A Brief Note RE: The Trib

From the beginning of one of today's op-eds:

How can Pennsylvania add jobs and boost its economy? The Tax Foundation says that's elementary -- lift the crushing tax burden on businesses.

The nonpartisan research group's study, billed as a "landmark, apples-to-apples comparison" of state and local taxes, says Pennsylvania's overall tax burden is heaviest among the 50 states on mature businesses, retailers, research-and-development centers and corporate headquarters.

Nonpartisan?  That's not what Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor of the National Review, said just last November:

The Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank, has estimated how many people paid income taxes each year going back to 1950.

See?

By the way, according to mediamatters, two Scaife foundations (Carthage and Sarah Scaife) have given more than a million dollars to the "nonpartisan" Tax Foundation over the years.  Perhaps that should have been mentioned somewhere in the Trib's editorial.

Oh, those two Scaife foundations have given more to the Tax Foundation than the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and Exxon Mobil combined.

Nonpartisan?  Really?

Some Days It's Just Too Damn Easy

Yikes! In today's Sunday Pops column, Richard Mellon Scaife's braintrust succeeds in showing exactly how the conservative media's spin hides in plain sight.

Let's start at the end and work forward. The last "pop" goes like this:

Gloucester (Mass.) Times reporter Nancy Gaines has, as The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott describes it, "made some shocking discoveries about a cozy little Iron Triangle among well-known reporters, Big Green environmental scientists whose findings they regularly report and the funding by foundations that share the movement's ideological agenda." We're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- we say.

This from the very same newspaper whose owner funds the Heritage Foundation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) per year. The very same newspaper whose owner's grants to the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy amounts to 87% of that local think-tank's foundational support.

We'd be actually shocked at braintrust's blatant hypocrisy were it not for the middle "pop" in the editorial:

Democrat gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato likes to brag that he hasn't raised Allegheny County's portion of property taxes during his seven years in office. Of course, what he doesn't say, as the Tax Foundation concludes, is that those property taxes, overall, are among the highest in the United States -- or that his court-flouting perversions gamed the system. Ooops.

That would be the same "Tax Foundation" that's recieved $1.065 million dollars from the Richard Mellon Scaife foundations over the last two decades.

So what's this again about the "iron triangle" of media - experts - foundations that the Scaife's braintrust wants to bring to our attention?

The circle jerk continues.