it didn’t, why didn’t he stop it?” the source said.

Yeah! Why didn’t some completely anonymous CIA official march into Dick Cheney’s office and force the vice president of the United States and all his acolytes to completely abandon their cherished torture program — something they feel so strongly about that they continue to defend it out of office? And why didn’t he do that while Porter Goss was firing CIA officials for insufficient loyalty to the Bush administration? Clearly Phil Mudd was the problem here.

We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.

Sigh. He wants you to hear “known ties to al-Qaeda,” knowing that for eight years, you’ve heard Bush administration officials conflate al-Qaeda with the generic term “terrorists.” In truth, Saddam Hussein had “known ties” to Palestinian terrorist groups that never did and do not still pose a threat to the United States of America. Not to al-Qaeda, as every single official investigation into this dubious and refuted claim has determined. But we’ll be hearing this conspiracy theory from Cheney forever, apparently.

Mylroie is the author of two studies — “Saddam’s Strategic Concepts: Dealing With UNSCOM,” dated Feb. 1, 2007, and “Saddam’s Foreign Intelligence Service,” dated Sept. 24, 2007 — on a list of reports from the Pentagon’s Office Of Net Assessment [ONA], obtained by TPMmuckraker through the Freedom Of Information Act.

Read Justin’s post for the case against Mylroie; anything I’d write would be redundant. But the Office of Net Assessment has long been run by a Yoda-like figure named Andy Marshall, who’s known for drastically unconventional thinking. Apparently, it’s a thin line between thinking outside the box and detonating the box to reconstruct box-like fragments into shapes that boxmakers have long proved were thoroughly unsupportable, while ranting that the boxmakers are the enemies of U.S. national security.