As Long As They Keep Doing It...

I'll have to keep pointing it out, I guess.

From today's Trib:

NEW BOOK RANKLES KERRY. Bet this book isn't in John Kerry's personal library.

The Democrat U.S. senator from Massachusetts is furious over a new expose that suggests he and his wife, Pittsburgh ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz, might have made money in the stock market because Kerry had inside information he learned on the job.

"Throw Them All Out" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, suggests many Capitol Hill politicians benefit financially from insider stock tips and cronyism.

Schweizer said certain Kerry stock transactions, though handled by independent trustees, often correlated with his Senate committee activities.

First off, let me bring up the obvious. This is from Newsweek's review of Schweitzer's book:

“Senator Kerry does not buy, sell, or trade stocks,” says Jodi Seth, Kerry’s spokeswoman. She notes that Kerry’s holdings are in family trusts and managed by independent trustees with whom he does not communicate. Further, Seth says, Kerry is not a beneficiary of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s trusts, which were established before they were married.

So if I am reading this correctly, Senator Kerry's money is in a blind trust that he doesn't control and he has no contact with the money in his wife's trusts.  And the Heinz trusts that were established before they were married?  There's a prenup that keeps his money separate from hers.

Schweitzer even admits:

“It’s not that I think John Kerry is calling up his broker, on health care, and saying, ‘Buy this company, sell that company,’?” Schweizer says. “The issue is one of a double standard.” He notes that if the executive of a health-care company were in discussions with the White House over pending legislation that would affect his industry, and then made a series of unusual stock transactions related to the industry, the SEC might well open an insider-trading investigation. “The only group in America that we exempt is politicians, who are probably the last people about whom we should be saying, ‘Oh, we’ll take their word for it,’?” he says. “That’s what’s so amazing to me.”

Except when by law their money's not controlled by them.  But why should such pesky facts get in the way of yet another Scaife smear?

But of course, that's not what I wanted you to look at.  Take a look at Schweizer's description above.  He's the "William J Casey Research Fellow" over at something called the Hoover Institution.

Elsewhere in today's Trib we find:

Speaking of quackery, Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson says President Obama's economic policies are a tutorial in turning "a natural recovery from a near-record recession into a serial slowdown." Adds Mr. Hanson, writing in National Review Online, Obama "came in with an agenda to redistribute income, expand government, raise taxes, emphasize class divisions and deflate the American profile abroad -- and he quickly turned petulant when all that worsened an economy that was never to be his main interest but was necessary to fund his fantasies." That, class, is what's known as a damning indictment.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Hoover.

Hmm...two two TWO Hoover fellows mentioned in the same Scaife owned paper.  You know where I'm going with this, don't you?

So how much money has Richard Mellon Scaife funnelled to the Hoover Institution over the years?

 $11,044,000

And yet, even with two fellows quoted in Scaife's paper, there's not one mention of all that Scaife support.

The circle jerk continues.