RUSH: I had a story in the stack yesterday. I had it at the top of the stack for 45 minutes, and the program was evolving in such a way that we never get to it, but this, folks, is pretty huge. It’s an editorial from Investors Business Daily from Monday, entitled: ‘The George Soros Threat to Democracy — George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency. How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely ‘NASA whistleblower’ standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute, which gave him ‘legal and media advice’?’ I didn’t know this until I read the IBD editorial. ‘That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship ‘philanthropy,’ by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s ‘politicization of science’ program.’ Now, one thing that confused me when I read this is I didn’t know that government employees could be on the take like this. So I don’t know if Hansen is still at NASA, but he’s always referred to as ‘the lone NASA whistleblower who is trying to really warn the American people about the lies and distortions coming out of the Bush administration,’ and we keep hearing from the global warming crowd that we can’t trust those who are opposed to the whole concept of manmade global warming because they’re being funded by Big Oil. They’re being funded by all these big corporations. They’re being funded by people.
Well, now we know that about James Hansen who, previous to this editorial, was thought of as clean and pure as the wind-driven snow. I, frankly, never thought that because the guy is too wrong, too often to be doing it on his own. This is probably the case with so many on the pro-global warming side. Nobody ever talks about how are they corrupted? How are they being compensated? What is their inspiration and motivation? Once again, despite all that, we find the hand of George Soros involved in this. Now, what this $720,000 might have meant is that Hansen could have had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly ‘censored’ spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda,’ and he has portrayed himself as being censored. Because he’s at NASA and he can’t speak out, as a lone government employee — and now we learn that Soros gave him 720 grand, probably to teach him to package himself and have people actually getting on various media. ‘Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.
‘That’s not the only case. Didn’t the [Drive-By] media report that 2006’s vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag-waving illegal immigrants…?’ Yeah. In fact, who did they credit for this? They credited Hispanic talk shows in Los Angeles and Hispanic talk shows on television for ginning up two million, spontaneously ‘angry Mexican-flag-waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles.’ It turns out, that’s not what happened. Soros’ Open Society Institute ‘had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.’ So we find Soros involved in creating the flag-waving two million people in LA protesting illegal immigration, funding James Hansen at NASA. ‘So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI’s glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI’s 2006 annual report. Meanwhile, OSI cash backed terrorist-friendly court rulings, too.’
Get this: ‘Do people know last year’s Supreme Court ruling abolishing special military commissions for terrorists at [Club Gitmo] was a Soros project? OSI gave support to Georgetown lawyers in 2006 to win Hamdan v. Rumsfeld — for the terrorists. OSI also gave cash to other radicals who pressured the Transportation Security Administration to scrap a program called ‘Secure Flight,’ which matched flight passenger lists with terrorist names. It gave more cash to other left-wing lawyers who persuaded a Texas judge to block cell phone tracking of terrorists. They trumpeted this as a victory for civil liberties. Feel safer? It’s all part of the $74 million OSI spent on ‘U.S. Programs’ in 2006 to ‘shape policy.’ Who knows what revelations 2007’s report will bring around events now in the news. OSI isn’t the only secretive organization that Soros funds. OSI partners with the Tides Foundation, which funnels cash from wealthy donors who may not want it known that their cash goes to fringe groups engaged in ‘direct action’ — also known as eco-terrorism.
‘On the political front, Soros has a great influence in a secretive organization called ‘Democracy Alliance’ whose idea of democracy seems to be a government controlled solely by Democrats. … Soros’ ‘shaping public policies,’ as OSI calls it, is not illegal. But it’s a problem for democracy because it drives issues with cash and then only lets the public know about it after it’s old news.’ While everybody’s out there complaining and whining and moaning about lobbyists, here we have one of the biggest lobbyists operating under the radar without anybody knowing what he’s funding and who he’s buying and who he’s paying for. ‘Without more transparency,’ what Soros is doing, ‘amounts to political manipulation. This leads to cynicism. As word of these short-term covert ops gets out, the public grows to distrust what it hears and tunes out,’ and that creates an even more open field for Soros to operate in when people aren’t paying attention anymore because they’re so irritated by it and turned off by it. So, Soros did not go away after the 2006 elections and may, in fact, have corrupted the global warming mirror.