There are still so many unanswered questions as to why CNBC's Rick Santelli went off the deep end two weeks ago and started bashing Barack Obama's stimulus package and calling for a Chicago Tea Party. Like, why did Santelli backpedal after his "impromptu" speech to sell out his own wife? Was his rant really so spontaneous, or the organized attack of a bunch of Republican sleeper cells, like Playboy seems to think? And when did Playboy start getting involved in investigative journalism, anyway?

Even creepier, the link to the Playboy article is dead, which either means the terrorists have won, or Hugh Hefner finally ran out of money. Fortunately, The Atlantic reprinted the piece.

ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the "Sam Adams Alliance," whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots "tea party" protests going on today. All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and funded by Koch money.

On the same day as Santelli's rant, February 19, another site called Officialchicagoteaparty.com went live. This site was registered to Eric Odom, who turned out to be a veteran Republican new media operative specializing in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns. Last summer, Odom organized a twitter-led campaign centered around DontGo.com to pressure Congress and Nancy Pelosi to pass the offshore oil drilling bill, something that would greatly benefit Koch Industries, a major player in oil and gas. Now, six months later, Odom's DontGo movement was resurrected to play a central role in promoting the "tea party" movement.

This is getting more complex and conspiracy-riddled than if Lost had a baby with 24. If Playboy wanted to drive home about Koch, removing that link would have been a brilliant P.R. move to draw attention to their piece and confirming the Republican conspiracy theory fears. Not that that's why the article is suddenly "missing" or anything…just saying.