MARK TAPSCOTT: Why Do The Koch Brothers Get All The Sunshine?

Here’s a couple of data points that bear serious thought this week by transparency advocates celebrating Sunshine Week and by everybody else who cares about protecting and preserving a free and independent press:

1,130 – Number of results for search term “Koch Brothers” on The New York Times web site.

64 – Number of results for search term “The Tides Foundation” on The New York Times web site.

For the few stray souls out there who don’t know, the Koch Brothers are Charles and David, principals of the Koch corporate conglomerate and chief bete noirs of President Obama, liberal journalists covering national politics and Citizens United obsessives everywhere.

It’s equally certain that few reading this post know anything at all about the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, even though its roots go deep into the radical student movement of the 1960s and it has helped fund or startup virtually every significant liberal, progressive and radical cause in the years since. . . . Consider these numbers, derived from multiple searches of foundation grant databases, IRS Form 990s and other public records:

Three Koch foundations made a total of 181 grants worth $25,405,525 in 2010 (most recent available records). The one Tides Foundation made a total of 2,627 grants worth $143,529,590 in 2010.

Put otherwise, for every one grant made by a Koch foundation, Tides made more than five grants.

Read the whole thing.

THAT’S VICE-CHANCELLOR BIG BROTHER TO YOU: Harvard Search of E-mail Stuns Its Faculty Members. “Bewildered, and at times angry, faculty members at Harvard criticized the university on Sunday after revelations that administrators secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans in an effort to learn who leaked information about a student cheating scandal to the news media. Some predicted a confrontation between the faculty and the administration.”

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Do Republicans Need a Conservative Version of the Welfare State to Win?

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HYPOCRISY UPDATE: Investigating Mark Kelly’s AR-15 Purchase.

THE NEW HOPE OF GUN-CONTROL ADVOCATES: The fictitious self-hating gun owner.

TA-NEHISI COATES ON RACISM IN MANHATTAN.

This leads Ann Althouse to write: “My question is: How did some people get to be considered the ‘good’ people in the first place? It’s that question that fires my antagonism to liberals. They think they are good.”

Given that so many are racist — by Coates’ own account, his wife is a racist who has been “at war” with white people since childhood — perhaps our whole approach has been wrong. Or perhaps some people profit too much by keeping racist fires fanned. And maybe too many of them are among the “good people.”

Plus, from the comments: “Time to extend the Voting Rights Act to New York. The place is chock full of racists!”

UPDATE: Another comment: “I wonder whether Coates has a good enough memory to imagine himself as a white, male college student on the Duke University LAX team.”

LEADERSHIP: House GOP leaders blindsided by defections on spending vote.

IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE TEA PARTY BECOME A TRUE THIRD PARTY, THIS IS HOW TO BRING IT ABOUT: House GOP Leaders: We Can Pass Gun Control, Immigration, Without Republican Support. And however well or badly that third party does, it’ll be the end of the GOP as a national party.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Scandals Are Only Half The Catholic Story: “Dealing with the scandals and intrigue in the Vatican is a serious part of the journalistic work that has to be done in covering the conclave. But it’s important to remember that the Church isn’t reducible to Vatican politics. Nor, for Catholics, is it reducible to its human side.”

OUTLAW GUNSMITHING: Going Mobile.

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MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY: Air Force Removes Drone Strike Data from Monthly Report.

GRID-IRONY: CBS’ Mark Knoller slams Gridiron Dinner; Where is the transparency, journalists?

CHEWING YOURSELF AWAKE: Wrigley’s New Chewing Gum Packs a Dose of Caffeine.

LANGUAGE: Madam, I’m Adam: Palindrome Masters Go Head to Head in Championship.

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BRAVE NEW WORLD: Video: Retired Lab Chimps Step Outside for the First Time.

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PROTO-HIPSTERISM: How 1970s Italian Photography Inspired Instagram.

A PALEO BLOG: Cavegirl Cuisine.

IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘Toaster Pastry Gun Freedom Act’ proposed in Maryland. “A Maryland state senator has crafted a bill to curb the zeal of public school officials who are tempted to suspend students as young as kindergarten for having things — or talking about things, or eating things — that represent guns, but aren’t actually anything like real guns.”

And I love this: “The bill also includes a section mandating counseling for school officials who fail to distinguish between guns and things that resemble guns.” Seems fair. We’re always told that public education is important because it fosters critical thinking, but critical thinking seems to be in short supply among public educators.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: One woman with 6 jobs to make ends meet. You know those jobs Obama says he created? She’s got 6 of them!

AS LONG AS THEY’RE JUST PASSING THROUGH: Earth Gets A Rush Of Weekend Asteroid Visitors. “An asteroid as big as a city block shot relatively close by the Earth on Saturday, the latest in a series of visiting celestial objects including an asteroid the size of a bus that exploded over Russia last month, injuring 1,500.”

Key quote: “The scary part of this one is that it’s something we didn’t even know about.”