Sad News This Morning.

I learned something that made me sad this morning.  It was when I read this from Richard Mellon Scaife:

Nothing gives perspective to life so much as death.

Recently, doctors told me I have an untreatable form of cancer.

Some who dislike me may rejoice at this news. Naturally, I can't share their enthusiasm.

For the record, while I have spent a great deal of time over the past few years criticizing both the tone and the content of his paper in general and his editorial page in particular (and I reserve the right to continue to do so), I do NOT rejoice at the news of Mr. Scaife's failing health.

Having lost my father to cancer 7 years ago and my mother to a particularly unforgiving combination of diabetes and congestive heart failure just 3 months ago, death's sting can be particularly piercing to me these days.  Yes, it's a part of life and all that but it's almost always sad when we hear the news that the unavoidable punctuation to the sentence we'd almost always like to have extended by a few more phrases is closer than we'd like.

Very sad, this end that awaits us all.

Whoever he was and whatever he did, Richard Mellon Scaife is someone's partner, someone's friend and someone's father.  They'll all be mourning their loss in one way or another - and it's a loss, I imagine, they'll feel for a long time.  Rejoicing in that loss, rejoicing in the knowledge that people are hurting on that deep a level, is simply inhuman. Selig sind, die da Leid tragen; denn sie sollen getröstet werden.

To Mr. Scaife personally, I'll use this venue to say that I am sorry to hear the news of your untreatable cancer - everything else aside, no one deserves that.

The Right Wing Web. Again.

Mediamatters has an interesting piece up on the latest "blistering new report" on the Benghazi "scandal.

In it they look at the birthers, anti-muslim activists and conspiracy theorists who put together the report.  Who are they?  The Dailymail has some info on that:

The commission, part of the center-right Accuracy In Media group, concluded that the Benghazi attack was a failed kidnapping plot

Ah, Accuracy in Media.  That would be the media watchdog that receives, according to the bridgeproject, 93% of its foundation funding from foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife ($2,640,000 from Sarah Scaife and $1,720,000 from Carthage foundations divided by a total of $4,665,200).

Then there's this from Newsmax:

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton says that had Benghazi happened during the administration of President George W. Bush, the mainstream media "would have been all over him."

Bolton told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV that he marvels at how the Democratic slant on major news stories, like Benghazi, by network news outlets in this country is accepted as the norm.

And:

Bolton's comments come on the eve of the Citizens Commission on Benghazi's announcing its interim findings and new leads on the Sept. 11, 2011, attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that left four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead.

Yea, Newsmax would be the "news" service owned by Clinton Conspiracist Christopher Ruddy and Richard Mellon Scaife.

And of course Bolton has a regular column in Scaife's newspaper.  Here's how he's described at the bottom of a recent column.

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

American Enterprise Institute?  Oh, yea.  They've received $9,811,000 in Scaife money over the years.

Would any of this exist without Scaife's largess?

A History Lesson

An astute reader emailed me the other day with a link to this Mother Jones piece.  It begins thusly:

In a 1995 internal memo, President Bill Clinton's White House Counsel's Office offered an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media mill that Hillary Clinton had dubbed the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Portions of the report, which was reported on by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets at the time, were included in a new trove of documents released to the public by the Clinton presidential library on Friday.

The report traced the evolution of various Clinton scandals, such as Whitewater and the Gennifer Flowers affair allegations, from their origins at conservative think tanks or in British tabloids, until the point in which they entered the mainstream news ecosystem.

They (the White House staffers) even had a name for it: "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce."

Not a big fan of the forced alliteration, but before we get the conspiratorial content, there was something about the fancy phrase that caught my eye.  Chop off the detailing nouns and you get "stream of commerce."
Here's how USLegal.com defines the phrase:

As used in tort law, stream of commerce theory refers to a principle that a person who participates in placing a defective product in the general marketplace is strictly liable for harm caused by the product.

The important part is the phrase "placing a defective product in the general marketplace."

Guess just guess who's prominently featured on that memo from nearly 20 years ago.  Take a look:

Richard Mellon Scaife is in the vanguard of this aforementioned form of this media age political organizing. Scaife uses the $800 million Mellon fortune which he inherited to fund a virtual empire of rightwing newspapers and foundations.These newspapers and foundations, in turn, propagate Scaife's extremist views. Scaife along with a handful of other wealthy individuals and foundations use their power to control the Republican Party's agenda and viewpoints.

And:

The controversy surrounding the death of Vince Foster has been, in large part, the product of a well-financed rightwing conspiracy industry operation. The "Wizard of Oz" figure orchestrating the machinations of the conspiracy industry is a little-known recluse, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife uses his $800 million dollar inherited Mellon fortune to underwrite the Foster conspiracy industry. Scaife promotes the industry through his ownership of a small Pittsburgh newspaper, the Tribune-Review. Scaife's paper, under the direction of reporter Chris Ruddy, continually publishes stories regarding Foster's death.The articles are then reprinted in major newspapers all over the country in the form of paid advertisements.The Western Journalism Center (WJC), a nonprofit conservative think tank, places the stories in these newspapers.The WJC receives much of its financial backing from Scaife.

Scaife is in the vanguard of a new form of political organizing. Wealthy right wing foundations and individuals finance conservative think tanks and non-profits. The think tanks and non-profits promote their benefactor's agendas and viewpoints. The think tanks and non-profits are able to spin their backer's agenda and viewpoints back into the mainstream and control the agenda of the Republican Party.

Scaife uses his financing of the fringe, right wing publications and non-profits to create a communications stream of conspiracy commerce.The stream effectively conveys the rantings of the fringe into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media.Here is how Scaife does it: 1) The right wing publications he owns or helps finance such as the Tribune-Review or American Spectator will do a Foster conspiracy story; 2) The story will then be picked up on the internet; 3) From the internet the story will bounce back into the mainstream media; and 4) From the mainstream media, a Congressional investigatory committee will follow up on the story which, in turn, gives the story even more undeserved legitimacy.

That was true in 1995 and it's just as true today.

And it's interesting to note that reporting of this story has found its way onto the pages of Scaife's Tribune-Review.  But look at the byline: Bloomberg News. Take a look:

Scaife, the newspaper publisher and Mellon fortune heir, is the central player identified in the dossier. He is singled out for sowing doubt about whether White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster committed suicide and for his financial backing of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican organizations.

“Scaife uses his financing of the fringe, right-wing publications and non-profits to create a communications stream of conspiracy commerce,” the author, who isn't identified, wrote. “The stream effectively conveys the rantings of the fringe into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media.”

 Yea, if Scaife was signing my checks, I wouldn't want to write that either.

By the way, Vince Foster committed suicide.  No less a screaming liberal than Ken Starr said so:

An exhaustive three-year investigation by the office of Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr has reaffirmed previous findings that White House deputy counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. commited suicide.

The report concludes that Foster was severely depressed about his work at the White House, took a revolver from a closet in his home, placed it in an oven mitt, and on the afternoon of July 20, 1993, drove to a Virginia park and shot himself. And it contains new forensic details that refute the conspiracy theories that have long surrounded his death – that Foster was a victim of foul play, or that his body was moved to Fort Marcy Park after his death at another location, perhaps the White House.

And where did many of those conspiracy theories come from?  Scaife's communication stream of conspiracy commerce.

But don't delude yourself that the stream's dried up (to continue the riverly metaphor).  For example, The Western Journalism Center is reporting on the recent Bundy lawlessness in Nevada:

After the federal Bureau of Land Management agents backed down from their intimidating stance at the Bundy Ranch last weekend, ample evidence has surfaced indicating the standoff between the government and the Nevada ranching family is far from over. Throughout the weeklong stalemate, members of the Bundy family were physically assaulted by armed officers, numerous cows were shot dead, and protesters faced threats of gunfire for merely expressing their outrage.

Immediately after what many considered a victory against a tyrannical federal agency, a number of leftist voices – most notably, Sen. Harry Reid – indicated the action against this family will continue.

In response, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman sent a letter to Barack Obama, Department of the Interior Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM Director Neil Kornze, laying out his position that any such action by the agency would violate the U.S. Constitution.

So one rancher in Nevada effectively steals a million dollars worth of grazing time from the guv'ment, refuses to pay up when caught, threatens the guv'ment agents sent to implement a court order and they're the ones violating the Constitution.

Only in the Scaife' funded fringe.

Thanks, Dick.

I Guess We Gotta Keep Doing This

From today's Tribune-Review:

Laurel: To Jake Haulk. The Allegheny Institute for Public Policy boss pulls no punches in a post about Pittsburgh Public Schools: “(T)he poor academic performance and the high rates of absenteeism” (well over 40 percent, on average, at the high school level) “point to the same thing — a failed public school system.” He takes to task those who continue to think the “solution” is to throw more money at the problem. Anyone ready to listen yet? [Bolding in original.]

We've done this blog post a number of times before.  But Scaife's braintrust still keeps hiding the financial entanglements that connect their boss with the subject of their praise.

So we'll have to do it for them, I guess.

According to the data found at the Bridge Project, The Allegheny Institute for Public Policy has received $6,484,200 in foundation support and $5.801,000 of that comes from three foundations (The Allegheny, Carthage, and Sarah Scaife Foundations) controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, owner of the Tribune-Review.

For those who don't have calculators handy, that's means that 89.46% of the total financial support the Allegheny Institute receives from foundations, it receives from one guy - the owner of the paper whose op-ed page just praised the Institute's president.

There's more.  According to the Trib, Haulk also sits on the board of the Lincoln Institute for Public Opinion Research.  And according to the data found at the Bridge Project, the Lincoln Institute has received $1,482,500 in foundation support and $980,000 of that comes from the above mentioned Allegheny Foundation.  That's 68.62%, by the way.

I am sure Jake Haulk is a very nice guy.  I am sure he's very smart, accomplished, respected and so on, but considering the above, I have to ask myself, "How prominent of an economic pundit would he have been without Scaife's largess?"

Now go back to today's op-ed praise by Scaife's braintrust and ask yourself that same question.

This is how the right wing noise machine works.

Brent Bozell, Eric Heyl, and The Tribune-Review

You may have missed this from Jim Romenesko this past week:

The conservative Media Research Center often urges liberal news outlets to TELL THE TRUTH, but the Reston, VA-based press watchdog isn’t telling the truth about its own leader: Brent Bozell doesn’t write the syndicated column that appears under his byline.

It is longtime MRC media analysis director Tim Graham who writes “almost everything published under [Bozell's] name,” a former MRC employee tells me in an email. “That includes his weekly column. Same goes for his books, which at least carry Graham’s name in a secondary billing, but also aren’t written by Bozell (but Bozell keeps 80-90% of the advance and all profits!)”

Two other people with ties to MRC confirmed that Graham is Bozell’s ghostwriter – and that Graham is not happy with the assignment. [Emphasis added.]

The Daily Beast has a follow-up:

Employees at the MRC were never under any illusion that Bozell had been writing his own copy. “It’s an open secret at the office that Graham writes Bozell’s columns, and has done so for years,” said one former employee. In fact, a former MRC employee went so far as to tell The Daily Beast: “I know for a fact that Bozell didn’t even read any of the drafts of his latest book until after it had been sent to the publishers.”

The Graham-Bozell relationship can best displayed in this book talk for the book that the two nominally co-authored in 2008, Whitewash. At an event at the National Press Club, Bozell gives an introductory speech but then has Graham come up to take questions.

It's bad enough that the head of the a conservative media watchdog is being charged with, in effect, lying to his readers - all the while screaming for the rest of the media to "TELL THE TRUTH" but there's more to this.

It's here in Romenesko's story.  A defense of Bozell was given to Romenesko when his third MRC confirmation:

...defended the practice of “people signing off on agreeable words written for them.” He asked me: “How many speeches has Obama written the last ten years? Should he have prefaced the State of the Union with ‘My fellow Americans – I didn’t write this?’

Here's the interesting part.  It's the next two paragraphs:

I asked Pittsburgh Tribune-Review colunnist and National Society of Newspaper Columnists president Eric Heyl about this remark. He said:

“The argument that the columnist should be allowed to use a ghostwriter because the president has speechwriters is as limp as pasta left overnight in boiling water. The comparison is ludicrous. The columnist doesn’t have to spend much of his time dealing with a dysfunctional Congress or fretting over Iran’s nuclear program.”

See that?  Trib columnist Eric Heyl is quoted rejecting that defense of Bozell's ghostwriter.  I wonder if Romenesko knows that Bozell has had some columns published in the very same paper that Eric Heyl writes for?

That would be the Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Revue, (as if you didn't already know where I am taking this) and that's where Brent Bozell had a (ghostwritten, it seems) column published as recently as this past Christmas Eve.

I wonder of Romenesko knows that?  I also wonder if he knows that Richard Mellon Scaife, by way of the foundations he controls, has given $3.7 million to Bozell's Media Research Center or how that's a little more than a fifth of the MRC's total foundation support.

So why is this such a big deal?  For that I'll turn to a former National Society of Newspaper Columnists president, P-G columnist Samantha Bennett.  to be clear, she's no longer an NSNC officer and she's not speaking for the NSNC.  This is her own opinion:

I didn't know about the ghostwriter allegation; I don't read Bozell. Or his ghostwriter. I don't know whether it's true or not. But I do believe it's a serious breach of ethics for any columnist of any stripe to put his name on stuff he didn't write. If you wrote it, own it. If you are a celebrity or "face" of a cause, write your own damn diatribes/marketing/agitprop/whatever or give credit to the person who does. Everybody knows corporate CEOs and presidents have speechwriters, but Mike Royko, Maureen Dowd, Dave Barry, Ernie Pyle, Erma Bombeck, Ellen Goodman and all other professional columnists string their own words and ideas together or suffer terrible consequences. You get drummed out of the corps for violating that code. And rightly so. Readers trust you. You can't lie to them.

It looks like Brent Bozell was lying to his readers on the pages of Scaife's Tribune-Review after his Media Research Center received $300,000 from the Scaife-controlled Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2011.

Any comments, Mr Heyl?

Refuting Spakovsky Who's "Refuting" Mediamatters

This'll be kinda circular so bear with me for a while.

In today's Tribune-Review my good friends on the [board who decides these things] decided to give Hans A. Von Spakovsky some space in (as the headline puts it):

Refuting (not rebutting) Media Matters
But with the usual misplacement of some very pertinent information (a practice so prevalent on the Trib editorial page), he does neither.

Hans begins:

Media Matters, the self-styled “media watchdog” of the left, has accused the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review of using “deceptive numbers” to “attack” immigration reform. But the Trib is exactly right when it says that the Obama administration is not committed to border enforcement and cannot be trusted to implement a comprehensive immigration reform plan.

The criticisms voiced by Media Matters are way off base — particularly their claims about so-called “secret numbers” from The Heritage Foundation and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

Of course he leaves out how much money the owner of the paper's given to those two fine organizations. Here, let me help you with that:

•  The Center for Immigration Studies has recieved a total of $11,476,000 in foundation money over the years with 17% of it ($1,947,5000) coming from two foundations (Sarah Scaife and Carthage) controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife.  Indeed in the first decade of records found at the bridge project (1991,2001), Scaife's foundations gave about 66% of the total foundational support.  I think that's called "seed money" but I could be wrong.
• We all know about how much Scaife's sent to the Heritage Foundation.  A this point, Heritage has received $109,986,558 in foundation money with about 25% ($27,944,000) coming from three Scaife foundations (Allegheny, Carthage and Sarah Scaife).  In the first decade of Heritage numbers found at the Bridge Project (1985-1995), Scaife's foundations gave almost exactly half of the foundation money given to Heritage ($12,439,000 out of $25,138,677).  Again, seed money.

But that's old stuff.  While its omission invalidates anything that follows, still let's move on.  This is how the Media Matters posting Von Spakovsky found so offensive begins:

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review cited deceptive statistics from the Heritage Foundation to attack the immigration reform effort, falsely claiming that the Obama administration is not enforcing current laws and arguing that it would continue this practice under a comprehensive immigration reform law.

A December 15 editorial by the Tribune-Review cited a post by the Heritage Foundation to claim that "the deportation of illegal aliens, in fact, has sunk to its lowest level in 40 years" and that the Department of Homeland Security has accepted 81 percent of 580,000 applicants for provisional legal status under a program called the Deferred Act of Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The Tribune-Review argued that these numbers show that the Obama administration is not committed to border enforcement and therefore should not be trusted to roll out a comprehensive immigration reform plan.

But the Tribune-Review's analysis should be taken with a grain of salt since its Heritage Foundation numbers come from "secret numbers" obtained by the anti-immigrant nativist Center for Immigration Studies, which is known for fabricating information and pushing misleading studies.

Let's start with that "secret numbers" link since Von Spakovsky mentions it specifically.  It leads to this paragraph in this piece at the Washington Times:

Authorities deported fewer illegal immigrants in fiscal 2013 than at any time since President Obama took office, according to secret numbers obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies that suggest Mr. Obama’s nondeportation policies have hindered removals.

Just 364,700 illegal immigrants were removed in fiscal 2013, according to internal numbers from U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement that CIS released Wednesday — down 11 percent from the nearly 410,000 who were deported in 2012.

And here's that report from CIS - and I'll ask, where do you think the Washington Times came up with the phrase "secret numbers"?  Here:

The report also presents previously unpublished statistics disclosing the startlingly large number of cases on ICE’s post-final-order docket of aliens who have been ordered removed, but who remain living here in defiance of immigration enforcement.

Now let's go back to how Hans pumped up the charge against Media Matters:

...particularly their claims about so-called “secret numbers” from The Heritage Foundation and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

He wants you to think that the charge of "secret numbers" came from Media Matters when it was actually from the Washington Times piece dutifully describing the very CIS "research" he's trying to defend.

Didn't he think someone would check?

Then there's Von Spakovsky's next charge:

Media Matters accused CIS of “fabricating information.”

But then he rebuts the charge by citing the very same Washington Times piece we've just been talking about.  The point being, he had to know about how they were the exact source of the "secret numbers" phrase and yet still decided not to tell you.

But let's look back at that "fabricating information" charge.  When and how did Media Matters say it?  What context?  It's in a sentence discrediting CIS in general - it's not about the specific charge Von Spakovsky attempts to rebut with the Washington Times piece.  The link at Media Matters leads to this PDF from the Center for New Community where we can read this description of CIS from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

CIS often manipulates data, relying on shaky statistics or faulty logic to come to the preordained conclusion that immigration is bad for this country.

That sentence is from this page at SPLC.  Here's an example of why the SPLC thinks CIS "fabricates information":

"Hello, I Love You, Won't You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage Phenomenon" (November 2008). This report alleges widespread fraud among marriages between American citizens and foreigners, but then goes on to admit that "there is no way of knowing" just how prevalent marriage fraud is because there is no systematic data. CIS even concedes that most marriages "between Americans and foreign nationals are legitimate." Then, based on this non-data, CIS gets to what seems to be the real point of its study — "if small-time con artists and Third-World gold-diggers can obtain green cards with so little resistance, then surely terrorists can." Fraudulent marriage applications, CIS concludes, are "prevalent among international terrorists, including members of Al-Qaeda. [Bolding in original.]

So much unmentioned by Von Spakovsky...kinda makes you wonder who's fabricating what information for which purpose.

Dig A Little, Find A Nugget

Take a look at this from today's Tribune-Review:

Contrary to President Obama's statements, ObamaCare hardly is “settled” and “here to stay,” as it faces numerous legal challenges in federal courts — including one that questions the constitutionality of its passage.

Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now before the D.C. Court of Appeals, “a traditional stepping-stone to the U.S. Supreme Court,” The Washington Free Beacon reports.

We've seen this before, haven't we?  You do know where I'm going with this, don't you?

That's right, the Sissel case.  Where did it come from?

Here:

In early 2010, the federal government enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Act), which forces every American to purchase government - approved health insurance coverage, or pay a fine. This legal requirement to buy health insurance is known as the “individual mandate,” and it is the target of a federal lawsuit filed by Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) on behalf of Iowa entrepreneur Matt Sissel. [Emphasis added.]

The Pacific Legal Foundation describes itself as:

Established in1973, Pacific Legal Foundation is the oldest and most successful public interest legal organization that fights for limited government, property rights, individual rights and a balanced approach to environmental protection.

And:

Pacific Legal Foundation is devoted to a vision of individual freedom, responsible government, and color-blind justice.

And so on.

Now let's talk money.  According to the Bridgeproject,The Pacific Legal Foundation has received $12,089,270 in foundation money since 1985.  Of that 12 million, more than a third ($4.355 million or 36%) came from foundations controlled by the editor and publisher of the Tribune-Review, Richard Mellon Scaife.  Interestingly enough, for the first decade after 1985, Scaife was responsible for an even larger percentage of PLF funding.  In that decade, the PLF received $2.112 million in foundation money and a solid 70% ($1.48 million) came from Carthage and Sarah Scaife foundations.

Such solid financial connections between the Scaife foundations and the legal foundation his newspaper is discussing.  And yet no discussion of any of those connections.

 This is how the right wing noise machine works.

More On David Horowitz And The Trib

Yea, we all know where this one's going.

Take a look at this from Eric Heyl and The Trib:

Conservative writer David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a California think tank, and the editor of FrontPage Magazine. Horowitz spoke to the Trib regarding the publication last week of the first volume of a planned 10-book series, “The Black Book of the American Left.”

As I said, we all know where this one's going.

Completely unmentioned in this interview with Horowitz are the millions upon millions of dollars the three foundations (Allegheny, Carthage and Sarah Scaife Foundations) controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife have poured into the coffers of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

How much, you ask?

According to the Bridgeproject, upwards of $7.7 million.  That's out of about $21.4 million of total foundation money listed.  It's more than a third of all the foundation money Horowitz has gotten over the years.  More than a third from the owner of the paper that's interviewing him for this puff piece.

Regardless of what's actually said in the interview, the omission of such a detail effectively erases any credibility it has.

It's been a while since I've written this, but it still holds: the circle jerk continues.

Ah...What We Find, When We Dig.

From today's Tuesday Takes:

The prospects for reining in the Obama administration's out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency are brighter because the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether it has overstepped the authority to regulate “greenhouse gases” it was granted by the justices in 2007's Massachusetts v. EPA .

You'll note, of course, that the irony quotes are there for a reason.  But that's not what we're here for.  Scaife's braintrust does the usual "liberal EPA overstep" dance blah-blah-blah.  But let's take a look at what the Supreme Court actually said:

12-1146 ) UTILITY AIR REGULATORY GROUP V. EPA
12-1248 ) AM. CHEMISTRY COUNCIL, ET AL. V. EPA, ET AL.
12-1254 ) ENERGY-INTENSIVE MANUFACTURERS V. EPA, ET AL.
12-1268 ) SOUTHEASTERN LEGAL FOUNDATION V. EPA, ET AL.
12-1269 ) TEXAS, ET AL. V. EPA, ET AL.
12-1272 ) CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, ET AL. V. EPA, ET AL.

The petitions for writs of certiorari are granted limited to the following question: “Whether EPA permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases.” The cases are consolidated and a total of one hour is allotted for oral argument.

You'll note that nestled warmly among all the pro-business groups challenging the EPA in the list of cases to be consolidated is something called the "Southeastern Legal Foundation."

Guess who's given more than 58% of all the foundational support to the Southeastern Legal Foundation?

That's right, Tribune-Review owner Richard Mellon Scaife.

According to the Bridgeproject, the Southeastern Legal Foundation has received a total of $3.817 million dollars from various foundations over the years.  $2.225 million of which has come from either the Sarah Scaife or Carthage foundations, both controlled by Tribune-Review owner Richard Mellon Scaife.  Unless my math is wrong, that's a tad more than 58% of the total.

Hmmm...so a legal foundation's challenge to the EPA has made it to the Supreme Court and a conservative editorial board cheers them on - all with no mention whatsoever of the millions that their boss has funneled to it.

Ah, the things you find when you dig, just a little.

Bad News For RM Scaife

We all know how embedded Richard Mellon Scaife is with the Heritage Foundation.  The owner of the Tribune-Review is vice chairman of the board of trustees and his foundations have given wads of sweaty money (at least $24 million worth) to that venerable rightwing think tank.

But yesterday, Senator Orrin Hatch called them out:


The important part:

Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans and helping conservatives and helping us to be able to have the best intellectual conservative ideas. There's a real question on the minds of many Republicans now, and I'm not just thinking for myself, for a lot of people - is Heritage going to go so political that it doesn't amount to anything anymore? I hope not. I'm going to try to help survive and do well. But right now I think it's in danger of losing its clout and its power around Washington, DC.

Uh-oh.

So what's Scaife's braintrust gonna now do with Orrin?  Only last August they praised him for this speech on the Senate Floor.

Like the rest of the GOP's internal arguments, this'll be fun to watch.

The Trib Covers A Source.

Yes, they're still at it.

From today's Tribune-Review editorial page:

The left and “progressives” love to blame wage stagnation on greedy businesses wanting to gobble a larger share of the pie. But it's actually a product of businesses' uncertainty about taxes, regulations and employee-benefit costs — which the Obama administration has exacerbated.

Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the nonpartisan, free-market Institute for Policy Innovation (ipi.org), notes...

Regardless of what Mr Matthews actually said regarding wages, take a look at how Scaife's braintrust characterizes the IPI -  "nonpartisan" and "free-market."

Really?  Nonpartisan? Let's go take a look.

Back in October, 2012, American Enterprise Institute scholar J. D. Kleinke published a piece in the New York Times called "The Conservative Case for Obamacare" and for that he was, according to Forbes.com "pilloried" by what they call "Conservative policy experts."

Among them:

Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation: “The fundamental philosophical difference is that liberals do not think the free market can work in health care and so the government must make it work. Conservatives think the free market has never been tried. Kleinke is clearly in the former camp and is thus making the liberal, not the conservative, case for ObamaCare.” [Bolding in original.]

In 2002 the Capital Research Center, a conservative think-tank that is itself the beneficiary of almost $5.3 million of Scaife foundation money over the years rated the Institute for Policy Innovation as an "8" on a "1 to 8"/"Left to Right"scale.

And since we mentioned the Scaife money, how much has this "nonpartisan" think tank received from foundations controlled by my good friend Richard Mellon Scaife?

Of the $2 million or so it's received from various foundations, the IPI got about a quarter of that ($470,000) from The Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations.

Finally, if the place were so "nonpartisan" why would TeaParty Senator Ted Cruz be a part of its 25th Anniversary gala?

Nonpartisan?  Not even close.

The Trib's Climate Strawman Argument

Before proceeding, we gotta answer the question, "What's a strawman argument?"

Here's an answer:

A straw man argument is one that misrepresents a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, refutes this misrepresentation of the position, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted.

So. How has Scaife's braintrust on the editorial board of the Tribune-Review committed that local fallacy today?

Take a look:

A funny thing happened on the way to Obama & Co.'s “grassroots” effort claiming “climate change” is wreaking all manner of weather havoc. The website wattsupwiththat.com notes that we typically have about 1,200 tornadoes by this time each year. But this year, there have been only about 720 reported twisters. What's a climate clucker to do? [Bolding in original]

Their point only makes sense if ""wreaking all manner of weather havoc" includes an increase in the number of tornadoes.  Meaning that if the "climate cluckers" are saying that climate change will increase the number of tornadoes while the number of tornadoes has actually decreased, then there'd be a problem, right?

Too bad that's not the "climate cluckers" argument.  How do I know?

From the IPCC report:

Although some evidence is available regarding increases in the intensity and frequency of some extreme weather events, it is not yet clear how tornadoes will be affected.

And according to wunderground, this has been the position of the IPCC since 2007.

Um, guys?  Do you even bother to do any independent research before writing your editorials?  Merely echoing stuff you find on science denial websites does not constitute adequate research and you're deceiving your readership by doing so.

Some More Trib Climate Mendacity

From a few days ago at the Trib:

Mr. Obama warns that the climate today is warming at an accelerated rate — “faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago” — and that the future “is going to depend on our willingness to deal with something we may not be able to see or smell.”

On the contrary, the smell of what's he's spreading around is quite distinctive.

At a recent Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, a panel of five scientists were asked twice whether they stood by the president's assessment, The Heritage Foundation reports. Their initial response?

Silence.

I fear I risk alienating my audience out of sheer repetition by pointing out that here's yet another example of Richard Mellon Scaife's editorial board citing The Heritage Foundation with no mention of the millions upon millions of Scaife foundation dollars he's simply drenched it with.

So let's move on to the argument itself.  Here's what the president said (it was at a DCCC fundraiser at the home of Paul and Bettylu Saltzman):

We still have a situation in which, on the one hand, our energy future is more promising than we’ve ever allowed ourselves to believe. We will probably be a net exporter of traditional fossil fuels over the next 20 years -- within the next 20 years, probably a net exporter of natural gas in the next three or four years -- something that could not be imagined even five, 10 years ago -- because of the dynamism and technology that America has produced.

But the flipside is we also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago, and that the future of Bettylu’s grandkids, in part, is going to depend on our willingness to deal with something that we may not be able to see or smell the way you could when the Chicago River was on fire, or at least could have caught on fire, but is in some ways more serious, more fundamental. [Emphasis added.]

So far, so good. At least Scaife's braintrust didn't take those words out of context.  They said he said the earth was warming faster than anticipated.  And he did say that.

But is that true?

Well, according to this article at the Scientific American, it is:

Over the past decade scientists thought they had figured out how to protect humanity from the worst dangers of climate change. Keeping planetary warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) would, it was thought, avoid such perils as catastrophic sea-level rise and searing droughts. Staying below two degrees C would require limiting the level of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million (ppm), up from today's 395 ppm and the preindustrial era's 280 ppm.

Now it appears that the assessment was too optimistic. The latest data from across the globe show that the planet is changing faster than expected.

Or this article from The Atlantic:

A new report from the International Energy Agency says global temperatures will rise twice as fast as projected if countries don't act to slash their admissions soon. Released this morning, the IEA report shows carbon diaoxide from energy emissions rose 1.4 percent globally last year, a new record, and puts the world on pace for a 5.3 degree Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in global temperatures by 2020 if new steps aren't taken. In 2010, a UN summit agreed the goal would be to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees by 2020.

But take a look at what's being said: the planet's warming is happening faster than anticipated.

Now look at how Scaife's braintrust tries to debunk what the president said:

“There is little or no observational evidence that severe weather of any type has worsened over the last 30, 50 or 100 years, irrespective of whether any changes could be blamed on human activities anyway,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama, according to a Heritage report.[Emphasis added.]

While the president (and the IEA and Scientific American) was talking about rising temperatures, Climate model skeptic and evolution denier Dr. Spencer is talking about severe weather.  Here's what he said in his Senate testimony:

There is little or no observational evidence that severe weather of any type has worsened over the last 30, 50, or 100 years, irrespective of whether any such changes could be blamed on human activities, anyway. Long-term measurements of droughts, floods, strong tornadoes, hurricanes, severe thunderstormsetc. all show no obvious trends, but do show large variability from one decade to the next, or even one year to the next. While the 2003 heat wave in France and the 2010 heat wave in Russia were exceptional, so were the heat waves of the 1930s in the U.S., which cannot b e blamed on our greenhouse gas emissions.[Emphases added.]

Now, what does he say about global warming in general? Does he deny it?

No, not really:

My overall view of the influence of humans on climate is that we probably are having some influence, but it is impossible to know with any level of certainty how much influence. The difficulty in determining the human influence on climate arises from several sources: (1) weather and climate vary naturally, and by amounts that are not currently being exceeded; (2) global warming theory is just that – based upon theory; and (3) there is no unique fingerprint of human caused global warming.

My belief that some portion of recent warming is due to humans is based upon my faith in at least some portion of the theory: that the human contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations has resulted in an es timated 1% reduction in the Earth’s ability to cool to outer space, and so some level of warming can be expected to occur from that change.

Funny how that part didn't make it into what the braintrust wrote.

But the larger point is the subject change.  As I wrote a few paragraphs above, Obama's talking temperature and the braintrust counters with hurricanes and tornadoes.  And the guy they cite to make that counter actually does believe that the planet is warming up.

And anyway, did you know that there were two 5-expert panels at that hearing?  Scaife's braintrust and Scaife's Heritage Foundation only mention one.  On the other panel, we can find another climate expert, a Dr. Heidi Cullen who is Chief Climatologist at Climate Central, saying this:

Ongoing research (Francis and Vavrus, 2012; Petoukhov et al., 2013) suggests a possible mechanism for the increasing extremes we are beginning to see . Specifically, by changing the temperature balance between the Arctic and mid latitudes, rapid Arctic warming is altering the course of the jet stream, which is responsible for steering weather systems from west to east around the globe . The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, due to a combination of human emissions of greenhouse gases and unique feedbacks built into the Arctic climate system. According to this new research, the jet stream is becoming “wavier,” with steeper troughs and ridges. Weather systems are moving more slowly, increasing the chances for long duration extreme events, like droughts, floods, and heat waves. The tendency for weather to get stuck in one pattern is going to favor extreme weather.

Funny how that never made it into what the braintrust wrote, either.

It was said at the hearing, right?  It was spoken to the Senate committe, right?  So why didn't the braintrust bother telling you about it?  My guess is that since it doesn't fit into the reality they want you to accept, they don't think you need to know about it.

Same story, different day.

No, HERE'S The Reality

My friends, the braintrust is misleading you.  Again.

This time it's about the sequester:

For all the hand-wringing over the big, bad sequestration, most of the worst fallout predicted by pols never occurred. The Washington Post reminds that prison guards and FBI agents weren't furloughed. Americans didn't get stuck at border crossings. And hundreds of thousands of low-income women and children didn't go hungry.

That last line's an obvious distract because as the Washington Post pointed out last February:

Most mandatory programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, and in particular low-income programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, or welfare) and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) were exempt from the sequester.

Back then, the Post did point out (in the next sentence, by the way) that:

...some low-income programs, most notably aid for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), are subject to cuts.

However when we look at the Post article (or even the Heritage Foundation blog post) the braintrust references we don't find ANY mention of WIC.

Um, so since, say, food stamps were exempt from the sequester, isn't it kinda misleading to imply that the sequester ain't so bad because women and children didn't go hungry because of it?

On the other hand the Washington Post article they reference does point out one of the reasons why the predictions of the Obama administration didn't occur:

So many predictions fell short because, in recent months, the administration and Congress did what was supposed to be impossible: They undid many of sequestration’s scariest reductions. In the process, this supposedly ironclad budget cut — ostensibly immune to political maneuvering — became a symbol of the reality that nothing in Washington is beyond politics.

So some of the details of the sequester have been changed by the Congress and the Administration in reaction to the reality of the budget cuts in order to lessen their impact.  Huh.  So let me ask you: Did you get any indication of that in reading the Braintrust's editorial?

No?  Me neither.

Don't you think it should have been in there, if only to present a clearer picture of reality?

Yea.  Me, too.

Distorting reality for the sake of pushing a political agenda - not much of a surprise, really, coming from the editorial board of the Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review.

Um...Irony? I'm Not Sure

Take a look at this Sunday Pop found on the pages of the Richard Mellon Scaife-owned Tribune-Review:

The speaker of the California Assembly says he's “deeply concerned about media outlets being purchased to further a political agenda.” John Perez is referring to speculation that billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, economic conservatives and social libertarians, are considering buying the Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers. Never mind that the L.A. Times has been furthering the far-left political agenda for decades. [Bolding in original]

Never mentioned: The Tribune-Review is also owned by another billionaire who's also an economic conservative/social libertarian who's also using his ownership of some other media outlets to further a political agenda.

Huh.  You think someone would notice a pattern.

The Commonweath Foundation

Found in The Nation:

The Commonwealth Foundation, a right-wing think tanks in Harrisburg, is plotting to go after public sector employee unions. In a letter from Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) on behalf of the Foundation, the think tank announced “Project Goliath,” a new effort to make Pennsylvania the next Wisconsin or Michigan. The Commonwealth Foundation is one of a fifty-nine-state network of similar think tanks that have vastly expanded since 2009. The letter makes clear that conservatives believe that right-wing political infrastructure—the organizing institutes, the partisan media outlets, the rapid response efforts—has helped turn the tide against labor unions.

The piece posts (and quotes) the letter and you can read it for yourself here.

There's something I want to add to the piece (but this isn't a criticism of the writers reporting - he was looking at a particular section of the story and so there's no reason he had to include anything else).  If it's a warning for PA residents about an upcoming effort by the legislature to undermine the state's labor unions, then we can probably expect to see some reporting about it by the Tribune-Review.

And if Toomey's letter lauds the Commonwealth Foundation (a right-wing think tanks in Harrisburg) and if the Trib covers the story in some way, then we want to get out front to point out (yet again) Trib owber Richard Mellon Scaife's financial connections to the Commonwealth Foundation.

Check out this page from the Bridge Project.  It lists all the foundational support given to Commonwealth.  By my math and at this time it adds up to a little over $6.6 million dollars (unadjusted for inflation from 1988 to 2011).  Of that foundations controlled by Scaife make up more than a third ($2.5 million out of $6.6 million).  In fact, in the first five years of foundation support all but $25,000 of it came from foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife ($450K out of $475K).  In the first ten Scaife's foundations constituted about 57% of all the foundational support ($900K out of about $1.6 million).

The fun part is to look at Toomey's letter itself or more specifically the Commonwealth document attached to it.  Included in the letter are some accolades about the Commonweath Foundation from some other conservative think tanks.  There's praise from:

• Cato Institute ($2.4 million in Scaife money)
• Competitive Enterprise Institute ($3.6 million in Scaife money)

So whenever the Trib starts reporting on the Commonwealth Foundation's efforts (or the legislature's efforts spawned from it) to pass any sort of "right to work" legislation, we should keep in mind the millions Scaife's already spent on it.

Another Reason Not To Trust The Braintrust

Scaife's Tribune-Review today published an op-ed explaining

Why states should say “No” to ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.

As part of their argument, they use some research from a well-known think tank:

An analysis by Grace-Marie Turner of the nonprofit Galen Institute (funded in part by the pharmaceutical and medical industries) provides some insights.

Ha.  You see where this is going, don't you?

According to The Bridge Project, PhRMA (the trade group representing the above mentioned "pharmaceutical and medical industries") has given $101,125 (adjusted for inflation, $107,913.74) to the Galen Institute from 2008 to 2010.

Don't get me wrong, it's good to point out that Galen's received some financial support from the industry it is, in turn, supporting with it's own research.  But do I need to point out that over a longer period of time (1998 to 2011) the Galen Institute's received even more money, $480,000 (adjusted for inflation, $569,978) from the Sarah Scaife Foundation?

The same foundation controlled by the owner of the paper publishing the op-ed?

Why qualify the story by pointing out that PhRMA money supports, in part, the Galen Institute while ignoring the much larger pile of money (by the way, that's about 4.78 times as large unadjusted or about 5.28 times as large adjusted for inflation) channeled to Galen by a Scaife Foundation?

Or maybe the answer is obvious.

CPAC Underwriting

Did you know that the Conservative Political Action Conference is going on this weekend?

You did?

That's nice.  Wanna know how much Scaife money is intertwined at there?

Ok, here's what I did.  I started from this page and then cross referenced it with the info at this page and this page and then I limited the data to only that which was available in the last ten years or so (everything from 2003 to be specific) and this is what I found.

For the various sponsors and exhibitors I found, the Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations have given a total of $32 million.  Here's the breakdown:

• Accuracy In Media ($750,000 from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• American Enterprise Institute ($4.225 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• America's Survival ($1.115 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Capital Research Center ($1.945 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Center for Security Policy ($2.66 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Competitive Enterprise Institute ($2.45 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• David Horowitz Freedom Center ($2.35 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Foundation for Individual Rights ($1.025 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Heartland Inst ($75,000 from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Heritage Foundation ($6.6 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Independent Women's Forum ($850,000 from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Intercollegiate Studies Institute ($3.125 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Judicial Watch ($1.15 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• Media Research Center ($2.7 million from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• National TaxPayers Union ($595,000 from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)
• NumbersUSA ($525,000 from Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations)

And again, that just represents just some of the money (from 2003) that's gone to some of the conservative organizations at CPAC.

So when the Tribune-Review decides to reprint, say, the Washington Post's coverage of Mitt Romney at CPAC, just remember how much money the Trib's owner has shuffled off to the various organizations supporting the conference.

It's Been A While, My Friends...

I haven't done one of these sorts of posts in a while but here goes.

This weekend the Tribune-Review published an interview with columnist Eric Heyl.  It begins like this:

Carl Meacham is director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. He spoke to the Trib about what Cuban President Raul Castro's recently announced plan to step down when his term ends in 2018 means to Cuba and the United States.

We have to wonder about the "non-partisan" nature of this foreign policy think tank when, according to The Bridge Project a majority of its foundational support came from one source (well three Scaife controlled sources; the Allegheny, Sarah Scaife, and Carthage Foundations)

According to that website between 1985 and 2011, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, received a total of $19,786, 480 dollars (unadjusted for inflation) from about a dozen foundations.  Of that total, about 54% or about $10,743,000 came from those Scaife Foundations ($400k from Allegheny, $10.15 million from Sarah Scaife and $195K from Carthage).

And yet, Eric Heyl, columnist employed by uber-conservative Richard Mellon Scaife at the Scaife owned Tribune-Review didn't see fit to tell you of his boss's financial entanglements with the "non-partisan" think tank.

The Right Wing noise machine noises on...

Fact-Checking Keith Rothfus On The "Cell Phone Giveaway"

Today's Tribune-Review published this commentary on the upcoming sequester from the tea-party pen of the newly elected representative from Pennsylvania's 12th district,  Keith Rothfus.

And he gets just a few facts wrong on his list:

Our federal government will spend more than $3.7 trillion this year. Replacing the sequester requires finding $84 billion in smart cuts to that budget. Here are a few things we could eliminate to begin replacing the sequester:

• $2.2 billion by ending the federal government's cellphone giveaway

What he's describing is something that's popped up recently (quite coincidentally, I am sure) on another of Richard Mellon Scaife's media holdings, Newsmax:

Nearly half of the 6 million people who received free cellphones and communications services through the government-funded Lifeline program last year apparently were ineligible or did not respond to certification requests, a new report shows.

The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion on the program last year alone, reports The Wall Street Journal, which conducted a review of the program's funding.

The only problem with this is that eliminating the program won't save the gov'ment any money. Here's why (and this is from the WSJ piece referenced above):

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren't cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer.

Factcheck already has something on this program:

Lifeline is funded by telecom customers who pay a universal service fee as part of their phone bills. The fee technically is not a tax but a cross subsidy, the rules of which are determined by the Federal Communications Commission.

And:

As we explained [in 2009], the FCC requires phone companies to fund “universal service” programs such as Lifeline that improve telecommunications access to all Americans. The companies pass the cost along to consumers in the form of a universal service fee, which is listed on a monthly phone bill.

The fees go into the Universal Service Fund, which is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company, an independent, not-for-profit corporation. USAC manages Lifeline and three other programs that provide telecommunications services to rural areas, schools, libraries and places where it’s more expensive to provide access.

And:

Lifeline does not “give away” “government phones.” The program reimburses phone companies with a monthly subsidy of $9.25 for each low-income customer who uses a landline or a cell phone.

So however leaky the program is, eliminating it would not reduce guv'ment debt in anyway - it would only reduce everyone's cellphone bill by a little bit AND reduce access to the global telecommunications network  by poor people a lot.  But it won't reduce the debt.

That's something Keith Rothfus got wrong.