The Necropolitan Sentinel

She got underbussed by the White House, as you already know, but her remark that Ann Romney, one of her most gracious critics this week, had “never worked a day in her life,” also brought her an unenviable kind of scrutiny. It’s true that Greta van Susteren stuck up for her on the basis of friendship, but that did nothing to stem the tide of criticism from the right . . . much less the left.

Leading off with information that I first saw tweeted by Iowahawk, the Daily Caller called her for profiting substantially for lobbying for the ridiculous penalties sought and mostly received by the RIAA and the much-lamented destruction of file-sharing service Napster. They followed that up with a piece on her publicity and lobbying work for British Petroleum, prior to her moving to SKDKnickerbocker.

Neither of those pieces was nearly as scathing, though, as what The Nation wrote about her lobbying.

— SKDKnickerbocker was hired by Kaplan Education to block Obama’s reforms on for-profit college companies, an industry plagued by by low quality education, false promises to students, and fraudulent business practices.

— SKDKnickerbocker was hired to push for billions in tax breaks for already profitable corporations. As Bloomberg reported, SKDKnickerbocker manages a lobbying campaign called “Win America,” an effort by companies like Google and Pfizer to receive hundreds of billions in tax breaks on profits made overseas.

— SKDKnickerbocker was hired by a coalition of food manufacturers to fight the Obama administration’s proposals on food nutrition standards. As the Washington Post reported, the firms paying Dunn include General Mills and PepsiCo.

— SKDKnickerbocker represents consulting for Students First, a lobbying group aimed at destroying collective bargaining, and replacing public education with a mix of charters, private schools, and online learning companies. According to documents revealed the blog At The Chalk Face, Students First helped craft bills in Michigan to break teachers unions by severely limiting collective bargaining.

— SKDKnickerbocker previously worked with the Association of American Railroads, a group representing large railroad companies. When the railroad industry was in a pitched battle with their respective labor unions, SKDKnickberbocker produced ads for the railroad lobby.

A proposal leaked two months ago showed that a group of political consultants, including SKDKnickerbocker’s Anita Dunn, worked up an effort to find hedge funds to pay them to kill efforts to enact the “Buffett Rule.” In the memo, Dunn clearly advertised her ties to the White House.

Earlier this year, I asked Hilary Rosen’s partner, Anita Dunn: “You have a lot of access to the President, from advising his campaign to regular visits to the White House. Do you think its a little bit disingenuous that you’re simultaneously being paid by a lot of corporations to lobby against his reforms?” Dunn scoffed at my question, and replied that she works for “some corporations” because “people have a right to be heard.” But the evidence suggests Dunn isn’t just giving voice to these multinational corporations. She’s also peddling their interests in multiple meetings with White House officials, all without registering any of her employees as lobbyists.

Kaplan Education, as you’ll recall, is owned by the Washington Post, and though scandal-plagued, keeps the rest of their operations in the black. Mostly, The Nation seems to have had their knickers twisted by the revelation that some of the lobbying that these people do is for causes that The Nation doesn’t like, though on the side of principle they seem upset that Obama’s lobby-free White House seems so plagued by lobbyists, to nobody’s surprise but that of liberals. God only knows, one can’t lobby against ever-increasing union power and abuse and still maintain their liberal cred.

If they were actually a little more “liberal” in the historical sense, they’d probably be more concerned with information like this, from the Washington Examiner via Lonely Conservative:

The Washington Examiner reports that a major shake-up in the way the Department of Labor dispenses jobs data to the media is taking place. Because the information is sensitive, there’s limited access to the secure area where the media receives the data. The department is forcing all of the news outlets to undergo new credentialing, and will require them to use government computers instead of their own laptops which they’ve always used before.

But Carl Fillichio, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’ top communications advisor, circulated a memo earlier this week to interested media informing them that everybody is being required to re-submit their credentials requests.

Fillichio reminded participants that there are only 20-30 seats available for the lockups and that priority will be given by DOL in selecting participants to those that “are primarily journalistic enterprises.”

He also offered a one-sentence assurance that “the department will not consider editorial or political viewpoints in making credentialing decisions.”

Whatever grumbling might be occasioned by being forced to go through the credentialing process again, the element of the Fillichio memo that has journalists worried is this paragraph:

“Second, as a measure toward enhancing security in its main lockup facility (the DOL news room), the department will supply and maintain standardized equipment with a standard configuration for all participants. This change means that privately owned computer and telephone equipment, including hardware, software, cabling, wiring and Internet and telephone lines will be replaced with equipment owned by the department.”

In other words, journalists will no longer be allowed to bring their laptops or other equipment to the lockups, they will have to use government-supplied equipment…

So, even as the Obamaists plant their surrogates in the MSM and absorb MSM figures into the White House’s machinery, the war on reporters rages, with the sole purpose of controlling the message. Like a lot of other lefty outlets, of more or less profile, The Nation seems slow to recognize that Progressivism is fascism.

As King Shamus noted in a comment and Bearing Drift in a post, the Proggies are losing control of the messaging apparatus, because the ideological contradictions become ever more apparent as they are pushed ever further in an effort to divide and conquer.

The mirage of a divide between talking heads and the MSM is finally being torn down. Plausible deniability ain’t enough, folks. Rosen is a DNC operative, active with the Human Rights Campaign, with a vested interest in defining real women as those with careers and as few children as possible (or as many adopted ones, if you’re a homosexual couple trying to redefine marriage). Either way… the insinuation that Ann Romney was living up to less of her vocation because she chose to be a mother? Outrageous in the extreme.

When we get to the point of Jay Carney stating that he personally knows three people named Hilary Rosen, any of which might have accessed the White House any of the 35 times that their records show, and when White House mouthpieces go on television to claim that it was Republicans who first began throwing around the term “War on Women,” we’ve reached the point where they are simply unbelievable even to the most politically uninformed audiences. Now, as Iowahawk characterized it on Twitter, we get to watch the sad spectacle of David Axelrod trying to “glue together the rubble of his precious War on Women.”

Related: Big Sis signed Stand Your Ground legislation in Arizona, and probably perjured herself with regards to Fast and Furious; climate hysteria spending out of control.

In another rhetorical flourish, Professor Nordhaus’s fourth point misrepresents us as claiming that “skeptical climate sci-entists are living under a reign of terror about their professional and personal livelihoods.” This reductio ad absurdum is inappropriate, but we observe that individuals like climate scientist James Hansen, environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr., and economist Paul Krugman have characterized critics of climate alarm as “traitors to the planet.” We noted the systematic dismissal of editors who publish peer-reviewed papers questioning climate alarm, as well as the legitimate fears of untenured faculty whose promotions depend on publications and grant support. We note here that editors like Donald Kennedy at the prestigious Science magazine have publically declared their opposition to the publication of papers finding results in opposition to climate dogma. [5]

The Climategate e-mails [6] specifically describe these tactics, and numerous examples are given in Lindzen (2012.) [7] While defense of existing paradigms is normal in science, the present situation is clearly pathological in its imposition of conformity. We cannot speak to the situation in economics, but the notion that dissident voices and new theories are encouraged in climate science is downright silly, though Professor Nordhaus is correct to view such encouragement as critical to a healthy science. Unfortunately, the current situation in climate science is far from healthy. Professor Nordhaus contributes to this when he succumbs to the introduction of the false analogy with tobacco, and his call for political leaders to “be extremely vigilant to prevent pollution [sic] of the scientific process by the merchants of doubt” is not atypical of the current situation.

Regarding Professor Nordhaus’s fifth point that there is no evidence that money is at issue, we simply note that funding for climate science has expanded by a factor of 15 since the early 1990s, and that most of this funding would disappear with the absence of alarm. Climate alarmism has expanded into a hundred-billion-dollar industry far broader than just research. Economists are usually sensitive to the incentive structure, so it is curious that the overwhelming incentives to promote climate alarm are not a consideration to Professor Nordhaus. There are no remotely comparable incentives to the contrary position provided by the industries that he claims would be harmed by the policies he advocates.

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