The Sierra Club disclosed Thursday that it received over $26 million from natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. between 2007 and 2010 to help the group’s campaign against coal-fired power plants.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said Thursday that he learned of the funding shortly after beginning the job in 2010 and moved to end the arrangement.

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According to the New York Times, no less:

Ever since he raised the issue in his State of the Union speech nearly nine months ago — prompting head-shaking by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. of the Supreme Court — President Obama has been warning about the danger of foreign money creeping into elections as a result of the court’s landmark campaign finance ruling.

In two campaign stops Thursday, Mr. Obama invoked what he portrayed as a specific new example, citing a blog posting from a liberal advocacy group as he teed off on a longtime adversary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over its political spending.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

But a closer examination shows that there is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.

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Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a front page article that claimed, “an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.”  The thesis of the article was that oil companies are the benefactors of enormous subsides, primarily through complicated maneuvering of offshore assets, “tax breaks,” and “loopholes.”

Unfortunately, the copy of the American tax code that The Times used to conduct their careful analysis appears to have been heavily edited by a cadre of left leaning groups, including ACORN President Maude Hurd, Citizens for Tax Justice, Center for American Progress and the Clean Energy Works campaign.

The smoking gun comes in the form of a leaked memo from CEW communications advisor and former Democratic congressional staffer David Di Martino just days after The New York Times ran it’s wildly misguided assessment of U.S. tax policy.

In the memo, Di Martino outlines a strategy to change America’s perception of increased taxes on energy producers as a tax on consumers by arguing “the American people already have a national energy tax — The Big Oil Welfare Tax — in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies to the wildly profitable big oil companies.”  The same day that Di Martino released his memo, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released their own defective and dishonest hit piece, titled “What Oil and Gas Companies Extract from the American Public.”   The tax breaks referred to by Di Martino and the CTJ memo, in reality, are the same credits that every American company receives for taxes paid overseas to foreign governments on income earned abroad.

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If President Obama’s Oval Office speech made one thing clear, it is that his administration and the activists who back it view the Gulf oil spill as simply an opportunity to advance their pre-existing agenda—which has nothing to do with cleaning up the Gulf, protecting the fragile coastal environment or fostering the region’s economy.

Although now overruled for the time being by a federal judge, the Obama administration’s May 27 order to stop all deep-water exploratory drilling in U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico for six months, pending the report of a commission investigating the causes of BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident, is a case in point.

Public and political reaction to the devastating oil release in the Gulf has revitalized a coalition of environmental and anti-energy lobbies that oppose not only deep-water drilling, but all offshore oil production and, in some cases, all use of fossil fuels. As usual, political opportunists have been quick to seize the moment.

“You don’t want to let a good crisis get away,” declares Athan Manuel, director of lands protection in the Sierra Club’s legislative office. The organization is urging a permanent moratorium on new offshore drilling.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, disputes industry claims that shallow-water drilling is much safer than deep-water drilling. The center wants the existing six-month moratorium extended to all offshore drilling.

Such lobbying already has born fruit. On June 8, the administration issued new safety standards for shallow-water drilling. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “as many as 50 shallow-water drilling rigs that employ about 5,000 workers may need new permits in the next six weeks under the administration’s new review.”

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From today’s Politico:

As the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history has played out on Obama’s watch, the environmental movement has essentially given him a pass — all but refusing to unleash any vocal criticism against the president even as the public has grown more frustrated by Obama’s performance.

About a dozen environmental groups took out a full page ad in the Washington Post Tuesday – not to fault Obama over the ecological catastrophe but to thank him for putting on hold an Alaska drilling project. “We deeply appreciate your decision. . .,” the ad says to Obama.

“President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.”

Some say there’s little doubt that if a spill like the one in the Gulf took place on former President George W. Bush’s watch, environmental groups would have unleashed an unsparing fury on the Republican in the White House. For their liberal ally, Obama, they seem willing to hold their tongues.

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Courtesy of Victor Skinner, writing on NEAexposed.com:

A recent study of contributions made by the nation’s two largest teachers unions reveals that both shelled out millions in 2008-09, with a good chunk going to radical and scandal-ridden organizations.

The study, posted online by the Education Intelligence Agency, is further proof that the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are out of step with their members, which union officials claim are evenly split between Democrat, Republican and Independent parties.

This is what the EIA found:

The AFT gave $46,894 to the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). That organization’s members gave tax evasion advice to pimps and prostitutes, encouraged struggling homeowners to walk away from their mortgages, and championed radical causes like softer immigration regulations and a government takeover of health care.

The AFT’s interest in government-run healthcare is also apparent in its $407,208 donation to the Economic Policy Institute, a union-funded progressive think tank that advocates for the expansion of unionized government jobs, and generally promotes organized labor’s interests.

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Congress’s official investigation into the financial crisis, the so-called Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, will convene its first meeting today.  Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked chairman of the commission Phil Angelides, has deep ties to radical left-wing politics, including the Van Jones-connected Apollo Alliance, which he chairs, and ACORN, which is an Apollo member and endorsed and actively supported his gubernatorial campaign.  His selection proves the commission will be a politicized attempt to advance a left-wing agenda through a revisionist history of the financial crisis.  It also assures that ACORN and other community organizers who forced banks to make reckless loans in the name of affordable housing will be let off the hook.

Angelides’s San Francisco-based Apollo Alliance describes itself as a “coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution.”  Based on the radical past of some of its key figures, the use of the word revolution is appropriate.  Apollo was conceived of, and presently serves, as a clearing house to align the otherwise disparate interests of environmental groups, labor unions, social justice organizations, and rent-seeking corporations.

Disgraced former White House green jobs czar Van Jones was an Apollo board member, involved with the group from its founding, and was its model for a new type of leader.  Apollo board member John Podesta, who was chairman of Obama’s transition team, already brought Van Jones back to the Center for American Progress, Podesta’s influential think tank where Jones had previously been a senior fellow.  These are Angelides’s friends and ideological peers. (more…)