The hits just keep on coming from Jeff Plale's finance report. We call it Pay to Plale.
Lisa Kaiser of the Shepherd Express discovers a donation from a lobbyist for Koch (say Coke) Industries. We'll let her tell it:
Why is this so important?
Well, Koch is the biggest privately owned oil company in America. It also owns Georgia Pacific.
The profits from the Koch conglomerate also fund Americans for Prosperity, the nutty Astro-turf group hyping the tea parties. (Well, I'm not so sure the various tea party "patriot" groups want to be linked to AFP, but AFP's doing its damnedest to do it to look legit.)
Koch is also a primary funder of climate change-denying think tanks and other free market outfits like the Cato Institute.
Greenpeace reports:
Billionaire tycoon David Koch likes to joke that Koch Industries is, "The biggest company you’ve never heard of". But the nearly US$50 million that he and his brother Charles quietly funnelled to front groups which deny that climate change is a problem is no joking matter. Our new report shows how that cash, between 1997 and 2008, went to groups working to prevent action being taken against climate change.
It's now crystal clear - and every journalist, scientist and politician needs to know - that denial of climate change is not something based on healthy scientific scepticism and debate: it is manufactured and bears the "Koch" brand.
What makes this especially interesting is that Plale was a key player in the state's climate change task force, which proposed a comprehensive bill that Plale co-sponsored -- and then killed in the final days of the session.
No one's suggesting he did it for a $250 contribution. But with the kind of company he keeps, what he did should be no big surprise.