Say Anything Blog

Put down the pipe.

They are paying somebody to review

actually lots of somebodys at 10K each

the man who made the offer Kenneth Green

The Fraser Institute received $120,000 US from ExxonMobil in 2003-’04, the funding paid for the work of researcher Ken Green.”

AEI “has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil, and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration.
Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees,” added The Guardian

Sourcewatch

WOOF, this is one of the things that utterly repels me from the left.  I’ve got little use for people that are so unconcerned with truth as either you or the author of the Guardian appear to be.

You see absolutely nothing wrong with distorting facts, make misleading statements or playing the degrees-of-separation game to smear anybody that you feel doesn’t serve your political interests.

The point of the “20 of its staff” was to try and establish a causal link between some association with the Bush administration and an attempt to debunk the IPCC.  Basically this is just an insinuation, and like most insinuation, doesn’t require any actual, you know, facts or whether any putative link between Bush & AEI actually affects how AEI does its work. It’s just a cowardly, dishonest and lazy way to smear your “enemies.”

Here’s the intellectually honest version, something you liberals have a lot of trouble doing (frankly I’m beginning to think you’re incapable of it):  Look at AEI reports align or conflict with the Bush administration’s policies.  If the reports are lock-synced with the Bush Admin, then you look further, and you say “Ah ha!  Conflict of interest, too much overlap!”

If you look at their policy papers on the other hand, e.g, this one on climate change, you hardly see a locked step approach with the Bush administration.  No doubt, you’ll notice the criticism of the Kyoto protocol.  That’s hardly a partisan position, unless you want to lump in member’s of Clinton’s administration with Bush as well.  The paper on the other hand, makes the right argument:  We shouldn’t rest the question of whether to reduce CO2 emissions on global warming.  That just might turn out to be flawed science.  We should do it because we need to improve our air quality, an argument I’ve seen from other frequent contributors to this blog as well.

In any case, if you are intellectually honest, you certainly don’t go the other direction of a possible conflict of interest and immediately assume it proves anything.  In that direction, you’re just playing the degrees of association game.  In Washington, everybody works with everybody, so association proves nothing. I mean Walter Pincus goes to Karl Rove’s office and talks with him, fairly often in fact.  Does that make Pincus a shill for the administration.  Hardly.

In reality, how many of those 20 people were Democrats versus Republicans?  Does it mean any thing at all?  In Washington, about zip, in the absence of any pattern of misconduct.

As to the $1.2 million number, that was the total over a five year period.  As I mentioned, Exxon funding accounts for less than 1% of AEI’s total yearly funding, hardly enough to make the statement an “ExxonMobil-funded think tank” anything other than another cowardly, lazy and morally-bankrupt insinuation.

AEI takes EXXon cash.
Ken Green takes Exxon cash.
Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil,
is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees,
these are not honest brokers.

I’d love to see your wooden nickle collection.

It must be extensive.

I smell the powerful odor of both guilt by association(with no causal links) and mendacity!  Woof, you never fail to come through with the leftie BS.

Hope and change, in a free world, are the private possessions of motivated individuals.

WOOF said, AEI takes EXXon cash.
Ken Green takes Exxon cash.
Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil,
is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees,
these are not honest brokers.

Why are they not “honest brokers”?

WOOF: AEI takes EXXon cash.

Yes they do.  They receive a whopping nearly 1% of their funding from ExxonMobil.  Of course that’s exactly what “a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies” implies.  Not.  And 1% of their funding=BFD.

Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees,

Which would be a concern if Raymond wrote the report himself, or equivalently was using his Jedi mind tricks on the employees.  Again if you want to establish something, you start with “they did these five studies and all of them are biased towards ExxonMobil”.  That’s how it’s done. 

What WOOF is doing is just a glorified version of name calling.

In the meantime it is quite clear that the Guardian ran a story full of lies.  And I have no doubt they were fully aware that they were smearing people, when they did it.  Part of their liberal bona fides, I guess…

The Fraser Institute received $120,000 US from ExxonMobil in 2003-’04, the funding paid for the work of researcher Ken Green.”

Pay for play, it dosn’t get much more obvious.

Ok, I’ll bite.  Tell me which research he distorted for his client.

I received $50k in funding from GE’s foundation once.  I suppose that makes me a shill for GE too.

In the meantime it is still quite clear that the Guardian ran a story full of lies.  That’s pretty much the end of story.