Speaking of Karl Marx — among other things, he is said to have said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” I think we’re well into farce mode.

For example, the Manhattan Institute lets us know it has been “probing” the “trial lawyer lobby.” Manhattan fellow James Copland has an op ed in the Washington Examiner explaining how the trial lawyer lobby is a “money machine” for Democrats, because they send generous campaign contributions to Democrats and get favorable legislation in return. What makes this farce is that the Manhattan Institute itself is one of those phony “think tanks” through which big corporations and other vested interests spread propaganda that suits their financial purposes.

It gets better. Fox News, the propaganda arm of the conservative movement, has discovered that what appears to be a very small group called the American Public Policy Committee had the nerve to set up an anti-tea party website called The Tea Party Is Over. Fox says the APPC is part of something called the American Public Policy Center, which is so small it doesn’t show up in google searches.

Anyway, Fox says, this APPC is part of a “complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.” According to OpenSecrets.org, in 2008 APPC’s contributions totaled $861. Yeah, them’s some mountainous coffers.

And this is coming from Fox News, whose relationships with corporate-funded astroturf organizations is well documented.

BTW, Faux may be in trouble with some parts of the Right — it has been revealed that Faux’s biggest shareholder outside the Rupert Murdoch family is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.