There’s a name that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics  as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch. Koch-heads now on the radar include Carly Fiorina, the Tea Party and Proposition 23.

There’s a name  that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch.

The New Yorker definitively exposed the gas and oil tycoons known as the Koch brothers. But who are the latest Koch-heads to wear the brand with pride?

•   Carly Fiorina

•   The Tea Party

•   The Proposition 23 campaign

Fiorina: The California Senate candidate recently aligned herself with the dirty-energy brothers by ramping up her courtship of the Tea Party in Northern California and the Central Valley. She also just gave a  mealymouthed endorsement of Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative aimed at killing the state’s climate-change law, known as AB32.

In return, Fiorina is getting some ka-ching from Koch Industries. The company is listed as a host of a  fund-raiser for her at Republican senatorial campaign headquarters in D.C. tomorrow.

Tea Party: The recent New Yorker exposé by Jane Mayer put David and Charles Koch on the political map by uncovering their early and continued funding of Tea Party organizations. In fact, the piece makes a good case that the Kochs invented the Tea Party movement.

Proposition 23: The Kochs’ $1 million contribution to the Prop 23 campaign aligns with their oil interests, and their ferocious denial of global warming. They’re longtime and usually unnamed funders of the climate-change denial industry, according to a Greenpeace report a few months ago.

All of this helps explain why Tea Partiers were out the other day supporting poor little Valero, the Texas company (and owner of two of California’s dirtiest oil refineries) that’s the top funder of Proposition 23.

So the Koch-heads among us are now visible, even if it isn’t always stamped on their foreheads.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.