A Thanksgiving Gift From The Trib

As long as they keep doing this, I'll keep pointing it out.

Take a look at this blurb from today's Laurels & Lances:

Laurel: To Jake Haulk. The president of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy continues to do what he does best -- slay shibboleths. His latest effort calls into serious question the conclusion of an American Public Transportation Association "study" that says Pittsburgh motorists could save $9,201 a year by taking Port Authority Transit. As per usual, the facts show the APTA hyped the numbers. Thanks for the reality check, Dr. Haulk.

We've run the numbers before, but let's get a more recent picture, alright?

According to mediamatters, the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy has received $3,421,000 from the Richard Mellon Scaife controlled Allegheny, Carthage, and Sarah Scaife Foundations and $4,039,200 in total foundation support.  After a few seconds with my trusty calculator I now know that that of all the foundation support received by the Allegheny Institute, about 84.7 % came directly from the foundations controlled by the owner of the paper that lavished such praise Jake Haulk, president of the Allegheny Institute.

Heck, the Washington Post reported in 1999 that:

Scaife has been donating to big think thanks for four decades, but he recently launched a new kind of policy group in Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, which describes itself as "devoted exclusively to the study of local issues" in western Pennsylvania.

So not only is Scaife the main source of foundation money for the institute, he founded the darn thing in the first place!

And yet no mention of any of that information is to be found on the pages of the Tribune-Review.

I find that interesting, don't you?