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Daily Caller

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see 519 CALLER 2

congrats feck

founder tucker?

huge # tags, not all implemented

see jrnl fail escalator

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KOCH TUCKER INCUBATOR batash

http://redgreenandblue.org/2023/03/15/climate-disinformation-daily-caller/

Climate disinformation is what the Daily Caller DOES | Red, Green, and Blue

Red, Green, and Blue

Related · Daily Caller has a fact checker! (But is now run by Koch-trained career disinformer Michael Bastasch) · No, Marc Morano, nobody wants a ' ...

as internal text messages _{prove}_ what most have _{long known}_ about _{Fox News}_ (that it’s a conservative propaganda machine posing as a news outlet), it’s important to remember that these days, Fox is hardly alone. While Murdoch’s Fox and Wall Street Journal are the unquestioned Big Leagues of right-wing disinformation, there’s a whole set of bush league outlets serving as training grounds.

By Climate Denier Roundup

The Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller is one of the primary examples of how Fox and the Koch-funded climate change counter-movement are intertwined.

Back when they were mostly Koch-funded, _{Koch-trained Michael Bastasch}_ was regularly running climate disinformation featuring Koch-funded climate deniers. These days, their funding has diversified a bit thanks to _{Carlson’s feud with Kochs}_, though giving the Daily Caller money still appears to increase the odds of the outlet _{writing favorable content about you}_.

But _{**Bastasch** returned}_ last year as Managing Editor of the Daily Caller’s _{non-profit tax dodge foundation}_, after a stint at Fox News writing for _{election-lie-spreader Laura Ingraham}_.

Since his return, we’ve been watching closely to note any changes, and at this point can say it definitely appears that Bastasch is using his position to spread climate disinformation through multiple channels at the Caller, not just the “Big Tent” opinion vertical _{we noted last week}_.

_{In the past}_, most of the Caller’s climate disinfo would come from just one or two employees who appeared to be tasked with turning press releases from Koch cronies into “news” as their job on the “energy” beat (like Thomas Catenacci, who now works for, _{you guessed it, Fox News}_).

But these days, attacks on climate change science, policy, and experts have become a feature of coverage across the website and its various staffers.

It really stood out between 5 and 7 p.m. last Wednesday, when the Daily Caller published a triple-play of climate disinfo: defending a fossil-fuel loving white supremacist, cherry-picking climate change from a US National security assessment, and attacked environmentalists organizing on TikTok to #StopWillow.

The first was from “news and commentary writer” Brianna Lyman, who provided _{a short write-up framed as criticism}_ of Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who “accused one of the witnesses of being racist.” Who, you might ask? Well, despite the fact that ‘who/what/where/why/when’ is a basic tenet of journalism, Lyman didn’t identify the person at the center of the House committee meeting, and in fact, described Bush as “criticizing the oil industry before turning her attention toward an unidentified witness.”

Which is an absolutely astonishing thing for a supposed journalist to write, because Congressional _{hearings are very easy to look up}_. Alex Epstein, one of the “so-called ‘energy experts’” called by Republicans, is who Rep. Bush called “a philosopher who has previously espoused white supremacist views,” before Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) interjected to try and censor her by calling for the comment to be removed from the Congressional record.

But naming Epstein would require doing actual reporting, and apparently all Lyman did was watch a _{video clip of the hearing}_ (that she embedded in the story). If you’d like to see what real reporting of the hearing looks like, as opposed to someone running cover for a fellow traveler, _{Timothy Cama covered it for PoliticoPRO}_ and named _{Alex Epstein}_ right up front.

Roughly thirty-six minutes after Lyman’s article defending a racist was posted, the Daily ‘_{whoopsie we keep hiring racists}_‘ Caller published a piece on the US intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment. The headline of “reporter” Micaela Burrow’s coverage? “_{Intel Community Warns Fight Over Green Energy Tech Will Worsen Global Tensions.}_”

The 10-paragraph write-up quotes the assessment just twice to justify the story’s thrust that fighting climate change will somehow make the world more dangerous. That’s probably because the _{40-page assessment}_ only devotes 2 pages to climate, and then otherwise focuses on a bunch of things that the Daily Caller doesn’t spread disinfo about.

Finally, rounding out a very busy day for the Caller, “Associate Editor” Ailan Evans’ _{hit piece ran at 6:49}_, attacking the #StopWillow campaign on TikTok because one of the participating groups is funded by “a Swiss billionaire with a documented history of philanthropy and political donations, primarily to left-wing causes and candidates.” Though it’s dressed up as some sort of scandalous revelation, at no point does Evans attempt to explain how or why this is somehow bad.

But that’s the kind of training you get from the Daily Caller. Both Evans and current _{Fox Production Assistant}_ Kendall Tietz were _{2021 fellows}_ of the Daily Caller’s American Journalism Institute, where they train the next generation of political hacks to pretend to be journalists.

So next time you hear about some bizarre disinformation, rank political propaganda, or shameless defense of racism on Fox News, remember that it’s not an accident, they’retrainedto be that awful. There’s a whole farm league of conservative propaganda shops like the Daily Caller — the _{frack-backed}_ Daily Wire and _{Heritage}_‘s _{Daily Signal}_ come to mind — and while they’d all oppose a Universal Basic Income as socialism, they’re proof that as long as would-be-journalists are willing to play ball for the highest bidder, they’ll never want for work.

ref jun 2019

just the _{other day we talked about}_ how Tucker Carlson questioned who the climate culprits are on his Koch-funded Daily Caller website. So we’re reluctant to go back to that well quite so soon, but a new post on the Caller’s website cannot go without comment.

The _{story is a clip and rehash}_ of one of Carlson’s recent segments on his Fox News show, in which he attacks Koch Brothers and questions their undue influence over the Republican party. In the clip, Carlson hones in on criticisms that the Koch brothers are libertarian and that their philanthropic aims don’t reflect the wants and needs of everyday Republicans.

yes, you read that correctly. Tucker Carlson, whose Daily Caller_{**website received 84%**}_of its funding from the Kochs in 2016 and _{close to a million dollars in 2017}_, railed against the Kochs’ influence. Keep in mind the website with _{over a thousand Koch stories}_, few if any of which are anything but bootlicking.

That said, in 2017 Koch money only made up 38% of the Caller’s funding. Its trajectory does seem to be moving away from Koch money as its primary means of support. Perhaps the website really is trying to break free from the Koch’s funding, or at least dilute its funder pool so it’s not quite so obvious that they exist as a propaganda tool for the Kochs’ interests. It launched a subscription program back in April, inviting readers to become a “_{Daily Caller Patriot}_” offering access to special content and removing ads. The invitation includes a clip of Carlson talking about his crusade against “big tech” for “censoring” “conservatives” over the little tinsy matter of propagating hate speech that is radicalizing white terrorists.

And that’s a big part of Carlson’s new rant against the Kochs: targeting their upcoming work with the Anti-Defamation League to combat online hate speech. Since we know full well that the _{Daily Caller has quite a history}_ of “accidentally” propagating white nationalism, perhaps that’s why Carlson is stoking division between himself and his followers and his Koch funders. If they’re anti-hate speech, odds are they’ll follow the lead of all the advertisers who have pulled their support for Carlson’s Fox program.

So maybe this new change in heart in response to the Kochs pulling away from supporting the website, and Carlson is pulling the old “you can’t fire me because I quit.” Back _{in November of 2018}_, Washington Post columnist Radley Balko wrote that Koch officials told him that “the Kochs and their foundations more generally find the Daily Caller abhorrent, and feel the same way about Tucker Carlson. One added that he was particularly troubled by the way the site objectives women as clickbait.”

And while the Koch donors Balko spoke to made it clear they saw their investment in the Caller to be aimed at training new journalists with free-market ideology, the lead investigative journalist at the Caller, per Balko, “doesn't inspire confidence.” Balko, who had previously worked with the reporter, Richard Pollack, wrote that Pollack is “a Trump toady” who “doesn't understand libertarianism” and is “a crappy journalist” who “isn't particularly smart.” But Balko conceded that Pollack’s “most marketable skill seems to be the ability to fool people into believing he has marketable skills.”

The same could be said for Tucker Carlson, and maybe the Kochs have finally realized it. Because as a _{millionaire funded by billionaires}_, it’s hard to comprehend why else Carlson would turn on his former patrons.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donors-to-tucker-carlsons-daily-caller-news-foundation-revealed?ref=home

ref roger s 12 22

this reporting is one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of [Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

The non-profit that feeds the conservative Daily Caller website co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from entities and individuals who have received favorable coverage, including some who authored opinion pieces, a new filing shows.

The document—the Daily Caller News Foundation’s fiscal year 2021 tax statement—includes for thefirst time a list of donors to the 501(c)(3) organization, a group that is not required by law to disclose donor information. The filing also reveals that Carlson, who in 2020 announced he was leaving the Daily Caller and selling his stake in the website, is still the foundation chairman, and has not cut back on his hours.

When Carlson announced his split with the Daily Caller in 2020, he cited work constraints. “I’m just too absorbed in what I’m doing,” the host told *The Wall Street Journal* at the time, explaining, “I wasn’t helping in any way, because I’ve got an hour to do every night” on his Fox News program. The tax filing, which covers the following year, shows he continued to hold the chairman position and put in the same hours as in all previous foundation filings—five hours a week.

Many of the foundation’s donors are tied to industries and issues that the Caller covers frequently. Most notable is the Ariel Corporation,which manufactures natural gas compressors and gave $135,000 to support the news organization—which has for years been criticized for its pro-carbon energy reporting and financial ties to the Koch brothers, the right-wing industrialists.

Other donors have an even closer relationship with the site, including some who have published pieces in their own names, without a disclosure of their financial ties. That, according to top journalism ethics expert Kelly McBride raises ethics questions.

“With any news organization that solicits donations, you really have to have an editorial policy that articulates how you separate out your loyalty to your audience and to your journalistic mission from your ties to your donors,” McBride, who is senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, told The Daily Beast.

‘CULT SPECIALIST’

William Vaillancourt]

Such a policy, she said, would ideally include an advisement to donors that they can’t influence editorial work, and a promise of transparency whenever there’s a conflict of interest.

“You’re looking for, first of all, separation between fundraising and the editorial product, and you’re also looking for clarity around what donors can expect in exchange for their donation, as well as transparency so the audience understands,” McBride said, adding that “a tagline on an op-ed would be an obvious transparency mechanism.”

The Daily Beast reached out to the Daily Caller and Carlson for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.

The journalistic and ethical standards published on the Daily Caller website don’t mention the foundation or any policy regarding donor influence over editorial content. But some donors have contributed content themselves.

For instance, RightForge, an internet infrastructure provider that caters to conservatives, in 2021 gave the foundation $7,500. In May of that year, the Daily Caller ran an op-ed from RightForge CEO Martin Avila, criticizing what Avila called the social media “witch trial” of former President Donald Trump. Months later, RightForge announced it would host Trump’s new social media network, Truth Social.

Real estate investor Adam Milstein gave the foundation $25,000 in 2021 and published an opinion piece that same year. The piece—titled, “Strategic Active Philanthropy Can Strengthen Our American Values”—includes a brief bio for Milstein, which describes him only as “an active philanthropist, an investor, and community leader.”

While the Daily Caller has been blasted for its affinity for the fossil fuel industry, the tax filing shows the Daily Caller News Foundation received financial backing from conservative green-energy group ClearPath Action, which gave $10,000 in 2021.

ClearPath has received favorable coverage from the Daily Caller, which earlier this year cited CEO Rich Powell in an article about his group, without a disclaimer. When Powell landed a Daily Caller op-ed earlier this month, the outlet added a note to the piece and his contributor page that read, “The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.” But those notes did not mention the financial relationship.

Then there’s Daniel Oliver, a Daily Caller regular​​ contributor who also serves as trustee of the George E. Coleman Jr. Foundation, which gave the foundation $7,500 in 2021. The Daily Caller highlights some of Oliver’s rich experience in his bio—chair of the Education and Research Institute, director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, and former chairmanships of the Federal Trade Commission under President ​​Ronald Reagan and the National Review”—but doesn’t mention his role with the Coleman Foundation, or the donor relationship. (Buzzfeed News reported in 2019 that the foundation was a FDRLST Media investor, citing Oliver’s role.)

‘LIVES CAN BE RUINED’

Will Sommer,
Olivia Messer

An even more influential GOP figure also appears in the filing, in the form of a $10,000 gift from CRC Advisors, a group headed up by arch-conservative megadonor and judicial activist Leonard Leo. The Daily Caller published a piece on Friday based on the results of a CRC poll, without disclosing the relationship. The two groups also show overlap in their employees, including current CRC vice president Kevin Daley, whose LinkedIn page says he left the Daily Caller in 2020 after four years as a reporter.

​​Power the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for the fossil fuel industry, donated $10,000 in 2021 and appears frequently enough in the Daily Caller that articles about the group have their own tag on the site. Since the donation, Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner has been cited in multiple Daily Caller pieces as an expert voice, without no mention of his status as a foundation donor.

Justin Olson , an elected Arizona utility regulatorand former Arizona GOP Senate candidate, gave the foundation $10,000 in 2021, listing his role at the time as an officer with right-wing youth activist group Turning Point USA.

The Daily Caller has given TPUSA favorable coverage, including after the donation. It also published an exclusive report in November 2021, the month after Olson announced his bid, revealing that a Scottsdale school board official had access to a so-called Google Drive “dossier” of personal information of vocal conservatives. (Police cleared the official of wrongdoing.) Olson tweeted the article when it came out, and expressed repeated outrage at the story on the platform, while a Twitter search shows he had not tweeted about schools previously.

The filing reveals the names of 2021 donors, but does not indicate whether they had donated before. Some of the contributors who present apparent conflicts of interest have had contributor roles in the publication previously, such as Leo and Adam Milstein, who published op-eds in 2018 and 2019. In 2018, when Power the Future announced its debut, the Daily Caller had the exclusive story.

There are, of course, numerous examples of media companies drawing funding from non-profit backers. But the Daily Caller and the DCNF have a unique relationship.

The foundation was created in 2011, a few years after Carlson founded the Daily Caller with then-partner Neil Patel, who still helms the operation. Thanks to the organization’s non-profit status, the foundation can subsidize not only publication costs, but the production of the actual content—with a built-in tax break.

Part of the foundation’s stated mission is to train young reporters, but its staff also generates content, which the Daily Caller then gets to post to its site for free. And while this content is nominally available to any publication,The Washington Postreported that it’s rarely used by anyone beyond the Daily Caller. A 2017 Center for Media and Democracy report found that the Daily Caller published “virtually everything” the nonprofit churned out.

However, other groups have taken advantage of the arrangement. The fact-checking site Snopes reported in 2019 that conservative political activists appropriated foundation content to populate a number of small-time websites styling themselves as local news outlets to smuggle political content to unsuspecting audiences.

The Daily Caller has also been called out for its financial and political ties to Trump’s campaign, which shelled out about $150,000 for access to the Daily Caller email list in the 2016 election, the Center for Media and Democracy reported.

One of the most familiar examples of a donor-funded news organization would be National Public Radio. While NPR gets some government grants, most of its money comes from private contributors—including from industries it reports on. But McBride noted that NPR puts disclaimers on stories that may present an apparent conflict.

“When you listen to public media, you hear that certain people give money for certain lines of reporting, like for climate change, et cetera. So you can fund a line of reporting, but you get no influence over how that news is presented, and public media also lets the audience know when that funding may intersects with the reporting,” McBride said.

It’s unclear whether any Daily Caller News Foundation donors tabbed their contributions for specific issues or series. But some well-known issues-driven names populate the list, including top GOP megadonor and election-denial enthusiast Dick Uihlein ($25,000), anti-climate change groups the Bradley Foundation ($50,000) and Sarah Scaife Foundation ($350,000), and conservative free-market underwriters Searle Freedom Trust ($230,000).

The source of the biggest donation, however, is still unknown. That would be the $400,000 the group received through DonorsTrust, a nonprofit known as a conservative dark money “ATM,” which allows funders to channel money anonymously to various recipients. The foundation also got a $300,000 injection from someone identified as “anonymous.”

The Daily Caller operation—which has been exposed forties to white nationalists—has been widely criticized on the left for its financial ties to energy interests, most specificallyCharles Koch, who has provided millions in funding over the years, and at one point reportedly accounted for more than 83 percent of the foundation’s annual revenue.

That bankroll swelled between 2020 and 2021. The foundation’s fiscal year 2020 filing shows $1.57 million in contributions, a number thatnearly doubled to $2.8 million the next year, according to the 2021 document. The foundation spent $1.4 million—$254,000 of it on fundraising—which, combined with previous assets, left it with a year-end balance of about $2.1 million.

https://www.ecowatch.com/facebook-factchecking-science-climate-denial-2635927165.html

no lnx twits

CLIMATE DENIER

Facebook Hires Koch-Funded Climate Deniers for 'Fact-Checking'

Oil Change International Apr. 30, 2019  BUSINESS

Isriya Paireepairit / Flickr

By Andy Rowell

It may not come as a surprise that leading climate denier Donald Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims since he became president, according to fact-checkers at the Washington Post.

As the Post reports, Trump's "tsunami of untruths just keeps looming larger and larger."

Much of this tsunami of untruths will get reposted on Facebook as fact. Those hoping that Facebook will accurately check Trump's statements and clean up the torrent of fake news on its platform will have to think again, especially if you are concerned about climate change.

In what can only be described as verging on the bizarre, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given the contract to fight fake news to an organization that pushes fake news on climate change.

According to reports in Think Progress and Grist, Facebook has announced that it was teaming up with CheckYourFact.com, which is an offshoot of the anti-science media site, The Daily Caller.

The CheckYourFactwebsite brags that: "Our mission is a non-partisan one. We're loyal to neither people nor parties — only the truth. And while the fact-checking industry continues to grow, there are still countless assertions that go unchecked. We exist to fill in the gaps."

In fact, the opposite seems to be true. As Think Progress outlines:

The Daily Caller, which has published misinformation about climate science for years, was co-founded by the science-denying Fox News host Tucker Carlson and is backed by major conservative donors, including Charles and David Koch, the billionaire fossil fuel barons who are the single biggest funders of climate science misinformation.

Think Progress includes a link back to 2015, when a peer-reviewed paper from scientists at Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute was published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The Daily Caller tried to twist the research to argue that "global warming is nothing new."

It is hardly surprising that leading climate scientists and academics are outspoken about the Facebook fact-check tie up.

One of the world's leading climatologists, professor Michael Mann, whose own work has been distorted by The Daily Caller, told Think Progress: "It is appalling that Facebook has teamed up with a Koch-funded organization that promotes climate change denial. Facebook must disassociate itself from this organization."

Mann also tweeted:

Michael E. Mann

?

@MichaelEMann

"The Koch brothers are funding @Facebook’s newest fact-checking partner" by Paola Rosa-Aquino (@prosaaquino) for @Grist:https://grist.org/article/the-koch-brothers-are-funding-facebooks-newest-fact-checking-partner/ …

88

2:55 PM - Apr 29, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

The Koch brothers are funding Facebook’s newest fact-checking partner

Is Facebook trying to solve its fake news problem by partnering with … climate deniers?

grist.org

111 people are talking about this

Environmental sociologist, professor Robert Brulle, who is an authority on the climate denial network, asked, "Why they are partnering with an organization that is part of the right wing echo chamber?" He added that: "Facebook should cancel this contract."

But as both websites point out this is not the first time Facebook has joined forces with a climate denial website: In the fall of 2017, Facebook named the right-wing, partisan Weekly Standard as a fact-checking partner.

Last year, Tessa Lyons, a product manager for Facebook wrote about the company's actions on Fake News:

False news is a money maker for spammers and a weapon of state actors and agitators around the world … Misinformation is bad for our community and bad for our business. It's why we're investing significant time and resources to fight it.

Fighting fake news with more fake news is a sure recipe for disaster. Especially during a climate emergency.

EcoWatch

@EcoWatch

@Greenpeace Calls BS After Trump Cites 'Paid Lobbyist' Masquerading as Co-Founder to Peddle Climate Denial @greenpeaceusa @AOC #GreenNewDeal http://bit.ly/2Ty5bfd

11

4:24 PM - Mar 12, 2019

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Greenpeace Calls BS After Trump Cites 'Paid Lobbyist' Masquerading as Co-Founder to Peddle Climate...

"Patrick Moore was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. He does not represent Greenpeace," the group wrote.

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Reposted with permission from our media associate Oil Change International.

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ref

Wall Street Journal published an editorial on April 23 that derided electric vehicles in Germany as "dirty," based on a recent study that has been called into question by a number of experts and mainstream German news outlets. The Journal's editorial board, which has a history of climate denial, has attacked both German energy policy and electric vehicles (EVs) before.

The dubious study has also been hyped by climate deniers and right-wing outlets in the U.S., including Infowars and The Daily Caller.

Experts point out major flaws in German study on electric vs. diesel cars

The study was conducted by the Ifo Institute, a Munich-based think tank, and argued that a Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle driven in Germany is responsible for more carbon dioxide pollution than a Mercedes C220d diesel vehicle. The study, which was released in German on April 17 and has not yet been translated into English, finds that the Tesla emits between 156 and 181 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, compared to 141 grams of CO2 from the diesel Mercedes. The study attributes roughly half of the Tesla's emissions to the vehicle’s production process, including its battery, which the authors assume will only last 10 years or 150,000 kilometers. The other half of the Tesla’s estimated emissions in Germany come from electricity used to charge the car, some of which is generated by burning coal.

English-language summaries of the study include a press release from the Ifo Institute and a Brussels Timeswrite-up.

Soon after the study's release, German-language outlets started pushing back on its findings and methodology, including Der Spiegel, the highest-circulation news magazine in Europe, and WirtschaftsWoche, a weekly business news magazine. Articles in both publications highlighted miscalculations and faulty assumptions, and pointed to a number of other studies on EVs that had come to opposite conclusions.

One English-language debunk of the study came in a Twitter thread from Netherlands-based energy researcher Auke Hoekstra. Hoekstra noted that the study's claims about the diesel Mercedes' emissions are wrong -- the Mercedes emits closer to 220 grams of CO2 per kilometer, rather than 141, he argued. He also highlighted how the authors used an extremely low number for how long an electric vehicle battery lasts. He stated, “even Tesla's from the olden days can drive 600 000 km before the battery reaches 80% capacity.” He summed up his criticisms:

To summarize: EVs only emit more CO2 if you make unrealistically negative assumptions for battery production, battery life and electricity mix while making unrealistically positive assumption about diesel consumption.

Correct ANY of these and the tables are turned. Bigly.

— AukeHoekstra (@AukeHoekstra) April 22, 2019

Hoekstra also argued that the analysis should not be presented as an academic study. Instead, he characterized it as “the opinion of three people, … none of whom have any background” in EVs or batteries. One of the authors, Hans-Werner Sinn, has been criticized for using dubious assumptions in energy studies before: Sinn received strong pushback on a 2018 paper he wrote claiming that energy storage requirements ultimately limit the expansion of renewable energy. Sinn has also argued that criticism of Volkswagen over its role in the Dieselgate scandal has been exaggerated, and placed much of the blame for the scandal on U.S. efforts to regulate diesel engines.

Another debunk of the Ifo study came from Fred Lambert, chief editor of the electric transportation news site Electrek. He noted:

One of the biggest mistakes they are making is that they are comparing the full production and lifecycle of an electric vehicle, including the emission from the electricity uses, against the production and lifecycle of a diesel car without accounting for all the energy used to produce the diesel and supply it to the cars.

Lambert also called out the study’s authors for falsely assuming a battery life of 150,000 kilometers and for failing to note that Germany is planning to rapidly decarbonize its electricity system, which would greatly improve the carbon footprint of EVs in the near future.

Another criticism of the study has been its focus solely on Germany's energy grid and the authors' failure to take into account the overall mix of the larger European energy market that Germany is a part of. German carmaker Volkswagen, which manufactures both EVs and diesel vehicles, responded to the study by defending EVs. In an English-language article by Deutsche Welle, a German international broadcaster, Volkswagen noted that with Germany's current electricity mix, its Golf EV would have a similar CO2 output as a diesel car of the same type -- 142 grams per kilogram compared to 140. However, “using the European energy mix for calculations, which includes large amounts of nuclear energy from France and water power from Norway, the e-Golf's carbon footprint would be down to 119 g/km” -- far below the CO2 output of a diesel car.

Other analyses have disproved the claim that EVs are not environmentally friendly. In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that a U.S.-based EV is equivalent to a conventional gasoline car that gets 80 miles per gallon. Unlike the German study, it looked at all of the emissions from fueling and driving both vehicles. It also found that EVs will get cleaner over time as electric grids get cleaner, noting that its 2018 estimate was an improvement of 7 mpg from 2017. And a 2017 report from the Transport & Environment group, a Brussels-based transportation policy group, found that EVs emit fewer greenhouse gases than diesel cars even when EVs are powered by the most carbon-intensive electricity.

Right-wing outlets in the U.S. promote Ifo’s study to disparage EVs

Although the Ifo study is specific to Germany’s electric grid and has been widely criticized, climate deniers and right-wing outlets in the U.S. have picked up on it and are using it to disparage EVs generally. Steve Milloy, a notorious denier and frequent Wall Street Journalcontributor, tweeted about the study on April 19. On April 22, extreme right-wing outlet Infowars wrote about the study, and far-right conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson tweeted about the Infowars piece. The right-wing website Zero Hedge wrote about the study too, and a tweet pointing to that post was retweeted by Mandy Gunasekara, a former Trump EPA official and current Fox News contributor.

After The Wall Street Journal wrote about the study, still more right-wing outlets covered it, including The Daily Caller, which has a long record of inaccurate reporting on climate and energy issues, and The Western Journal, a conservative news outlet with a history of deceptive climate claims.

The Wall Street Journalhas a long track record of misleading on climate and energy issues

The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages have spread misinformation about climate change for decades. A Media Mattersstudy found that from January 2015 to August 2016, one-third of the paper’s climate-related opinion pieces contained climate denial or other inaccurate statements about climate change. We’ve also found that the paper's opinion section is ExxonMobil’s chief apologist for its climate change lies, and it has defended the fracking industry against accusations that it contaminates drinking water. According to a recent article in Current Affairs,the Journalhas shifted in recent years from denying climate change to downplaying it, but still remains an impediment to clean energy and climate action. The Wall Street Journal has always been a pro-polluter, pro-industry paper, so it’s no surprise that it would overlook flaws and publicize questionable research that disparages a direct threat to the fossil-fuel industry.

Posted InEnvironment & Science, Climate Change, Energy

Network/OutletWall Street Journal, The Daily Caller, Infowars, Western Journal

PersonSteve Milloy, Paul Joseph Watson

Stories/InterestsClimate Change, Electric Vehicles

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CMD

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is under fire this week for racist, sexist, and homophobic comments he made while chatting on “Bubba the Love Sponge” a shock jock radio show between 2006-2011. Groups are scrutinizing Fox’s advertisers and demanding that they drop the show.

But Carlson also publishes The Daily Caller, a controversial online media outlet with ties to white nationalists that has infamously peddled everything from climate denial and anti-Islamic tropes to false prostitution charges and violence against protesters.

Carlson’s moonlighting as an extremist at The Daily Caller is heavily bankrolled by — you guessed it — the Koch brothers. An investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) finds that the Charles Koch Foundation has poured more than $2.7 million into the Daily Caller’s non-profit “charity” since 2012, which generates the lion’s share of the “news” that the Caller publishes.

Indeed, in 2016, Koch cash accounted for 83 percent of the The Daily Caller News Foundation’s $1.1 million in revenues.

Carlson Under Fire

As if catering to white supremacists was not bad enough, Media Matters published an inventory of hateful comments made by Carlson as a guest on the show between 2006-2011.

The radio host discusses Warren Jeffs, the religious leader who was investigated in 2007 for marrying off underage girls to older men and was eventually jailed for sexual assault of minors in 2011. When the radio host condemned Jeffs for being an “accessory to the rape of children,” Carlson said “whatever the hell that means,” and going on to suggest that forcible underage marriage is not as serious as forcible child rape. Listen to the tape here.

In other interviews, Carlson called Iraqis “semi-literate primitive monkeys,” who “don’t use toilet paper or forks.” They should just “shut the fuck up and obey.” Carlson spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the “lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals.” That candidate would be “elected king” if they vowed to “kill as many of them as [they] can.” Carlson also said Afghanistan is “never going to be a civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.” Listen to the tape here.

The release of the older audio tapes gives “context and insight” on his nightly programming today,said Media Matters President Angelo Carusone on MSNBC.

So far, Carlson has failed to apologize. As Fox News scrambles to control the damage, at least three advertisers — Allergan, letgo, and GreatCall — have had enough.

But with the focus on advertisers, it’s important to remember who else bankrolls Carlson’s mini media empire.

The Koch Caller?

The Kochs have long underwritten The Daily Caller. Previously, CMD reported that the Kochs gave $805,512 to The Daily Caller News Foundation between 2012 and 2015, predominantly from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Since then, the numbers have continued to grow.

The Koch foundation gave another $946,000 in 2016 and $960,000 in 2017, the last year publicly available — for a total of $2.7 million.

In 2017, CMD analyzed emails sent by the Trump campaign to The Daily Caller subscribers and estimated that the outlet also received at least $150,000 from the Trump campaign in the months right before the November election, based on the fee charged for mailings to its list. The funding was never disclosed by Carlson or The Daily Caller as they reported on the Trump campaign.

In addition, CMD also examined the relationship between the non-profit and for-profit arms of Tucker Carlson’s operation. The mechanics of how they operate together raise serious concerns about whether Carlson’s tax-free nonprofit is operating primarily for the private benefit of his for-profit media outlet, which would be a violation of tax law.

CMD’s story was picked up by numerous media outlets including the Washington Post, which interviewed tax experts on the legality of the scheme.

“It really does look like the reason for the existence of this 501(c)(3) organization is to provide benefits to the for-profit company, and that should be a private benefit that is not acceptable,” Linda Sugin, a law professor at Fordham University, told the *Post* and other media outlets. “You can’t have money going into the foundation being used for purposes that are really to support the for-profit organization.”

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Ann Coulter unloaded on Trump in a podcast with The Daily Caller,accusing him of being “a joke presidency who scammed the American people.” Coulter said that she will not vote for Trump in 2020 without a border wall, adding, “nor will, I think, most of his supporters.” (Coulter had also vowed earlier in the week to not support Trump in 2020 if the wall was not built.) Within hours of these comments, the president unfollowed Coulter on Twitter.

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Fact-Checking the Attacks

The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.

The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:

The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute prefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.

Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast. CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.

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rww

...The Clark brothers would stand alongside Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer, of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.

(((Alexander Reid Ross)))

@areidross

Whoa, these are the guys who tried to bust up my book talk in DC. There was a Daily Caller journo waiting in a cab outside livestreaming in case something went down. Instead, dozens of antifascists came and ensured the security of the space. Fash couldn't even catch a ride home.

(((Alexander Reid Ross)))

@areidross

That evening, Jack Posobiec posted a pirated copy of the PDF of my book online -- total coincidence, i know. Here's an article that was published about the evening's affairs...https://itsgoingdown.org/nazis-fail-attempt-shut-fascist-creep-author-talk-potters-house/ … pic.twitter.com/ww7RrDO09K

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Twitter Ads info and privacy

In a video interview recorded by One People’s Project, Spencer detailed his relationship with Posobiec going back to the Republican National Convention in 2016.

[pix]

“He introduced himself as, ‘Oh, I work for Roger Stone, I’m Roger Stone’s man, kind of thing.’ He definitely introduced himself as really tightly connected with the campaign—the Trump campaign—and he was maybe two degrees of separation from Trump himself, that kind of thing,” Spencer says in the video, adding that Posobiec expressed gratitude to the alt-right for joining a pro-Trump “coalition” in a tone Spencer described as “a smoke-blown-up-ass kind of way.”

Spencer alleged that while Posobiec was at The Rebel, the outlet had edited him out of rally footage while feeding his talking points to Posobiec to reiterate as if they were Posobiec’s opinions.

“It was highly dishonest, to put it mildly,” Spencer said.

Spencer said he had an “ongoing connection” with Posobiec over the years, but that the relationship was “not intimate.” Spencer described Posobiec as being “highly complimentary” to him “in a way that no conservative would be.”

Posobiec has documented ties to the alt-right dating back to his formative years at Rebel Media. In the most public example, he was fired for plagiarizing a video published by the organizer of the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Posobiec was also spotted sitting with Marcus Epstein, who was once charged with assault after karate-chopping a black woman and calling her a racial slur, during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s also tweeted anti-Semitic tropes (and since deleted those tweets).

Posobiec’s tie-ins to the alt-right are not entirely severed. In September, Posobiec released a book that Theodore Beale, an “alt-right” writer using the pseudonym “Vox Day,” edited and published. Beale has been openly identified as “alt-right” as recently as August 9, 2018.

mma

Right-wing media outlets The Daily Caller and the Washington Free Beacon have often acted as de facto press offices for Scott Pruitt's Environmental Protection Agency. Media Matters has documented how the two publications have defended Pruitt in the face of his many scandals and tried to discredit sources of information about his misdeeds. Now we learn from Washington Examiner reporter John Siciliano, who covers energy and environment for the conservative-leaning newspaper, that the EPA's press office tried to strong-arm him into writing flattering pieces about the agency and complained to his editors when he refused.

Speaking on June 11 on a panel about media coverage at a conference organized by Citizens' Climate Lobby, a nonpartisan climate activist group, Siciliano recounted the EPA’s attempts to coerce him and his paper to print favorable stories, which he described as “a really bizarre pressure play on their part that I’ve never experienced from an agency, a cabinet-level agency, to enforce an agenda on a journalist.” Siciliano also discussed how the agency referred to him in pejorative terms and pitted him against other journalists -- practices the agency has used against other environmental journalists.

From the June 11 panel titled “Covering Climate Change in the Current Political Landscape”:

....

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Stefan Halper was identified this week as the alleged “informant” who Donald Trump accused of spying on his 2016 presidential campaign and kicking off an FBI investigation into possible collusion with Russia.

But several weeks ago, a news outlet with deep ties to Trump himself had already identified Halper as the likely information. The Daily Caller, a right-leaning news outlet founded by Trump supporter and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, had actually reported back on March 25 that Halper had reached out to members of Trump’s campaign in an effort to learn about their communications with Russia.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-media-explodes-over-new-fbi-texts-misrepresents-facts

rare corrections?

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/one-right-wing-pundit-almost-singularly-responsible-taking-white-nationalism

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ref

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/16/daily-caller-has-white-nationalist-problem

no lnx img

The Daily Caller has a White Nationalist Problem

August 16, 2017

Stephen Piggott and Alex Amend

On Monday, August 14, the Daily Caller very quietly removed white nationalist Jason Kessler’s contributions to the publication after the violence and chaos in Charlottesville. The white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally was organized by Kessler.

But the white nationalist problem at Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, a conservative political outlet launched in 2010 as a “response” to the Huffington Post, is bigger than just Kessler. Throughout the 2016 election and since, the Daily Caller has not only published the work of white nationalists, but some of its writers have routinely whitewashed the Alt-Right, while one editor there is an associate of key Alt-Right figures. Two Daily Caller contributors, including a senior investigative reporter, were recently announced as speakers at the upcoming white nationalist H.L. Mencken Club conference organized by Paul Gottfried, a godfather of the Alt-Right.

Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief in November to start his own show on FOX News. In the top image, Carlson dedicated a segment on the anti-Muslim conspiracy of "creeping Sharia" on Tuesday, August 15, the day President Trump made another statement regarding the violence in Charlottesville, garnering criticism for ignoring the story. In the bottom image, Carlson aired an inflammatory anti-immigrant segment in July about a small Gypsy population in Pennsylvania.

As for recent Daily Caller contributors, take Peter Brimelow; the English white nationalist is the founder of the website VDARE, named after Virginia Dare, the supposed first white child born in the new world. VDARE is a major hub for white nationalists and anti-Semites. Brimelow is a leading figure on the Alt-Right and has been published three times in the Daily Caller in recent months, with his first piece coming in March defending Rep. Steve King, a hero to white nationalists, who recently tweeted, “Geert Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

A few years ago, the Daily Caller publishing the work of an established white nationalist would be unthinkable. Take the response from Washington, D.C., senior contributor Matt K. Lewis following the firing of white nationalist John Derbyshire from National Review in 2012 for writing a racist screed regarding the Trayvon Martin shooting titled, “The Talk: Nonblack Version.” The article, presented as conversation between a white parent and their child included lines like, “A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us.” It also included tips like, “If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date.” Lewis’ response in the Daily Caller to Derbyshire’s 2012 firing was, “Some people aren’t worth the [sic] fighting for. Some things are indefensible. This is one of those cases.”

Following his firing, Derbyshire joined VDARE as a regular contributor, and now his boss, Brimelow, is contributing articles to the Daily Caller.

But Brimelow is only a contributor. Despite his attempts to hide it, Daily Caller deputy editor Scott Greer has questionable ties to many younger members of the white nationalist movement. The activist website OverthrowDotCom published multiple photographs of Greer in late 2016 documenting his extensive relationships with other white nationalists. In the expose, mostly taken from Facebook, Greer is photographed with hardcore white nationalists such as Devin Saucier, a man who works as an assistant to Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. One of the most prominent white nationalists of the past quarter century, Taylor once wrote, "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears."

From right to left: Scott Greer, Ben Zapp, Devin Saucier, and Tim Dionisopoulos.

Saucier is a regular attendee at white nationalist gatherings, including Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute (NPI) conferences. Greer is also pictured with another white nationalist, Marcus Epstein, another friend of Spencer’s who pled guilty in 2009 to drunkenly assaulting an African American woman in Washington, D.C., which occurred two years prior.

Scott Greer in the middle in plaid facing the camera. Marcus Epstein is in the pink shirt.

Scott Greer in the red circle wearing a Youth For Western Civilization (YWC) shirt at a Wolves of Vinland gathering.

In these photos, Greer is seen wearing a Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) t-shirt. YWC is a now defunct white nationalist student group founded by Epstein and another white nationalist, Kevin DeAnna. DeAnna has been involved with the neo-volkisch collective called the Wolves of Vinland, and Greer has been photographed at a Wolves gathering with Saucier and others.

An active member of the Wolves is Maurice Michaely, a man who was sent to prison for burning down the black historical Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Haymarket, Virginia. According to the “Fools of Vinland” blog, Greer liked a picture of Michaely that was posted on Facebook in 2014, showing him in prison with the letters 666 scrawled onto his hand.

While Greer has scrubbed his Facebook page, his Twitter account still shows that he “follows” a number of white nationalists, including Tim Dionisopoulos of YWC who Greer is sometimes photographed with, as well as Richard Spencer and Steve Sailer of VDARE.

Scott Greer's Facebook profile featuring a photograph of him at the Daily Caller. Marcus Epstein left a comment as did Patrick Sharp, another white nationalist.

Greer’s writings also indicate his white nationalist views, though calibrated for a more mainstream conservative audience. He recently published a book, No Campus for White Men — an attack piece focused on the evergreen right-wing grievance of “political correctness” on college campuses — which received glowing reviews from white nationalist websites including VDARE, American Renaissance and Counter Currents. Greer, originally from Tennessee, published a staunch defense of the Confederate battle flag for the Daily Caller in July of 2016, writing that a National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples leader’s call to remove Confederate soldiers from a carving on Stone Mountain in Georgia was “remarkably similar to the tactics of jihadis like ISIS and the Taliban.” Other stories written by Greer for the Daily Caller include tropes that are often peddled by white nationalists including black-on-white crime, and that immigrants are bringing disease to the country.

In a 2014 piece, Greer dismissed an article in Time magazine on the threat right wing anti-government groups and individuals pose to law enforcement. “A thorough search of Time’s archive produced no stories about the threat that communists, black nationalists or prison gangs pose to police,” he claimed. In a May 2015 opinion piece, Greer heaped praise on St. Louis County district attorney Bob McCulloch for his handling of the Michael Brown case, despite McCulloch’s history of bias and the widespread criticism he received for his actions during the aftermath of the shooting.

One of Greer’s fixations is on downplaying the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. In a July 2015 opinion piece, Greer defended then-candidate Donald Trump who called Mexicans “criminals and rapists,” writing, ”Except that it’s still Hispanic men who are raping these women, and the countries where illegal immigrants primarily come from countries [sic] have sexual assault rates that dwarf the phony numbers for American universities. The eight-in-ten figure for migrant women proves that there is a very real rape culture among illegal immigrants, contrary to what some fact checkers might want you to believe.”

In a June 2015 piece, Greer again whitewashed sexual assault on campuses, writing, “[I]t’s the perverse fantasy that thousands of women will be raped at some point during their college years,” before making a statement that is often heard from Alt-Right misogynists. “On top of that,” Greer opines, “more innocent men will find themselves accused of these crimes and see their lives ruined by a culture that nurses and refuses to punish false rape accusations.”

The day after the 2016 election, Greer tweeted, “Now as a white man, I can finally feel safe in America.” Richard Spencer is clearly a fan of Greer’s, retweeting him a number of times....

Each year, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller marks “Equal Pay Day” by publishing a piece attacking the idea that women are paid less than men or trying to rationalize the pay gap.

This year, The Daily Caller criticized Google for highlighting the pay gap through Cheryl Sandburg’s Lean In initiative and a Funny or Die video about women being paid 20% less than men.

The piece, attributed to Carlson’s non-profit charity, the Daily Caller NewsFoundation, was illustrated with a photo of a woman “showered with money.”

The author, a recent college grad who is a Breitbart alum and former Koch intern, noted without irony that “the so-called wage gap only makes sense if hours worked, years of experience, and education of male and female laborers are considered.” It might help to read that “critique” again.

For good measure, the Daily Caller ran a second piece that day, a reprint of a blog claiming Elizabeth Warren paid women less than men. That spin bounced through the rightwing echo chamber from the Washington Free Beacon to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox, before it was refuted by Warren’s payroll data. No correction was issued by any of the outlets that spread the attack on Warren. (The Beacon has described itself as an “aerial hunting operation” and it has attacked watchdogs like the Center for Media and Democracy.)

But that’s par for the course for The Daily Caller. Though its website has more than 16 million visitors and a huge staff of writers who produce content for it through its non-profit the Daily Caller News Foundation, the site routinely relies on rightwing bloggers and groups to provide many of the “facts” it asserts as true in its news stories.

During the presidential election season, The Daily Caller was rife with articles attacking Hillary Clinton, including a piece by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF)that reinforced Trump’s nicknaming Clinton as “crooked,” which some might consider projection given his documented history of cheating contractors out of their full pay or the Trump University scam or more.

IWF’s smear piece published in The Daily Caller in the run-up to the presidential election could have been written this year about the policymaker-in-chief: “The bigger problem is that she doesn’t think the rules should apply to her in the first place. HRC – or Her Royal Crookness – sees herself as a Queen, existing in a realm above the minions who work for her, and even higher above her lowly subjects. Queens don’t have to bother with the system meant for ordinary schlubs. She doesn’t have to accept facts or findings; we peons are expected to accept her version of events, rather than trust our own lyin’ eyes.”

IWF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity that is theoretically barred from intervening in an election by criticizing the character of a candidate. That story by the head of IWF concludes with: “Americans recall that we are supposed to be a nation of laws, after all, and those laws are meant to apply to everyone, even those with titles like Secretary or Senator. That’s bad news for Her Royal Crookness, Hillary Clinton, who epitomizes the elitism that Americans resoundingly reject.” IWF has not issued, and The Daily Caller has not published, a follow-up on that take in light of Trump’s acts as president.

Last summer, CMD released a major report detailing IWF’s history and role in the War on Women, a story that was broken by Joan Walsh in The Nation. CMD also documented that almost all of the publicly known funders of the IWF”s affiliated (c)(4), the “Independent Women’s Voice,” were men. CMD also filed an FEC complaint against IWV last November contending that the group violated election laws, which IWV denies.

CMD also documented how as IWF was claiming there was no “war on women,” IWV was running ads and doing calls to aid politicians like Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that IWF has sponsored a forum where its panelists contended that “rape culture statistics have been blown out of proportion in the United States, and that this is largely a product of the media’s focus on rape and sexual assault.” That’s the description from The Daily Caller’s coverage of the event. Another piece, titled “Restraining Orders Hurt Women” also credited IWF’s analysis.

IWF, by the way, has opposed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) for years and its renewal, despite the strong support for its protections by groups that represent women’s interests in not getting killed by a violent partner. VAWA helps fund a coordinated community response to help women who are beaten, raped, or stalked–and it helps ensure that those restraining orders are enforced across jurisdictions to help protect women where ever they may flee for safety.

IWF’s out-of-step assertions as a mainstream “women’s voice” have found a ready distribution channel in The Daily Caller. Take, for example, an article headlined “Stay vertical a bit longer, ladies: Study claims men as winning the game of love,” which featured IWF’s claims about marriage and sex. IWF’s rep expressed concerns about women engaging in “commitment-less sex” because “when it comes to marriage there is certainly a marketplace and many factors have changed that marketplace.”

That Daily Caller story also cited the controversial academic Mark Regnerus, who as CMD recently noted, has “claimed, for example, that ‘liberal’ and ‘very liberal’ women want to have much more sex than other women [and to] speculate that liberal women want more sex than other women because they’re not religious enough.Specifically, Regnerus theorizes that sex provides the “transcendent” feeling others achieve through faith – that these liberal women are getting in bed, as it were, what they’re not getting in church. ‘Basically,’ Regnerus writes, ‘liberal women substitute sex for religion.’ (Insert obligatory ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ joke here.)”

It’s not just sex on the brain of The Daily Caller, which regularly features swimsuit models to peddle its spin, like its “story” minimizing the effects of climate change on the day Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris agreement: “These 14 Models Prepared for Trump to Drop the Climate Deal.” The text accompanying the slideshow stated: “As we approach President Trump’s decision on the Paris climate accord, we decided to turn our attention to the models out there who have been hoping for warmer temperatures.”

The Daily Caller’s news presentation has sought to undermine grassroots efforts to secure paid leave and increase the minimum wage. One example is their story “Social Justice Activists Want Olive Garden To Be Nicer to Cows Before Serving Them As Meatballs.” That story emphasized that “Thus far, the coalitions’ campaign is not going well. The group’s attempt to set up meetings with Darden in the fall was an abysmal failure. The company responded with a letter rebuffing meetings and generally rejecting the demands set forth.” Other pieces pushed the rightwing narrative that requiring paid sick leave and increasing the minimum wage would lead to higher unemployment rates.

The Daily Caller has even written against maternity leave pay. One such piece was written by the Independence Institute, which is part of the State Policy Network: “Mandated Paid Maternity Leave: A Bad Idea for Women.” That’s not the view of most women or even of most CEOs, as CMD revealed last year after it was given a detailed survey by Frank Luntz’s group showing overwhelming support for maternity leave, paid sick leave, raising the minimum wage.

That survey of 1,000 executives was commissioned to help the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its global corporate funders and its state affiliates in their efforts to defeat popular paid sick leave policies and efforts to increase the minimum wage. Luntz’s team said the problem was business leaders havetoo much “empathy.”

Another Daily Caller piece amplified the assertions of the controversial PR flack Rick Berman–who 60 Minutes helped dub “Dr. Evil”–that “The $15 Minimum Wage Could Lead to More Youth Crime.” Like IWF, the claims of Berman’s front groups get plenty of play in The Daily Caller. CMD recently detailed how Berman’s front groups are funded not just by corporations but also with millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, which also funds IWF’s promo of “free market” alternatives to paid sick leave and raises in the minimum wage. CMD also published the audio of Berman bragging about his tactics: “I get up every morning and I try and figure out how to screw with the labor unions” and “marginalize the people on the other side….”

CMD has previously refuted to The Daily Caller’s claims about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and its assertions on climate change and fracking, but has not responded to every erroneous claim the outlet has made about CMD. Among other things, like other rightwing outfits, the Daily Caller has repeated the claim that CMD is “Soros-funded,” even though CMD has pointed out that it is not funded by George Soros and was awarded a grant from the Open Society Institute several years ago as part of a set of grants to examine national security surveillance of Americans, along with a grant to the Kochs’ Cato Institute–which the Daily Caller has never called “Soros-funded.”

During CMD’s investigation of IWF, its researchers noted the wayThe Daily Caller was readily echoing IWF claims on numerous issues. That led CMD to take a closer look at The Daily Caller’s operations, which resulted in the investigation reported by the Washington Post on June 2, 2017. More details about that research, which showed that Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller had received a six-figure sum from the Trump Campaign in the weeks before the election, are availablehere.

As Callum Borchers noted in the Washington Post story,tax experts have expressed concerns about how Tucker Carlson’s charity benefits his for-profit media outlet,The Daily Caller, which profits from the web traffic and list-building resulting from its content, a substantial portion of which is provided by the non-profit. CMD has also noted that Carlson did not tell FOX News viewers that he had financially benefited from the Trump Campaign cash, as he critiqued other outlets for their purported bias against Trump or when he interviewed Trump for a primetime show on FOX this spring.

How much Carlson received in pay or bonuses from The Daily Caller last year after it received the money from the Trump Campaign is not known.

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/23/hundreds-scientists-urge-trump-withdraw-un-climate/

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batasch daily caller;

Hundreds of scientists and policy experts sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to withdraw from a major United Nations environmental treaty ratified during the Bush administration.

More than 300 eminent scientists signed the letter to Trump, delivered Thursday, arguing he should pull out of the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because it targets carbon dioxide — a gas essential for life.

CO2 “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth,” reads the petition, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Observations since the UNFCCC was written 25 years ago show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign — much less than initial model predictions.”

Trump promised to pull out of the Paris agreement on global warming, which went into effect in November 2016. President Barack Obama signed the U.S. up to cut greenhouse gases 26 to 28 percent.

The hundreds of scientists who signed the letter, however, argue that’s not far enough. Trump should pull out of the foundational treaty the Paris agreement is based on — the UNFCCC.

The UNFCCC’s focus on global warming is misguided because it targets CO2, which isn’t a pollutant, with the idea reducing it can stop global warming. Their plans aren’t supported by science, one petitioner argued in a letter.

“Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm—with no environmental benefits,” reads a separate letter written by Richard Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“While we support effective, affordable, reasonable and direct controls on conventional environmental pollutants, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” Lindzen wrote in his letter, supplementing the petition.

“To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison,” Lindzen wrote.

Increasingly, scientists are finding the world has actually greened in the past few decades largely due to increased CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 fertilization is even greening some of the world’s most arid regions.

It’s not clear when Trump plans on withdrawing from the Paris agreement, but some sources say executive orders on the matter could be coming in the next few weeks.

Obama never brought the Paris agreement before the Senate for ratification, so Trump can treat it as an executive agreement, rather than a treaty, and pull out without congressional consent.

Pulling out of the UNFCCC may be trickier. The Senate ratified the UNFCCC in 1992, and there’s not a ton of legal precedent on what the procedure would be for withdrawing from such a treaty.

The petition from Lindzen and others comes just two months after a group of 800 scientists called on Trump to stay party to the Paris agreement. Those scientists claim pulling out of Paris would “undermine our best chance to avoid dangerous climate change.”

“The United States will lose its seat of influence at the international negotiating table, and will cede to China, the EU, and other countries its authority as a political, technological, and moral leader,” scientist wrote to Trump in Decembe

:{

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/23/hundreds-of-scientists-urge-trump-to-pull-out-of-a-25-year-old-un-environmental-treaty/#ixzz4ZdaDaPVq}:

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http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/10/20/report-daily-caller-employees-were-embarrassed/183946

Last month, Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boylepublished a story that was basically catnip for the anti-regulation crowd. Citing a court brief from the Environmental Protection Agency, Boyle wrote that the EPA was "asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats -- at a cost of $21 billion -- to attempt to implement" new climate change regulations. Boyle also took to Twitter to broadcast how EPA administrator "LISA JACKSON wants an ARMY OF 230k BUREAUCRATS."

Predictably, the story got picked up by Fox News, the office of Sen. James Inhofe, and the usual climate-change-denial suspects. Unfortunately for them, Boyle's story was 100% false. Boyle completely misread the court brief, which detailed how the EPA had avoided the scenario he described.

Boyle's misfire was widely ridiculed, but rather than admit fault and correct the error, the Daily Caller stuck to their guns. Executive editor David Martosko compounded the damage to the publication's credibility by issuing a snide comment to Politico and following that with a misleading editor's note on the Caller website.

Apparently outside observers weren't the only ones aghast at Daily Caller's complete lack of standards. According to a report this morning by FishbowlDC's Betsy Rothstein, "newsroom sources" at the Caller were dismayed by Martosko's defense of Boyle's "pointedly bogus" story and "feared their reputations would be sullied by the widespread negative attention":

Martosko has undoubtedly been a controversial figure from the start. Newsroom sources say his profound defense of reporter Matthew Boyle and his recent EPA piece troubled reporters who believed the story was false and feared their reputations would be sullied by the widespread negative attention the ordeal received in publications such as Politico and parts of the right-wing media. They couldn't conceive why their editor was defending a story many considered pointedly bogus.

I suppose it's slightly reassuring that at least some people at the Caller are capable of acknowledging facts and reality -- too bad their executive editor doesn't seem to be one of them.

UPDATE (11/18):Politico reports that the EPA debacle "has raised larger questions" about the "rigor" of Daily Caller's reporting:

Five months after Martosko's hiring, that spur-of-the-moment decision is looking less inspired. Martosko's background and approach to the job - particularly his decision to run, and then double down on, an erroneous report that the Environmental Protection Agency was proposing to hire 230,000 new employees - has embarrassed some Daily Caller staffers and contributed to their departures. And it has raised larger questions about whether Carlson is serious about his promise of a publication that may approach stories with a conservative point of view, but is dedicated to reporting them out with the same rigor as the New York Times.

The EPA story was published in September and ended up as a Drudge-linked and Fox-fueled viral hit cited by members of Congress.

[...]

[A]s the Daily Caller took round after round of fire in the left-leaning blogosphere over the story and Martosko defiantly stood by the story in a subsequent editor's note, some staffers cringed.

"People were just really embarrassed, and a lot of us were upset with how it was being handled," one former staffer told POLITICO.

===

DC is an aggregator? so i don't tend to report their stuff much; promoted to primary, as it has eclipsed drudge and breitbart?

eg judicial watch ~ HC

==

front page horowtiz republished arctic ice bs

calls itself Daily Caller NEWS FOUNDATION

and yet behold the commerce:

Send tips to craig@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Tags: Arctic, Environment, Global Warming

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ou may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I'm a sociopath and blah blah blah," says Charles C. Johnson. Peter Duke

Update, 5/26/2015: On Monday, Twitter permanently suspended Chuck Johnson’s Twitter account, as well as another account, @citizentrolling, he set up in response to the initial suspension. The suspension came in response to a tweet Johnson sent out asking for help “taking out” activist civil rights activist DeRay McKesson. (Johnson has said he was merely referring to his reporting and was not making a physical threat.) You can read his lawyer’s letter to Twitter demanding immediate reinstatement here. Read the original piece below:

Hours before I was due to hop in a rental car to drive to his home last week, Charles C. Johnson laid down a new ground rule: He would talk only if I promised not to mention he lived in Fresno. The internet was full of crazy people, after all.

We'd originally arranged to meet weeks before he launched a one-man crusade to out "Jackie," the woman at the heart of Rolling Stone's flawed investigation into campus rape at the University of Virginia. There were already many other examples of his antagonistic brand of online dirt-flinging to discuss. Johnson, a tireless self-promoter, seemed eager to speak—or spar—face-to-face; he even offered to let me stay at his place in California. Now he was asking for privacy.

It was an odd request, considering that the Washington Post had just reported where Johnson lived? and his location was posted on his Twitter page at the time. Not to mention that he had recently published the home addresses of two New York Times reporters? and he'd just spent two days gleefully airing personal information about a woman he'd never met. ("I'm giving Jackie until later tonight to tell the truth and then I'm going to start revealing everything about her past," he'd taunted her on Twitter.) Johnson was asking for a degree of respect that he relishes in denying others.

I didn't agree to Johnson's ground rule, but he agreed to see me anyway. After five hours in the car, I arrived at my motel to find a fresh set of emails. We could talk, but only if we didn't go anywhere near his house. On second thought, we couldn't meet in person at all—he'd traipsed off to LA for some meetings and was planning on staying for another day to do a TV interview. I'd already rearranged my flights after he had forgotten I was coming. Now I'd been snubbed for Larry King.

"I suppose there's some people who think it's ironic or whatever," Johnson said about his desire to conceal his whereabouts when we finally spoke by phone. "I'm just trying not to make it easy on people. There's a reason I own several guns."

Johnson had almost immediately called BS on Rolling Stone's investigation after it was published in late November. ("That UVA story about that gang rape never happened. We all know it. Why can't we say it?" he tweeted.) Like most of the story's skeptics, Johnson zeroed in on its central anecdote, in which a student named Jackie described a brutal gang rape at a fraternity. Johnson hammered the article's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, searching for holes in her previous reporting and wondering whether she was friends with her former University of Pennsylvania classmate, journalistic fabricator Stephen Glass.? After RS conceded that it had found "discrepancies" in Erdely's reporting, Johnson offered a cash reward to anyone who could tell him who Jackie really was.

Two days later, Johnson published what he claimed was Jackie's full name at his website, GotNews.com. Then he published photos from her "rape obsessed" Pinterest page. He told me that he paid $200 for the information that led to her.

"It'd be very easy to write a 'Fuck Charles Johnson' piece, and in many respects, however you write the story, it doesn't hurt me either way."

It was a characteristic performance from the 26-year-old provocateur, who is impatient with journalistic ethics and possessed with an insatiable appetite for personal destruction. He is a subject of mockery on the left and the right due to his blustery self-promotion ("I'm making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who is naughty…"), baseless speculation (he thinks Barack Obama may be secretly gay), and regular face plants. Last week, he mistakenly claimed to have found a photo of Jackie at an anti-rape rally; it was someone else. Still, he defended his "batting average." (The woman in the photo says she will sue Johnson.) But he is adept at digging up dirt on public and private figures, and even when he's at his most egregious, he's hard to ignore.

His other recent antics have included suing for access to Mike Brown's juvenile records, making the unproven claim that the Ferguson police shooting victim had once been charged in a second-degree murder.? Citing police sources, he accused "street thug" Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died after being put in a chokehold by a New York City police officer, of domestic abuse. He incorrectly reported that New Jersey had an Ebola case; he then reported that a nurse quarantined in the state was a "left-wing Democrat." He hijacked the Mississippi Republican primary by offering $1,000 for photos of Sen. Thad Cochran's wife, who was in a nursing home. And he's trained his sights on other journalists, such as Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post, whom Johnson said was "obsessed with race" and had shown "overt friendliness in his reporting about Michael Brown." Johnson revealed that Lowery had once received a speeding ticket. "We are going to use auctions to set the price on the head of each journalist we take down," he tweeted.

Besides Twitter, Johnson's primary platform is GotNews, a crowd-funded startup he launched in early 2014 after denouncing the "stenography" of traditional insider media. "I don't do the 'being a bitch for the establishment' thing which a lot of Republicans do," he told me. "I go where the story leads." While he claims to be an "equal opportunity debunker," Johnson's stories often lead back to familiar targets—lefty activists, "lying women and thuggish black men," elitist journalists, and the mainstream conservatives he believes have screwed him over.

"It'd be very easy to write a 'Fuck Charles Johnson' piece, and in many respects, however you write the story, it doesn't hurt me either way," Johnson told me. "You may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I'm a sociopath and blah blah blah. Or, on the other hand, that I'm 'working on some new entity that's going to be controversial.' There's a degree to which, however you turn the lens, both things will be true."

The Rolling Stone-UVA debacle is the perfect scandal for Johnson, he explained on Twitter, because it combines his "three favorite types of frauds: college administrators, campus feminists, & fake journalists."? It was a clue to Johnson's evolution: His current role stems directly from his days as a campus gadfly, the conservative kid who was obsessed with tweaking political correctness and fixated on grudges and gossip.

The chip on his shoulder dates back to at least high school, when Johnson, the son of two teachers from a working-class part of Boston, attended prestigious Milton Academy on a scholarship. He gravitated toward politics, and when someone on a Young Republicans online forum posted a quote from former Education Secretary Bill Bennett positing that aborting black babies would drive down the crime rate, Johnson sprang to his friend's defense. "Despite being called a Nazi repeatedly, I defended free speech and said that given what I had read about the African subcontinent and the successes of black Americans (despite their high crimes [sic] rates), I found myself rather privileged to be living in America," he later wrote.

In the ensuing controversy, which drew the attention of the Boston Globe, minority students took a vow of silence, classes were canceled, and the school held a special assembly to screen the movie Crash. It had all the trappings of a Johnson controversy—an inflammatory comment involving race, his own sense of persecution, and an empty threat of legal action (he believed the school had not treated him fairly, but opted not to sue).

Johnson came into his own as a right-wing enfant terrible at Claremont McKenna College, a Southern California liberal-arts school, which he attended between 2007 and 2011. He wrote a blog called the Claremont Conservative, where he pilloried campus figures in increasingly hostile fashion, getting himself named "Most likely to take over the world" by the student newspaper and becoming infamous enough to inspire a Twitter account? dedicated to ending his "reign of terror."

"On Twitter, like, I have a certain kind of personality, a pugnaciousness, like an alter ego… like when Spider-Man puts on the costume."

I spoke with several former classmates who knew Johnson but were afraid to go on the record for fear of becoming his next target. Those concerns were probably not misplaced. Last week, Johnson posted an open letter on Facebook to his fellow Claremont alums, telling them to bug off: "Now that I have some measure of notoriety and success, I do not owe you phone calls or responses to your condescending 'concern' for me. Please know that most of these emails will be deleted or archived. Some will be openly mocked. Others may be retweeted or written about in future things."

In one typical dustup, the editor of the student newspaper, Ross Boomer, deleted a comment Johnson had left on a pro-gay-marriage article. In a subsequent comment, he said he'd been censored because Boomer was gay. At the time, Boomer had come out to his college friends but not to his family, and he believed that Johnson was trying to out him. Johnson told me the incident has been "exaggerated," and that he didn't realize Boomer's sexuality was private because he had been "like running around being gay on campus."

Another student newspaper editor named Michael Wilner got it even worse. Johnson published a series of posts rehashing Wilner's run-ins with the law over a couple of misdemeanors. (His record has since been expunged.) Even after they had both graduated, Johnson wouldn't let it go: In 2013, Johnson wrote an article for the Daily Caller? in which he reprised his claims against Wilner, who had since become the Washington, DC, bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post. In March, he tweeted that Wilner should be banned from Saudi Arabia due to his past. Wilner declined to comment for this article.

Johnson's biggest target at Claremont was Bassam Frangieh, a professor of Arabic best known for teaching poetry. Johnson accused him of supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, based on a trove of writings and petitions that Johnson had "translated by three different translators at considerable personal expense.?" He added that all of his allegations had been reviewed before publication by his mentor, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, for whom he had worked as a researcher when he was in high school. Asked about Johnson, Dershowitz responded in an email, "We disagree about many issues but I admire his principled opposition to all things politically correct and his determination to be heard and to make a difference." Frangieh, who is still at Claremont, declined to comment for this story.

The lesson from Johnson's college years was a valuable one: Vendettas go viral. His stories, which fit neatly into the conservative narrative that diversity and political correctness are concealing the truth about campus leftists run amok, got him noticed. He wrote about Frangieh for National Review? and Breitbart, and landed an internship at the Wall Street Journal on the strength of his Claremont Conservative scoops.

Johnson's post-graduation freelance pieces for Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Glenn Beck's the Blaze were united by a promise that somewhere out there existed some piece of dirt—a video, a thesis, a long-lost gay roommate—that, if revealed, would knock down the facade of lies created by the liberal establishment and its media allies. His biggest scoop was a report suggesting that then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker didn't actually live in Newark. Booker knocked the story down by releasing corroborating documents, and the Caller took a hit for not disclosing that Johnson had been a paid opposition researcher for a PAC supporting Booker's opponent in the New Jersey Senate race.

Johnson's investigations often hinged on race. He reported that Obama had told his law school students there is "institutional racism" in American society. He dug up an essay that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro wrote about his mother, Rosie, a Chicano activist. Johnson discovered that United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice had once argued at Stanford that white people should have to study black history. He uncovered that Mo Cowan, an African American lawyer who had been temporarily appointed to Sen. John Kerry's vacant Senate seat in 2013, had once helped organize "takeovers" in which black people would go to Boston bars and restaurants and…buy drinks.

Johnson boasts that he wants to do for conservatives what Romney's "47 percent" comments did for the left in 2012.

He also continued to take on other journalists. He penned a report for the Daily Caller on David Kirkpatrick, after the New York Times reporter published a lengthy investigation into the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. According to Johnson, Kirkpatrick had been busted for public nudity while he was a student at Princeton. That was true, but much of the rest of the piece, which detailed Kirkpatrick's collegiate hijinks and an appearance in Playgirl, was cribbed from a satirical Daily Princetonian story. Johnson told me that he has trouble recognizing satire because he is mildly autistic. Though he personally wasn't worked up about Benghazi, he was smart enough to know, as a contractor getting paid by the click, that the Caller's audience was.

"I was with Charles when he was right (which was usually) and with him when he was wrong (which was more frequently than is optimal)," writes Tim Cavanaugh, Johnson's former story editor at the Caller, in an email. Cavanaugh, now at National Review Online, does not hesitate to praise Johnson: "He is a constantly interesting journalist who is worth paying attention to more often than not. He was well worth the effort and cash the Caller put in for his work." In an email, Daily Caller founder and Editor in Chief Tucker Carlson confirmed that Johnson had a freelancing arrangement and was not a full-time employee, but otherwise declined to comment.

But Johnson increasingly felt like he was being constrained by his editors at the Caller and other sites, who encouraged him to tone down his tweets. In early 2014, after the Caller stopped publishing him, he devoted himself to working full time on GotNews. His first big project was in Mississippi, where Republican Sen. Thad Cochran was facing a tough primary against a tea party challenger in the summer. Johnson paid a black pastor to allege that Cochran had illegally relied on black Democratic voters in the Republican primary. The pastor later recanted; Cochran was reelected in November. Johnson's still pissed off about it; he told me he'd like GotNews to "curb-stomp" mainstream Republicans like former party chair Haley Barbour, with whom he'd clashed with in Mississippi.

Those attitudes and tactics have alienated Johnson from his conservative colleagues. A Washington Examiner story last Wednesday featured a half-dozen conservative writers venting about the damage Johnson is doing to right-wing journalism. The Daily Caller's Matt K. Lewis has argued that writing about Johnson would only encourage "more bloggers threatening to expose the identities of an alleged rape victims [sic]." Yet perhaps no outlet has done more to encourage Johnson's habits than the Caller, which recently published a rambling speculation about Lowery's racial identity that was inspired by the GotNews report on his speeding ticket.

It's a mistake to think that Charles Johnson came out of nowhere. He honed his style as a regular contributor for the Caller and Andrew Breitbart's website. His first book, an ode to President Calvin Coolidge, was blurbed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Fox News pundit Michelle Malkin, and torture-memo author and University of California-Berkeley law professor John Yoo. His stuff was featured on Fox News, and he spoke at the Heritage Foundation. At first, when he started scoring Drudge links and embarrassing Democrats, Johnson's escapades were very useful to a lot of people in conservative circles. Now no one knows how to make him go away.

In a series of phone conversations, Johnson was civil, trying, perhaps a little too hard, to frame his work as a nonpartisan quest to "disrupt" the powers that be. This was not the unhinged Johnson of Twitter, who had justified doxing Jackie by noting that a friend of his had called her a "lying bitch." He had a ready explanation for this—it's performance art. "On Twitter, like, I have a certain kind of personality, a pugnaciousness, like an alter ego," he said. "You know, like when Spider-Man puts on the costume, for instance, he's no longer a mild-mannered photographer. He has an attitude. I do that because I want my content to really go viral."

But even a put-on online persona can have real-life consequences for the people sucked into its maw. Twitter's policies state that users who "engage in targeted abuse or harassment" are subject to permanent suspension. Johnson's Rolling Stone-UVA tweets and the stories they link to have prompted a calls for his account to be suspended. It's happened three times already, if only temporarily. His most recent suspension came after GotNews published the home addresses of Campbell Robertson and Julie Bosman, New York Times reporters who had sinned in Johnson's eyes by publishing the name of the street on which Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson lived. After the GotNews story went up, both reporters received threats and had to leave their homes. (An Illinois woman named Julie Bosma also received threats.) Johnson's defense was that he didn't directly post the reporters' information on Twitter, but only linked to it on GotNews. The stunt prompted New York Times media columnist David Carr to dub Johnson a "troll on steroids."

"I'm just trying not to make it easy on people. There's a reason I own several guns."

While Johnson's rise was made possible by new and old conservative institutions, he now exists in the no-man's-land occupied by Gamergate trolls and fellow troublemaker James O'Keefe. That's fine with him. GotNews functions as a mash-up of Reddit and TaskRabbit, with Johnson offering his network of "independent researchers" cash bounties for solving "puzzles" he throws at them—like taking down Jackie. "You get all these hobbyists and amateurs and people out there who have a lot of time on their hands, many of whom are retired, or they're a mother, their kids are sleeping while they're researching, they're stay-at-home moms, or they're college students, or they're unemployed, or this is their moonlighting thing," he explained. "All those people are starting to find one another, and many of those people are starting to find one another through me." (He runs a side business, CCJ Strategies, which does oppo research for companies and campaigns. He hopes to integrate it with GotNews in the future.)

When we spoke, Johnson was thinking about how to turn his current momentum into something more sustainable. He was in Southern California for a series of meetings with potential investors. He sounded almost drunk on success, boasting that he wanted to do for conservatives what Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments had done for the left in 2012. "The day Jeb Bush announces for president is the day I publish his mistress's name," he promised on Twitter. (He considers Cruz the "least dirty" of the 2016 field.)

With his site's traffic spiking and the Rolling Stone story crumbling more every day, Johnson's head was spinning with possibilities. "I wanna do a Kickstarter for leaks," he told me. "Right now there's essentially no mechanism to financially reward whistleblowers…Basically there's no mechanism to reward those people for giving up the information. And I want to kind of fix that." It sounded almost altruistic. But Johnson's vision would essentially monetize the kinds of privacy invasion and harassment that mark the dark side of citizen muckraking and have made the internet such an unwelcoming place for many people—particularly young women.

And the kind of petty score-settling Johnson specializes in goes both ways. On Tuesday, Deadspin floated an old college rumor that Johnson had once defecated on a dormitory floor at Claremont. When Johnson tweeted on Friday that he's considering a run for Congress, the first reply suggested his campaign slogan could be "Outing rape victims and pooping on the floor since 2014. Vote for me." Of course, I had to ask him about the allegations. "For the record, I did not shit on the seventh floor, but I wish I did," he told me.

And sometime after he revealed Jackie's name, he began to worry about the deranged critics who had begun doxing his family and sending him threatening messages. For a moment, Charles Johnson had gotten a taste of what it's like to feel the wrath of Charles Johnson.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/sorry-daily-caller-sea-level-rise-is-real-and-miami-isnt-just-sinking-because-of-too-many-condos-8594225

Sorry, Daily Caller, Sea-Level Rise Is Real and Miami Isn't Just "Sinking" Because of Too Many Condos

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016 AT 10 A.M. BY JERRY IANNELLI

Sorry, Daily Caller, Sea-Level Rise Is Real and Miami Isn't Just "Sinking" Because of Too Many Condos

This past Sunday, the Daily Caller, the right-wing news site run by former CNN talking bow tie Tucker Carlson, did Miami a huge favor: The site fixed our long-term issues with sea-level-rise in a single article. Huzzah!

According to the Caller, man is not melting the polar ice caps, and Miami is not actually getting swallowed by the world's ever-rising seas. Instead, the entire South Florida landmass is apparently "sinking" into the ocean because we've actually just built way too much stuff and put too many people on top of the land.

Unfortunately, Miami Beach officials tell New Times the Daily Caller's "Miami Beach is sinking" conspiracy theory is completely inaccurate.

OK, so we need to address some very basic factual inaccuracies in the Caller piece upfront: The writer, Craig Boudreau from Alexandria, Virginia (who refers to himself online as a "musically illiterate musician"), begins by confusing the separate cities of Miami and Miami Beach in paragraph three.

In a cruel twist of irony, Boudreau opens the piece by criticizing a Grist article that — wait for it — accurately quoted from New Times' own reporting on sea-level rise. Boudreau claims Miami Beach Public Relations Manager Melissa Berthier — whom he inaccurately lists as working for the City of Miami and/or Miami-Dade County — told him the streets of Miami Beach flood only twice a year, during "king tides."

This is wrong, because (A) anyone who's ever lived in Miami Beach can tell you the streets flood more often than that, and (B) because we actually spoke to Berthier, who says, in no uncertain terms, that the Daily Caller misquoted her but refuses to correct the story.

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"Flooding occurs in South Florida during extreme tidal and rain events," she says in an email. "Not solely during 'king tides,' as quoted." Berthier says she contacted the Daily Caller yesterday morning to outline the stream of inaccuracies in the piece, but as of presstime, the story stands unchanged. Boudreau did not respond to an email from New Times.

But more important: The crux of the entire piece also rests on a government study on "land subsidence" (read: sinkage) in the Everglades ecosystem — the writer somehow includes the paved, condominium-covered cities of Miami and Miami Beach within that ecosystem, which is so obviously incorrect it borders on outright fabrication.

According to a United States Geological Survey study, the land within the Everglades actually does appear to be "subsiding," due to too much development sucking water out of the soil, thus leading to collapse. But the study does not, in any way, imply that any of South Florida's coastal cities are sinking into the sea — yet the Daily Caller, however, somehow claims that subsidence is affecting "all of South Florida," and implies that Miami is crumbling into the ocean.

"As populations increase, the need for industry does as well," Boudreau wrote. "That means more water is drawn from the ground for industrial purposes. Add the weight of an increased population and you have a recipe for subsidence. Water that once filled areas underground is now gone, and the land settles into these new hollow spaces."

Reached by phone, Miami Beach Director of Environment and Sustainability Elizabeth Wheaton says she's seen no evidence that Miami Beach is "sinking." (She could not comment about the City of Miami.) Though she did say some cities, especially ones in the Northeast, are dealing with sea-level rise and land subsidence, she says it's wholly inaccurate to claim Miami Beach is, in any way, sinking into the ocean.

"What you’re seeing in the Everglades is a completely different ecosystem," she says. "The writer was misunderstanding what that article was about. In Miami Beach, our city surveyor is out there every day, working in the city, and he has not observed subsidence or any changes in elevation."

As for any skeptics who claim it would be impossible to know whether the sea was rising or the land was sinking, Wheaton says land surveyors use fixed "control points" to ensure they're getting an accurate read on the rising seas.

"There's so much misinformation about what’s happening," Wheaton says. "That’s what breeds the skepticism. It's so important as a region that we go beyond the conversation of if it’s happening to how, as a region, we need to be preparing."

Then, she says flatly: "The sea levels are rising."

In addition to being upset that she was misquoted, Berthier says she's annoyed that climate-change deniers unk information to hold onto, especially because her communication team is working round-the-clock to spread accurate information about sea-level rise.

"It irritates us," she says. "People read that stuff on the web and think it’s true."

==

hipster beartd aviator shades bood music

follows

elizabeth ray

@eraycrc:{

CRC Public Relations Vice President of Accounts

}:

==

also by craig:

Study: Marijuana Makes People Less Aggressive

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A new study, fittingly done by the Netherlands and published in the journal Psychopharmacology, says that alcohol increases aggressive tendencies, while marijuana decreases them.

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==

NEW YORK -– The Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, denied Friday that his news site paid Dominican lawyer Melanio Figueroa to find women who would lie about having sex with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), an allegation that had surfaced in a Washington Post article.

“It seems clear to me Figueroa is under pressure to change his story,” Carlson said in a statement provided to The Huffington Post. “What I know for certain is this claim is a lie. The Daily Caller never paid anyone, was never asked to pay anyone and of course never would pay anyone for this story.”

On Nov. 1, The Daily Caller reported the claims of two women from the Dominican Republic on video that Menendez had paid them for sex. But the unsubstantiated allegations against Menendez had initially been pushed more than six months earlier, beginning with an anonymous tipster contacting the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and later operatives approaching several news organizations.

HuffPost has reported that both The New York Post and New Jersey’s Star-Ledgerinvestigated the claimslast summer but did not find enough information to warrant writing stories. CREW, which lacked the resources to adequately investigate the claims, reached out to ABC News, which then tried confirming them to no avail.

On the same day that The Daily Caller — a conservative site co-founded by Carlson in 2010 — interviewed two of the alleged prostitutes by Skype, ABC News reporters spoke to all three. HuffPost has reported that ABC News was approached about doing the interviews in mid-October, and ABC has described those arranging the interviews as Republican operatives. ABC News indicated that it was not convinced by the women’s accounts because “none of the women could produce identity cards with their names, and they all provided the same story almost word for word, as if they had been coached.”

The Daily Caller was supposed to interview a third woman that day, but said it could not because a laptop battery in the Dominican Republic died.

While ABC News didn’t trust the women’s accounts, The Daily Caller quickly completed and published a story. Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart News reporter who wrote the original Menendez piece while at The Daily Caller, began reaching out to the senator’s staff for comment around 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 31, the day of the interviews. The Drudge Report began teasing a supposed “scandal” that evening, with The Daily Caller publishing its Menendez story around 1:40 a.m. on Nov. 1.

Given that the prostitute allegations were never substantiated, many news organizations did not cover them and recent reporting only gives more reason to doubt their veracity.

On Monday, the Associated Press reportedthat “three women were paid to falsely claim in videotaped interviews that they had sex for money” with Menendez, according to a spokesman for the police conducting an investigation in the Dominican Republic. The AP wrote that authorities were seeking to interrogate Figueroa.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Figueroa said a foreign man identifying himself as “Carlos” had “offered him $5,000 to find and pay women” to make such claims against the senator, according to the district attorney for the La Romana region.

“The accusations made Thursday by Melanio Figueroa about The Daily Caller are categorically false,” The Daily Caller said in its own statement on Friday. “At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation, nor did anyone named Carlos travel to the Dominican Republic on behalf of The Daily Caller. As recently as two weeks ago, Figueroa was on record with another news outlet as saying the women he represented were telling the truth about their initial allegations against Senator Mendendez [sic].”

ABC News reported Friday that Figueroa “has given contradictory public statements about the incident over the last several weeks,” while also providing more details about the name “Carlos” coming up in conjunction with the Oct. 31 interviews.

When asked about “Carlos” during the interviews, one of the women said, “He says he works for a newspaper or something like that.”

At the time, “Carlos” was described to ABC News by the lawyer Figueroa as an associate who was in charge of organizing the interviews via a Skype hook-up. There was no mention made of any connection between “Carlos” and The Daily Caller.

The Skype address used by ABC News to make contact in the Dominican Republic included the names Carlos and Martinez. A message sent by ABC News Thursday to the same Skype address seeking comment has not been returned.

A Republican operative who insisted on anonymity made the introduction between ABC News and Figueroa and “Carlos.”

The Daily Callerpublished its own story Friday on Figueroa, reporting that the lawyer “blamed four news outlet — CNN, The Daily Caller, Telemundo and Univision — for allegedly encouraging him to fabricate false accusations about Menendez.” According to The Daily Caller’s story, Univision reported Thursday night that Figueroa claimed he had been paid $5,000, which he used to find the three women.

The Daily Caller also included a statement from Univision noting that the Spanish-language network characterized “Figueroa’s claims as absolutely ridiculous, utterly false” and that the network has not had contact with the lawyer.

During an interview last month with HuffPost, prior to reports of the women being paid to make claims against Menendez, Carlson explained why The Daily Caller ran a story on the Menendez allegations and responded to criticism for doing so.

“We interviewed a couple of prostitutes on tape who said they, you know, knew Menendez and he was hiring hookers and having sex with them,” Carlson said. “That seemed like a story to me. I don’t know how you wouldn’t run that. And we were attacked for it. ... I actually don’t care that much, because I just assume that people are going to dismiss some of our reporting because they don’t like my politics. There’s nothing I can do about that, so I try not to pay attention.”

huffpo

==

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for allegedly stacking a scientific advisory panel on air pollution with researchers who had received more than $190 million in grants from the agency.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (EELI) is suing EPA on behalf of the Western States Trucking Association and Dr. James Enstrom, a retired University of California-Los Angeles epidemiologist who was blacklisted for challenging EPA claims about particulate matter.

“The EPA has stacked the panel, which is required by law to be independent and unbiased, with researchers who have received over $190 million in discretionary grants from the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, an attorney with EELI, in a statement.

“This clearly violates the law and makes a mockery of the notion of ‘independent’ scientific review,” he said....

==

5/16

http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/01/warren-buffett-tells-greenie-crusaders-to-buzz-off-at-berkshire-annual-meeting/

Warren Buffett and shareholders with Berkshire Hathaway overwhelmingly rejected a resolution Saturday asking the holding company to write reports on the risks so-called man-made global warming causes to insurance companies.

The rejection came despite a strong campaign push on behalf of the resolution from NASA climate scientist James Hansen, Illinois State University professor and insurance expert Jim Jones, and activists from environmentalist group Nebraskans for Peace.

Tens of thousands of environmentalists associated with Nebraskans for Peace, as well as many others, spent their Saturday listening to the hours-long annual meeting in Omaha, which was composed mostly of discussions between Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger over business minutia.

Buffett eventually got down to brass tacks on the climate change report, telling activists at the meeting he is standing firm on his decision to nix the climate change report resolution. He said he believes global warming is an important issue but ultimately doesn’t think it poses a threat to Berkshire’s insurance businesses....

Buffett also defended NV Energy, an energy group he founded that won a battle over Elon Musk’s SolarCity following Nevada’s decision to introduce sharp cutbacks to its net metering program in December.

If the billionaire’s decision to nix the climate resolution was a poke in the collective eye of all climate justice warriors, then surely remarks defending earlier decision to reduce solar panel subsidies will be seen as an all out assault on the environment.

Net metering policies force utility companies in Nevada, which Berkshire Hathaway owns, to purchase electricity produced by rooftop solar panels at triple retail rates, which makes it difficult for Nevada’s utility company to the cover the costs of a fixed electrical grid.

Buffett, for his part, said at the annual meeting that people with rooftop solar power systems were allowed to sell power to the utility at exaggerated rates, which, he said, had the effect of forcing other ratepayers to subsidize the niche group of people leasing solar panels.

In a similar move, Berkshire Hathaway-owned PacifiCorp, an Oregon electrical utility company, managed to notch out a victory when it successfully lobbied to change the state’s net metering policies. The company is now able to ratchet down the amount of green electricity it is required to purchase from rooftop solar companies.

==

12. Ted Nugent: Wildlife Populations “Actually Increase” Because Of Energy Development. In a column for The Daily Caller, National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent falsely claimed that wildlife populations “actually increase and expand” in areas where pipelines, oil drilling, fracking, coal mining, and other forms of energy production occur. The next day, Nugent posted to Facebook that he wanted to drive “over the rotting corpses” of “algore [sic] & all the pathetic greenies.”

==

Climate scientists refuse to debate global warming ‘skeptics’ in the media

Posted By Michael Bastasch On 12:54 AM 03/24/2014 In | No Comments

Climate scientists and environmentalists are venting their frustrations debating those who are skeptical of man-made global warming — and some have even gone so far as to refuse debating skeptics.

Dan Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress, refused to appear on Fox Business to debate climate skeptic Marc Morano last week. Morano runs the blog Climate Depot, where he reports on environment and climate news. (RELATED: ‘Suffocating pressure’: Former Center for American Progress describes White House censorship)

Weiss was set to debate Morano on the show “The Independents” but “refused to debate directly with Morano, and chided [the show] for airing his views,”according to the Fox Business show.

“In what is part of a growing trend,  yet another global warming activist ducked a TV debate,” Morano told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Weiss and other activists claim the debate is so settled that granting a skeptic ‘equal time’ does some type of disservice to ‘science.’ Climate activists want to impose everything from carbon taxes,  UN treaties, cap-and-trade,  EPA regulations, light bulb restrictions, automobile regulations,  even our bedtimes — yet they will not debate the basis for these actions.” (RELATED: Scientists: Government agencies use the peer review process to squash dissent)

“I have had many debate cancellations previously,” Morano added. “In 2010, I was set to debate Hollywood producer James Cameron after weeks of negotiations, only to have the debate cancelled at the last moment when my plane landed in Colorado for the debate.”

Weiss isn’t the only proponent of man-made global warming that has refused to debate a climate skeptic. Last year, Fox Business host John Stosselasked about a dozen climate scientists to debate skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist who now teaches at the University of Alabama.

Stossel also asked the environmental group the Union of Concerned Scientists if they would debate Spencer on TV. Stossel said UCS replied that debating Spencer “would be doing the public a disservice because it would give [his] extreme ideas credibility.” NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies climate scientist Gavin Schmidt did go on that episode but only after Spencer was no longer on the set.

As the debate surrounding global warming has intensified this past year, some news outlets have opted not to provide a platform for climate skeptics. Most recently, the BBC Scotland has barred debates between climate scientists and skeptics from being aired.

The Daily Mail reports: “A BBC executive in charge of editorial standards has ordered programme editors not to broadcast debates between climate scientists and global warming sceptics.”

Alasdair MacLeod, who is head of editorial standards and compliance for BBC Scotland, sent an email in February to senior producers and editors, saying that “we should not run debates / discussions directly between scientists and sceptics.”

Last year, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would not be publishing letters to the editor that were critical of the theory of man-made global warming because the evidence provided by scientists suggests that human activity is warming the planet.

“I’m no expert when it comes to our planet’s complex climate processes or any scientific field,” wrote Paul Thornton, the Times’ letter editor. “Consequently, when deciding which letters should run among hundreds on such weighty matters as climate change, I must rely on the experts — in other words, those scientists with advanced degrees who undertake tedious research and rigorous peer review.”

Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contactlicensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The Daily Caller abandoned an attempt to accuse the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer of plagiarism, including in her comprehensive expose of Koch Industries. Tucker Carlson, who runs the Daily Caller, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, which has received over $5.5 million from Koch foundations since 1997. Charles Koch co-founded Cato, and Cato’s directors include David Koch and Kevin Gentry of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

==

raised 3 mil, cpac?

The Daily Caller

Main article: The Daily Caller

On January 11, 2010, Carlson and former Vice President Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel launched a political news website titled The Daily Caller. Carlson serves as editor-in-chief, and occasionally writes opinion pieces with Patel.[19] Other high-profile bloggers include Jim Treacher (DC Trawler) and Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles.)

The Daily Caller is in the White House rotating press pool.[20] Its reporters have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, CNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, and radio stations across the country. Reporters and columnists for The Daily Caller include Matt Lewis, Mickey Kaus, Alex Pappas, Jamie Weinstein, Will Rahn, Caroline May, Nicholas Ballasy, Vince Coglianese, Matt Labash, Jeff Poor, Alexis Levinson and Jim Treacher.[21]

In an interview with The Politico, Carlson said that The Daily Caller will not be tied to ideology but rather will be "breaking stories of importance". In a Washington Post article, Carlson added "We're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone."

Neil Patel is an American political advisor and publisher. He is the co-founder of The Daily Caller.

Education

He graduated from Worcester Academy and received his B.A. from Trinity College. At Trinity College, Patel was roommates with Tucker Carlson.[1] Patel holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was an associate editor of the Journal of Law and Policy in International Business.[2]

Career

Patel served as Scooter Libby's deputy before becoming chief policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney.[3] In his role as an advisor to Cheney, Patel represented the Vice President at White House economic and domestic policy meetings, interacted with the business community on behalf of the Vice President, and managed the Vice President’s policy staff.[4]

Patel was nominated by the Bush White House to run the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, but he was not confirmed.[1]

After leaving the vice president's office, Patel co-founded The Daily Caller, a web based news company focusing on politics, policy, and current events. Patel is also co-founder and is managing director of Bluebird Asset Management, a hedge fund focused on mortgage backed securities[2]

References

  1. ^ a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patel%28political_advisor%29#cite_ref-post_1-0) b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patel%28political_advisor%29#cite_ref-post_1-1) Kurtz, Howard (2010-01-11). "Media Notes: A look at Tucker Carlson's political Web site, the Daily Caller". Washington Post. Retrieved October 4, 2012.
  2. ^ a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patel%28political_advisor%29#cite_ref-The_Americans_Futures_Project_2-0) b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patel%28political_advisor%29#cite_ref-The_Americans_Futures_Project_2-1) "Neil S. Patel Joins AFP as Senior Advisor". The Americans Futures Project. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  3. ^ Schmitt, Eric (2005-10-30). "Indicted aide had been 'Cheney's Dick Cheney'". New York Times. Retrieved October 4, 2012.
  4. ^ "Famous 5: Neil Patel". famousdc. Retrieved 22 June 2011.

Climate change hurts women. Wall Street Journal sneers.

By John Upton

Apparently the idea of girls being sold off into early marriage and women being pushed into prostitution is fucking hilarious.

Or so thinks the right-wing media machine, confronted this week with warnings about the negative ways climate change could affect women around the world.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and 11 other House Democrats, both men and women, introduced a resolution that aims to raise awareness about the vulnerability of women and girls to global warming.

From the resolution [PDF], via *The Hill*:

Whereas climate change exacerbates issues of scarcity and lack of accessibility to primary natural resources, forest resources, and arable land for food production, thereby contributing to increased conflict and instability, as well as the workload and stresses on women farmers, who are estimated to produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in most developing countries; …

Whereas food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health; …

The resolution lists many other threats and goes on to encourage the president to “integrate a gender approach in all policies and programs in the United States that are globally related to climate change” and to “ensure that those policies and programs support women globally to prepare for, build resilience for, and adapt to climate change.”

Heavy stuff, right? And it’s heavy stuff that’s not often talked about. The resolution got some people in politics and the media to consider these issues for the first time.

But conservative commentators decided against spending too much time thinking about it. They jumped right to snickering about the sex references. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the resolution in a mocking piece with the headline, “Baby, It’s Warm Outside,” and the subhed, “The climate is changing. Lock up your daughters.” The first paragraph:

Is “climate change” corrupting the morals of women around the world? That’s a question nobody is asking if ever there was one, yet a dozen left-wing congressmen, led by Rep. Barbara Lee of California, are answering in the affirmative.

The Daily Caller followed right up with “Democrats: Global warming means more hookers.”

Needless to say, Lee has been unimpressed by some of the coverage, particularly by the near singular focus on sex work. She told the *Los Angeles Times* that “it’s unfortunate that this resolution has been misrepresented as to its goals.”

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

http://grist.org/news/climate-change-hurts-women-wall-street-journal-sneers/

==

Foster Friess -- Billionaire Republican investor who spent $3 million to help launch the Daily Caller.

The Daily Caller abandoned an attempt to accuse the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer of plagiarism, including in her comprehensive expose of Koch Industries. Tucker Carlson, who runs the Daily Caller, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, which has received over $5.5 million from Koch foundations since 1997. Charles Koch co-founded Cato, and Cato’s directors include David Koch and Kevin Gentry of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/drudge-and-tucker-carlson-arent-only-clowns-circus-8-ridiculous-right-wing

breitbart carlson

==

The Daily Caller

A conservative/Republican news spin organization founded by conservative reporter Tucker Carlson and former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel.[1] The Daily Caller's announced objective is to be a "content" response tool to articles on The Huffington Post.

Contents[hide]

Foundation

Tucker announced a loose idea for it at the 2009 CPAC. He and Patel than officially announced it at a Heritage Foundation gathering in May 2009, after which $3 million in capital from unnamed outside sources was invested.

Employees

It's unclear besides an editorial and accounting staff whether they actually employ any journalists other than Carlson, who's career has been as a talking head as opposed to a reporter. According to Carlson, they intend to use and adapt content from bloggers, possibly under freelance contracts. Per a 2010 article in The Washington Independent, it's reporters are from the conservative Washington Times (Jon Ward) and Government Executive (Gautham Nagesh) along with a humor opinion writer Jim Treacher (real name Sean Medlock).

Writers

Those who have written for it include Andrew Breitbart and Newt Gingrich.

Outlets

They use Youtube to post video/audio.

External

===

LOVE TRIANGLE: The Daily Caller Inserts Itself Into NRA-Gun Industry Symbiosis

Blog›››  August TIMOTHY JOHNSON

For years a mutually advantageous relationship has existed between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and firearm manufacturers. The gun industry donates huge chunks of cash -- as much as $38.9 million from 2005 to 2011 -- to the NRA, and the gun rights organization in turn engages in hysterical fearmongering to promote gun sales. One hand washes the other. And now the Daily Caller is joining the action by offering its readers discounted NRA memberships.  

It was only a matter of time before the gun-loving Daily Caller recognized the benefit of shilling for the gun industry and its unofficial PR wing, the NRA. In recent months the online publication has been heavily promoting the NRA while offering its readers perks in the form of a weekly handgun giveaway.

But as material published this week demonstrates, increasingly unabashed promotion of the NRA and FMK Firearms calls the Daily Caller's credibility as a news source further into question.

On Wednesday Mike Piccione, editor of the Daily Caller's :{Guns and Gear:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: section -- which features firearms advertisements, NRA press releases, and other pieces of dubious gun "reporting" -- announced that Daily Caller readers were eligible to purchase discounted NRA memberships. Piccione offered a number of childish reasons for signing up, including, "Joining the NRA is the equivalent of giving [New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg the finger."

The ethical implications of a journalism outlet directly helping to fill the coffers of special interest group are certainly weighty. How can one trust the Daily Caller's reporting on the NRA -- which gets itself into the headlines all the time -- when it accepts advertising money from the group and urges its readers to purchase memberships?

The Daily Caller is clearly unconcerned. Nor does it see any problems in publishing columns by Jim Pontillo, who donates the guns for the weekly giveaway from his company FMK Firearms. Pontillo was probably happy for the exposure considering that in previous columns for other online outlets he offered casual racism aimed at the President and defended the Confederacy.  

In a Daily Caller column published on Tuesday, Pontillo took umbrage with comments that President Obama made about small business owners (which were taken out of context by Fox News and other right-wing outlets). In his column, Pontillo made clear his feelings about people receiving government assistance:

How much of my success can I attribute to my hard work? Do I owe thanks to the welfare recipients you enrich at my expense? While they sit in government-subsidized housing, talking on their iPhones, viewing Netflix movies on their plasma TVs and eating dinners purchased with government food stamps, I sweat 80 to 100 hours a week trying to make my small business succeed.

Such uninhibited bashing of the needy might (or at least should) embarrass a reputable publication. Other publications might think to avoid mainstreaming a racist crackpot. But the Daily Caller wants to keep giving away guns, so they're sticking with Pontillo for the time being. 

Marking the start of July's month-long United Nations conference to negotiate a small arms treaty, National Rifle Association top lobbyist Chris Cox authored an op-ed for The Daily Caller making the hysterical -- and baseless -- claim that the treaty could "seriously restrict your freedom to own, purchase and carry a firearm." In fact the proposed treaty seeks to regulate the international trade of firearms - curtailing the illicit arms trade that keeps weapons flowing to human rights abusers -- and will not change ownership rules domestically.   

Cox also made the reality-defying argument, citing conditions in the Sudan, that a treaty to restrict illegal small arms proliferation would harm citizens in countries ruled by human rights abusers. To the contrary, the United Nations has noted that "[m]ore human rights abuses are committed with small arms than with any other weapon."

But according to Cox's theory "the world's socialist, tyrannical and dictatorial regimes" will use the treaty to "implement international gun registration requirements, bans on commonly owned firearms, tracking and registration of ammunition purchases, and create a new U.N. gun control bureaucracy" thus fulfilling "President Barack Obama's vision for America." 

This laughable conspiracy has no place in reality. Top officials from the United Nations, the United States, and other high profile supporters have repeatedly and clearly said that the treaty does not aim to restrict anyone's "freedom to own" a gun.  Indeed, the U.N. General Assembly's resolution on the treaty makes clear that countries will "exclusively" maintain the right within their borders to "regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through national constitutional protections on private ownerships."

The chair of the Preparatory Committee for the UN Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, Ambassador Roberto García Moritán of Argentina, has stated that the definitive goal of the small arms treaty "is to try to have common standards to be applied by all countries when they export or import weapons."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also said that treaty is "opportunity to promote the same high standards for the entire international community that the United States and other responsible arms exporters already have in place to ensure that weaponry is transferred for legitimate purposes."

A senior policy advisor to the humanitarian organization Oxfam America has also pushed back against claims that the treaty has the nefarious purpose of interfering with domestic law:

same random day: 8/3/12

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/senior-officials-ignored-solyndra-warning/  they link to Wa Post, to be fair, but distort http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/white-house-budget-analysts-thought-saving-solyndra-could-be-expensive-move/2012/08/01/gJQAf2QGQX_print.html

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/inhofe-navy-publicity-stunt-squandered-millions-put-sailors-lives-at-risk/  inhofe

p michaels spins muller 180 http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/the-best-global-warming-science-goes-lukewarm/

jim huffman lewis and clarkhttp://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/coal-dust-is-the-new-spotted-owl/  also As a bike partisan myself, I think it’s great that my congressman likes to ride his bike and wants to make riding bikes safer and more convenient. But even after teaching constitutional law for 38 years I can’t pinpoint Congress’ constitutional authority to promote bicycle transportation.

~ food stamps http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/03/gao-460-million-food-stamp-benefits-went-to-households-ineligible-under-federal-limits/

jennifer anniston braless

Coulter calls John Kerry a 'gigolo': Where were 10 years of his wife's tax returns?

Michelle Joann Fields (born January 10, 1988)[1] is an American political journalist. Upon graduating from Pepperdine University in 2011, she gained attention after having a confrontation with actor Matt Damon over teacher tenure reform.[2] After the Damon altercation, Fields was hired as a reporter by Tucker Carlson at The Daily Caller.

Contents

Early life

Fields was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Fernando Valley.[3] She is Honduran American and is the daughter of television and film writer Greg Fields.[3]

She studied political science at Pepperdine University and served as the president of the Pepperdine chapter of Students For Liberty.[4]

Journalism career

Fields films and edits her videos in a citizen journalism style. She credits the internet for launching her career and believes that the popularity of her videos is due to her style of reporting. In an interview with C-SPAN in 2011 she said that the use of the internet has empowered people so much that now "one voice can be just as powerful as the New York Times."[3]

On December 25, 2011, Fields was interviewed for one-hour by Brian Lamb on the C-SPAN Sunday evening Q&A show about her reporting style.[3] Fields has appeared on Fox News and Fox Business programs including Hannity, The O'Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, America's Newsroom, Fox and Friends, America Live with Megyn Kelly, Stossel, and Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ "California Birth Index, 2012".
  2. ^ "Matt Damon's clash with libertarian journalist Michelle Fields on education is a viral hit". Washington Post. 2011-08-03. Retrieved 2012-02-17.
  3. ^ a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Fields#cite_ref-CSPAN_2-0) b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Fields#cite_ref-CSPAN_2-1) c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Fields#cite_ref-CSPAN_2-2) d(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Fields#cite_ref-CSPAN_2-3) "Q&A With Michelle Fields". C-SPAN. 2011-11-30. Retrieved 2012-02-17.
  4. ^ "2011 SFL Awards Finalists". Students For Liberty. Retrieved 2012-06-20.

External links

Categories:

wiki

Students For Liberty (SFL) is an American libertarian non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to provide a unified, student-driven forum of support for students and student organizations dedicated to liberty."[6] Formed after a meeting where students exchanged ideas from their own experiences with liberty advocating student groups, SFL quickly expanded with new programs and a growing network of affiliated student groups.[3][7][8][9] Gene Healy with the Cato Institute includes the organization in the limited-government movement.[10]

The organization hosts an annual international conference as well as various regional conferences.[7][8] The organization has experienced growth since its inception in 2008.[8][9] The 2012 network includes 699 student organizations around the world.[8][11] SFL's expansion is encouraged and supported by current students involved in the Campus Coordinators program.[12]

SFL seeks to raise awareness of the benefits of liberty and civil society with programs that focus on student rights events, lectures, literature, an academic journal for student work, and an alumni network.[9][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][1][25][26][27]

Contents

History

Origin

Students participating in an Institute for Humane Studies Koch Summer Fellowship got together on July 24, 2007 to discuss successes and challenges faced by libertarian student organizations. In 2008, Alexander McCobin and Sloane Frost decided to organize a conference for 40 students who were involved in libertarian student organizations.[7] As more students contacted the planners to participate, more students joined the planning. The first Students for Liberty conference was held at Columbia University from February 22 to 24, 2008, with 100 students participants. The perceived success of the conference encouraged the planners to form Students For Liberty to provide continuing support to student groups.[7][28][29]

In the news

SFL co-founder and executive director Alexander McCobin opened his remarks on the February 19, 2010 panel “2 Minute Activist: Saving Freedom Across America” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by thanking the American Conservative Union for welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor of the event. Ryan Sorba, California Young Americans for Freedom's chairman and author of The "Born Gay" Hoax,[30] followed with harsh words for McCobin, SFL, Young Americans for Liberty’s Jeff Frazee, and the American Conservative Union.[10][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]

In 2010, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine wrote an article accusing Koch funded charities, including SFL, of inventing the public outcry over security theater. The article addresses the Transportation Security Administration's purchase and deployment of scanners that cost far more than metal detectors. Ames and Levine argue that patriotism is more important than leaked revealing images and concerns of doctors over possible increased risk of cancer. Critics argue that enhanced pat down searches are used to forcefully encourage travelers to submit to the scanners to justify the purchase when security experts consider them ineffective.[38][39][40]

Programs

Conferences

SFL hosts an annual international conference. The inaugural international conference brought 100 students from 42 schools in three countries to New York City. The second annual international conference brought 153 students from 13 countries to George Washington University.[41] The third annual international conference took place February 13 and 14 at American University in Washington, DC and had more than 300 students in attendance. The fourth annual international conference, covered by ReasonTV, returned to George Washington University on Friday, February 18 and continued until Sunday, February 20, 2011, this time with 500 students participating.[42][43][44] This international conference included a taping of Stossel, which aired March 31, in which John Stossel and Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz spoke to students about the ideas of liberty.[45]

During the fall semester, SFL hosts regional conferences on campuses across the country. In 2008, SFL ran three regional conferences at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. In 2009, SFL held seven regional conferences. They were hosted by libertarian student groups at Drexel University, Harvard University, Arizona State University, University of Texas at Austin, Wake Forest University, University of Chicago, and Columbia University.[2] In 2010, SFL held nine regional conferences at the same schools (except Wake Forest) as the 2009 conferences (listed above), while adding three new schools: Pepperdine University, Kennesaw State University and University of California at Berkeley.[3][8] On November 18 to 20, 2011, SFL hosted the first European conference at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium with over 200 students from 25 different countries attending.[2][11]

Free Books Project

SFL, in association with the Foundation for Economic Education, provides libertarian student groups with select free books. Books available have included works by Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises.[1]

Journal of Liberty and Society

SFL publishes an annual academic peer-reviewed journal.[25][26] The Prometheus Institute sponsors awards for the top paper and two honorable mentions based on clarity of thought, originality, intellectual skill, and connection of liberty to important social or theoretical issues as well as offers to all award recipients to join the Prometheus Institute staff for a semester.[25][26]

Student Rights Week

To assist student groups in advocating for civil liberties, SFL distributes pocket Constitutions from Cato, copies of the Guide to Free Speech on Campus from the FIRE, and the movies 10 Rules for Dealing with Police, Busted: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, and Indoctrinate U.[13][14] One Students Right Week project is the establishment of temporary “free speech walls” where community members are encouraged to express their opinions by writing comments that will be left in public for several days.[46][47][48][49][50][51][52]

E-Leadership Series

Since 2009, SFL hosted an E-Leadership Series of seminars that utilizes web conferencing.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] Held weekly during the academic year, the webinars tend to focus on career advice, economics, history, law, leadership, philosophy, public policy, public speaking, and statistics. Past guest speakers include Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University, Bob Ewing of the Institute for Justice, John Hasnas of Georgetown University, Larry Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education, Jim Lark of the University of Virginia, Radley Balko of The Huffington Post, David Friedman of Santa Clara University, LGBTQ activist Zach Wahls, and Tyler Cowen, Bryan Kaplan, and Peter Boettke, and Chris Coyne of George Mason University.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]

Campus Coordinator Program

Campus Coordinators work with campus group leaders within a designated regional area to form and support student groups and to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of programs.[12] The 2010–2011 school year saw the inaugural year of the program.[12] Training is provided by the full time staff as well as executive board members. The 2011–2012 class of coordinators included 60 students from the United States, Canada and Venezuela.[12]

Alumni For Liberty

Alumni For Liberty is a network of working professionals interested in supporting students and student organizations dedicated to libertarianism.[8][53] The program is open to all adults interested in supporting the student movement, whether or not they were a member of a liberty oriented student group.[8][27] The project provides ways to remain involved in supporting the student movement for liberty with monthly updates describing opportunities such as networking events, job openings, training sessions, leadership dinners, options for financial support of alma mater student groups, speaking to student groups, and mentoring of students interested in related careers.[53]

Organizational structure

SFL is a 501(c)(3) organization that supports student groups advocating libertarianism. SFL is run by five full time professionals at its headquarters in Washington, DC.[1] Direction of the organization comes from the executive director, the board of directors, and the executive board (entirely composed of current students). Alexander McCobin serves as executive director. McCobin, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is currently a graduate student in Georgetown University's Department of Philosophy.[54] In 2009, McCobin was sued by Perspectives Debate Inc., a nonprofit organization he had founded while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, for allegedly breaching his fiduciary duty by misappropriating funds and allegedly withdrawing more than $37,000 from the organization's bank account.[55][56]

Europe

In 2011, SFL established a board to expand their programs into Europe.[57] On November 18–20, 2011 SFL hosted the first European conference at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium.[2]

Finance

Incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization completely funded from private donations from individuals, foundations, and participation fees, SFL does not solicit or accept any government contributions.[58][59]

^=^

Matt Lewis is a writer, commentator and blogger, currently with The Daily Caller.

Contents

Background and education

Lewis was raised in Myersville, Maryland. He is a graduate of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Lewis has also lived in North Dakota and is currently based in Alexandria, Virginia.[1] He has a pet pug named 'Uncle Rico' after a character in the film Napoleon Dynamite.[2]

Career

As a writer, Lewis has contributed to Townhall.com,[3][4] AOL's PoliticsDaily.com,[5] Human Events and The Daily Caller.[6] In his early career, Lewis served as director of grassroots for the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit conservative training organization,[7] for which he organized and led workshops around the United States.[8]

In March 2007, Lewis was one of two bloggers invited on John McCain's campaign tour bus on a visit to New Hampshire for an interview with the candidate.[9] That September, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich acknowledged in an interview with Lewis that he was considering a presidential run.[10] Lewis is the editor of The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words, published in 2011.[11]

Lewis was selected as a "Rising Star of Politics" by Politics Magazine in 2002[12] and by the American Conservative Union as "Blogger of the Year" in 2012.[13]

Media appearances

Lewis is a featured commentator on cable news channels and radio, and is a podcaster. Since February 2009, he has represented the conservative viewpoint on Bloggingheads.tv's weekly discussion of U.S. politics, opposite Bill Sher.[1]

See also

Conservatism portal

References

  1. ^ a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Lewis%28journalist%29#cite_ref-Bio_0-0) b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Lewis%28journalist%29#cite_ref-Bio_0-1) "About Matt Lewis". mattlewis.org. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  2. ^ http://www.mattklewis.com/?p=6287
  3. ^ Ruffini, Patrick (2007-01-13). "Matt Lewis Now Blogging at Townhall". PatrickRuffini.com. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  4. ^ Anderson, Karen (2009-02-16). "Coming & Going". Politics Magazine. Campaigns & Elections. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  5. ^ Calderone, Michael (2009-04-09). "Sweet, Lawrence join AOL politics site". Politico. Retrieved 2009-05-23.
  6. ^ Betsy Rothstein (MediaBistro). "The Daily Caller Successfully Woos Politics Daily’s Matt Lewis". Fishbowl DC. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
  7. ^ "Speaker Bios". Philanthropy Roundtable. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  8. ^ Reed, Theresa (2003-07-03). "Republicans Get Emotive". Portland Mercury (Portland, Oregon). Retrieved 2009-05-23.
  9. ^ Dayton, Soren (2007-03-26). "A view from the Straight Talk Express". eyeon08.com. Retrieved 2009-05-09.[dead link]
  10. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (2007-09-29). "Gingrich Tiptoes Toward a White House Bid". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  11. ^ W. James Antle III (July 21, 2011). "The Quotable Rogue". The American Spectator. Retrieved March 20, 2012.
  12. ^ "Rising Stars of Politics, 2002". Campaigns & Elections Magazine. April 2002.
  13. ^ Bill Hobbs (February 11, 2012). "Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis Named "Blogger of the Year"". CPAC. American Conservative Union. Retrieved 15 March 2012.

External links

==

trained on koch

ucker Carlson's website, the "Daily Caller," recently posted a story claiming [3] that a Florida state legislator had rebutted a purported claim by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that the American Legislative Exchange Council [4] (ALEC) "drafted" Florida's "Stand Your Ground" (SYG)/"Castle Doctrine" law. But we did not make that claim.

Unfortunately for the Daily Caller's Investigative Researcher Michael Bastasch, CMD has not argued that ALEC drafted that law. Had Bastasch done any original research about CMD's actual original reporting on SYG, he would have seen that CMD is the research organization that documented how ALEC "ratified" the Florida SYG bill after it was signed into law, as noted here [5] and here [6] and here [7].

And despite efforts this week by Florida state Senator David Simmons to manufacture history in asserting that the NRA did not help draft the bill, the NRA itself took credit [8] for conceiving of the Florida law, as CMD found in contemporaneous news [9] reports.

[cf pix]

Bastasch's piece raises a question about how Daily Caller fact-checks its stories. If undocumented assertions like those about CMD are passed off as news, the Daily Caller could be said to be acting with reckless disregard for the truth.

It's a Koch-Fueled World for Some Given Megaphones on the Right

The author of the piece was given the title of "Investigative Researcher of the Daily Caller News Foundation" based on his experience in the following internships and gigs at Koch-funded operations, according to his own LinkedIn [10] profile:

In fact, Bastasch's online resume makes it look as though his post at the Daily Caller News Foundation since January of 2012 overlaps with a Koch Internship that began in 2012. Are they one and the same? Regardless, this recent college grad has already garnered months of experience nursing at the teat of Koch money through multiple right-wing groups.

Paging ALEC?

Interestingly, the author did not disclose to readers his past internship with ALEC, the subject of the article. Some Daily Caller readers might have considered that credential a feather in his cap; other readers on the world wide web, however, might consider that a potential conflict of interest worthy of disclosure, especially after the whipping [14] some on the right tried to give NPR's Peter Overby for daring to report on ALEC after working for Common Cause almost two decades ago. Meanwhile, Bastasch's internship helping ALEC with its PR spin officially ended less than two years ago. But, he promptly tweeted his Daily Caller "news" article about ALEC to allies over at his former internship, as captured in this screenshot, and ALEC staff promoted his claim/story about SYG too:

Tweet by Daily Caller "reporter" to fomer employer

Of course, Bastasch conveniently omits ALEC's well-documented role supporting the proliferation of "Stand Your Ground"/"Castle Doctrine" laws across the country, which is not the same as having absolutely nothing to do with these laws. ALEC's own reps used to boast [6] to the NRA and others that "Some of the things that we were pushing in states was the 'Castle Doctrine,' we worked with the NRA on that. That's one of our model bills we have states introduce...." ALEC's PR team also claims the charity does zero lobbying, despite admissions like these of senior staffer Michael Hough [15] and other evidence.

Unraveling the Web of Koch-Fueled Interest Groups and Internships

Let's review. The Charles Koch Institute (CKI) was founded last year in Wichita, Kansas, where one of the world's richest men, Charles, and his global mega-corporation, Koch Industries, are located. As a new non-profit organization, CKI's income and expenses for internships are not yet publicly available. Bastasch is one of hundreds of interns who have been funded by Charles's newest enterprise to help turn their ideological affinity with Koch "into careers [16]." Koch interns are paid $10 an hour to work at Koch "partner organizations," such as the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Humane Studies, the State Policy Network (which includes the Cascade Policy Institute), and the American Legislative Exchange Council -- all of which the Daily Caller's staffer has done time at.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the non-profit corporate-funded think tanks, or really "stink tanks," that has received millions from Koch family coffers [17], according to GreenPeace. Heritage is one of the federal arms of the policy creation network that puts the talking points funded by global corporations and right-wing ideologues into the hands of federal lawmakers and gets their claims aired on FOX, CNN, and other stations through its media outreach operations.

The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) is also a pet project of Charles Koch. IHS had revenue of almost $10 million last year, largely from his foundation, and spent almost $9 million to advance Charles' ideological agenda through projects like the "Koch Summer Fellowship."

IHS is also part of Koch's homage to F.A. Hayek, whose "Road to Serfdom," has been extolled by right-wingers who claim America is on that "road" and who have drunk the Koch Kool-Aid on what it calls the "free market" but what is really a corrupt form of crony capitalism that has undermined the U.S. economy. Some followers of Hayek and of the immorality of Ayn Rand [18] have absurdly claimed that everything from Social Security to public schools to taxpayer-funded firefighters are signs that the U.S. is on the brink of communism. Such wild-eyed condemnations of American institutions might sound eerily reminiscent of big daddy Fred Koch's irrational screeds advancing the paranoid worldview of the John Birch Society, which in some ways has been re-born in the "Tea Party," with the help of two of Fred's sons, apples that did not fall far from the tree.

If only people who blindly claim they are defending "free markets" when they defend ALEC had read all the way through Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." Smith cautions against trusting policies proposed by business tycoons. Smith said legislative proposals of such men "ought always to be listened to with great precaution.... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

The State Policy Network/ALEC Love Affair

The Cascade Policy Institute (CPI) in Oregon, where the Daily Caller's Bastasch also interned, is also one of the state stink tanks helping to advance ALEC's agenda. CPI is subsidized in part by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation through its Koch internship program. That foundation is run by its namesake and his confidante Richard Fink. As a charity, Charles can claim donations to his family foundation as an offset against income taxes; in 2010, the CGK Foundation received $42 million from Charles and had income of almost $10 million on various investments and transactions.

And then there is ALEC. As CMD has documented [19] extensively [20], the Koch brothers have a long relationship [21] with Bastasch's other past internship supervisor, ALEC [4]. Some State Policy Network (SPN) groups and their reps are also members of ALEC task forces -- voting behind closed doors with elected officials on templates to change our laws -- alongside the Heritage Foundation and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP), according to task force minutes. Oregon's CPI, which is part of SPN, has ties [22] with AFP and has produced numerous articles promoting ALEC's agenda in the state.

With all that Koch-funded training on how to advance the Kochs' ideological agenda, should readers be surprised when someone with a byline on a site like the Daily Caller writes a story that helps ALEC?

ALEC "Hearts" the Daily Caller's Founder

Tucker Carlson told the Washington Post that his Daily Caller is "not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone." It merely hires the ideologically orthodox, such as a Koch acolyte who then writes favorably about a Koch-funded group he recently worked for and unfavorably about its critics.

But the Daily Caller doesn't just hire young true believers. As CMD has reported [23], Carlson is beloved by ALEC. He was a featured speaker at ALEC's meeting in New Orleans last summer. And, in 2009, he received ALEC's "Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism" at its meeting in Washington, D.C., where he talked about how much he loves corporate lobbyists and thinks they know best, a position not inconsistent with ALEC's effort to give lobbyists easy access to lawmakers and an equal vote on model legislation to change our rights. Included here is a video of part of Carlson's speech accepting this ALEC-created award, which is named for a newspaper columnist who was a harsh critic of laws to protect our environment.

Who Funds the Daily Caller?

Maybe the Daily Caller's readers should just be expected to take a "buyer beware" approach. On the other hand, who is actually bankrolling the Daily Caller's news site and funding the Daily Caller News Foundation [24], a non-profit charity? Are there big undisclosed benefactors behind the scenes, beyond the company's online ad revenue? Does the Daily Caller benefit from perks such as interns subsidized through Koch largesse? Maybe Bastasch will turn his attention to that question for the sake of the transparency? Probably not.

Lisa Graves is Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy (PRWatch.org and ALECexposed.org). She formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. She also served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, as Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Courts, and as an adjunct professor of law.

numbers are in and the verdict is that there has been no global warming for 17 years and 11 months, according to satellite data.

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Is The EPA Preparing For A Massive Private Land Grab?

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