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Banned
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Liberal vs. Conservative Benefactors and their Agendas how is G.Soros More Troubling?
I started a thread a couple of days ago:
<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=130666">Iraq War False Statements By Month Chart of 935 False Statements by 7 Admin Officials</a>
The oppostion argument to the "False Statements" presentation, was based on an Investors Business Daily Editorial that dismissed the study, the chart, and the search capability for retrieving the 935 statements and who said them, because, the IBD editorial stated:
Quote:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/e...86069773455153
Journalism's Lazy Lie Protectors
....The so-called Center For Public Integrity is a "non-profit" funded by the profits of left-wing billionaire George Soros. It also gets foundation support from the Heinz Endowments, chaired by Teresa Heinz, wife of Democratic Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
You'd think that in a presidential campaign year, a "study" by an organization propped up with money from someone who contributed more to defeat George W. Bush than anyone, plus cash from the wife of the man who ran against Bush in 2004, would be treated skeptically by our oh-so-impartial and professional mainstream media.
Not a chance. This week, when Soros' group accused the White House and Bush cabinet secretaries of making hundreds of deceitful assertions about Saddam Hussein and his nuclear ambitions, the activist organization was treated as an objective source....
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The same financial news publication, Investors Business Daily, did another editorial, four months ago, titled:
"The Soros Threat To Democracy"
Quote:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...es-from-china/
.....Finally, the limited access to the Internet that one gets in China (through a combination of having better things to do with one's time and the sometimes capricious nature of what gets through the Great Firewall) allowed me to take a bit of break from the constant back and forth on the climate blogs. In getting back into it, one appreciates just how much time is wasted dealing with the most ridiculous of issues <h3>(Hansen's imagined endorsement of a paper he didn't write <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/09/perspectives-from-china/">thirty six years ago</a></h3>, the <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/schultes-analysis-not-published-not-going-to-be">debunking of papers</a> that <a href="http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/09/ha-ha.html">even E&E won't publish</a>, and the <a href="http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/09/and-so-it-goes.html">non-impact</a> of the current fad for amateur photography) at the expense of anything substantive. In effect, if possibly not in intention, this wastes a huge amount of people's time and diverts attention from more significant issues (at least in the various sections of the blogosphere). Serious climate bloggers might all benefit from not getting too caught up in it, and keeping an closer eye on the bigger picture. We will continue to try and do so here.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007...aily_has_a.php
Investor's Business Daily has as much as 100 lies on every page
Category: Global Warming
Posted on: September 27, 2007 1:13 PM, by Tim Lambert
Via <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/09/perspectives-from-china/">RealClimate</a>, James Hansen <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_Grandfather_70924.pdf">refutes</a> the Investor's Business Daily's <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/to_rasool.php">claim</a> that he endorsed global cooling in 1971:
<i>Mr. McCaslin reported that Rasool and Hansen were colleagues at NASA and "Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied clouds above Venus."
What was that program? It was a 'Mie scattering' code I had written to calculate light scattering by spherical particles. Indeed, it was useful for Venus studies, as it helped determine the size and refractive index of the particles in the clouds that veil the surface of Venus. I was glad to let Rasool and Schneider use that program to calculate scattering by aerosols. But Mie scattering functions, although more complex, are like sine and cosine mathematical functions, simply a useful tool for many problems. Allowing this scattering function to be used by other people does not in any way make me responsible for a climate theory.</i>
But hey, the hacks at IBD can churn these things out faster than Hansen can knock them down. <a href="http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=275526219598836">Look</a>:
The Soros Threat To Democracy
How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute, which gave him "legal and media advice"?
That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program.
And if you invest just $10,000 in my get-rich-quick pyramid scheme you can make as much as $720,000 profit! Once you realise that "as much as $720,000" includes the amount $0, you understand the scam.
So what did the IBD build this story out of? Well, the <a href="http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/annual_20070731/a_complete.pdf">OSI annual report</a> says:
Scientist Protests NASA's Censorship Attempts James E. Hansen, the director the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, protested attempts to silence him after officials at NASA ordered him to refer press inquiries to the public affairs office and required the presence of a public affairs representative at any interview. The <a href="http://www.whistleblower.org/template/index.cfm">Government Accountability Project</a>, a whistleblower protection organization and OSI grantee, came to Hansen's defense by providing legal and media advice. The campaign on Hansen's resulted in a decision by NASA revisit its media policy. ...
The Strategic Opportunities Fund includes grants related to Hurricane Katrina ($1,652,841); media policy ($1,060,000); and politicization of science ($720,000).
So the OSI didn't give Hansen any money at all. They did give money to the Government Accountability Project, "the nation's leading whistleblower protection organization", who <a href="http://www.whistleblower.org/content/press_detail.cfm?press_id=1155&keyword=">provided legal advice</a> for Hansen, and a <a href="http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=161281030&u=1587131">detailed report</a>. And the $720,000 is the total of grants to defend against the politicization of science, not the amount of money given to GAP.
<h2>The IBD has declared George Soros a "threat to democracy" because he helps defend whistleblowers. You can't make this stuff up.</h2>
Of course, the usual collection of anti-science warriors blogged about it, often embellishing the story with their own fabrications.
<a href="http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+James+Hansen+and+the+Politicization+of+Science/article9061.htm">Michael Asher at DailyTech</a>:
A report revealed just this week, shows the 'Open Society Institute' funded Hansen to the tune of $720,000, carefully orchestrating his entire media campaign. ... For Hansen to secretly receive a large check from Soros, then begin making unsubstantiated claims about administrative influence on climate science is more than suspicious -- it's a clear conflict of interest.
<a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=27245&only">Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs</a>:
Dr. James Hansen, who approves and issues NASA climate change statements and is one of the most alarmist global warming advocates in the US, is apparently deep in the pocket of George Soros
<a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jake-gontesky/2007/09/26/global-warming-alarmist-james-hansen-shill-george-soros">Jake Gontesky at NewsBusters</a>:
So he got some big paychecks from Soros - but was there a quid pro quo? The evidence certainly indicates as much
<a href="http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1190831545.shtml">Scott Kirwin at Dean's World</a>:
Nearly a million dollars. That must be a lot of money to a humble civil servant like James Hansen. However since Hansen's climate models are riddled with errors, self-fulfilling assumptions, and bootstrapping biases, I'm not sure I would call what Hansen has done "speaking truth to power." It's more like "telling a rich geezer what he wants to hear for a few bucks."
<a href="http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=9883">Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom</a>:
Writes Gary Schamburg (who emailed me the article) in a loose paraphrase of Lenin, "[Soros'] money is buying the noose that will hang our country.
Maybe so.
Though I remain stubbornly convinced that a paradigm shift in the way we come to think about how it is we interpret could provide the intellectual corrective to combat the consensus-driven meaning-making that has grown like kudzu in the wake of the linguistic turn.
As far as I can figure out, the last paragraph doesn't mean anything at all, but I like the imagery of kudzu growing in the wake of the linguistic tern.
<a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/26/nasa-s-hansen-mentioned-soros-foundations-annual-report">Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters (again!)</a>:
As is typical, a global warming obsessed media don't find this newsworthy. Think they'd be so disinterested if this smoking gun involved an oil company giving money to a Republican official?
<ahref="http://ncwatch.typepad.com/media/2007/09/ibd-mr-global-w.html">Russ Steele at NC Media Watch</a>:
Mr Global Warming was on the take
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/soros+hansen">And on and on and on</a>.
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So what I'm wondering here, is:
1.) Why the intense anti George Soros sentiment? What sets Soros apart from deep pocketed opposing politicial activists, like Richard Mellon Scaife, Richard Devos, the Koch and the Coors families, to name just a few of the wealthiest and most prominent and accomplished benfactors of organizations and agendas?
2.) Why do Investors Business Daily editorials have any remaining credibility, in your opinion? How could they seriously described Soros as a "Threat to Democracy", when the causes and organizations he supports and funds, seem aligned with the ACLU's defense of the Constitution, and the concepts of protecting whistleblowers in government and in the courts, sentencing reform and monitoring?
Don't these agendas center around protection of the least of us, or the most put upon? How does support for such principles and political activities make Soros, as the IBD editorial claimed, a "threat" to democracy?
Are you somehow more incensed about Soros's activities, and the effort he puts in to timely disclosure of them, than you are, for example, about this?:
Quote:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/reports/u...ory/16224.html
U.S. attorneys 2006 Missouri's election was ground zero for GOP
By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Wednesday, May 2, 2007
...Joining the push to contain "voter fraud" were Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., who charged that votes by dogs and dead people had defeated Ashcroft, Missouri Republican Gov. Matt Blunt, whose stinging allegations of fraud were later debunked, and St. Louis <h3>lawyer Mark "Thor" Hearne, national counsel to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, who set up a nonprofit group to publicize allegations of voter fraud....</h3>
....Separately, Hearne helped establish the nonprofit Center for American Voting Rights in February 2005, which issued lengthy reports alleging voter fraud in states across the country, including Missouri. One director of the supposedly nonpartisan group was Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee who switched his allegiance in 2000 and headed Democrats for Bush in 2004.
Barnard's Minnite said the center's summary on Missouri consisted of "a litany of overblown allegations of fraud appearing in newspapers, most of which turn out to be minor problems or no problem at all."
Republican state Sen. Delbert Scott of Lowry, Mo., chief sponsor of the photo-ID bill last year, said Hearne had helped draft it and served as a key adviser.
Hearne didn't respond to several requests for comment. His organization closed down its Internet site in March and has disappeared from view...
http://www.firedupmissouri.com/rove_..._lott_writings
<font size="2">omgA <a target="_blank" href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003100.php#more">post this afternoon at the excellent TPM Muckraker</a> demonstrates that a speech on "Voter Fraud" delivered by Karl Rove to the Republican National Lawyers Association in April 2006 drew heavily on a New York Post op-ed co-authored by nutty professor John Lott:<br /></font><blockquote><font size="2">...we took a hard look at just where Karl Rove got the bulk of the voter fraud stories he imparted at an <a target="_blank" href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002982.php">April 7, 2006 speech</a> before the Republican National Lawyer's Association. We noted that three of the seven "hot spots" he mentioned in that speech appeared to come directly from a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.americanretiredpersons.com/InsuranceServices/itsfraud.htm">2000 New York Post op-ed</a> by Stephen Bronars and <strong>John Lott, Jr</strong>....</font><br /></blockquote><p><font size="2">Missourians <a href="http://www.firedupmissouri.com/lott_id_hearing">may recall</a> that John Lott was the creator of written "expert" testimony submitted to the Cole County Circuit Court by <a href="http://www.firedupmissouri.com/cummins_hearne_doj_purge">voter fraud hypester Thor Hearne</a> as the prominent GOP attorney spearheaded the third-party legal defense of Missouri's Republican-built Photo ID Voting Law, which the courts would <a target="_blank" href="http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/09/missouri-judge-rules-voter-id-law.php">ultimately find unconstitutional</a>.</font></p><p><font size="2"> That Rove and Hearne were relying on writings from the same discredited academic to stoke the bogus flames of "voter fraud" fear and agitate for the constitutionality of a suppressive Photo ID voter identification law is yet another indicator of the national pervasiveness and thorough coordination of the effort by Republican Party operatives at the highest levels.</font></p>
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Why? Soros is not an elected official, and, unlike in the immediately preceding example, even closely connected to elected officials, compared the Thor Hearne.
Can you see the difference between what is stated in the above example, and what the IBD editorial board stated in "The Soros Threat to Democracy"?
Are the IBD accusations against Soros, on the same par as the McClatchy and <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003322.php">TPM Muckraker</a> reporting on Thor Hearne's suddenly emerging, and later disappearing, "voting rights", organization?
Thor Hearnes' misinformation "Op", and the Rove/RNC/DOJ use of it to justify <ahref="http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/070531nj1.htm">prosections of ACORN</a> and select voters, and purging of US Attorneys, was in direct opposition to the efforts of <a href="http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=275181103776079">Soros funded ACORN</a>....
Why do you think there is so much animonsity towards, and distrust of George Soros? Do you have a more positive opinion of Richard Mellon Scaife? |