Daily Kos: Did a Rightwing PR firm bribe NYT, WSJ, MIT and others? UPDATED

Daily Kos: Did a Rightwing PR firm bribe NYT, WSJ, MIT and others? UPDATED

This ain't no baseball game -

On March 7, 2007, a "media and research" company called eSapience filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against C.V. Starr & Co., the California investment firm helmed by Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.

What makes this suit so interesting is not C.V. Starr's alleged actions, but the services eSapience was hired to perform. That's because, far from being a typical p.r. firm, eSapience, run by a clique of conservative, free-market academics, is in the business of buying and manipulating influence at the very highest levels of academic and intellectual circles--a cynical strategy laid out in deep detail by the lawsuit. The suit, in fact, is a Rosetta Stone into the extremes to which a group of right-wingers have taken the phrase "marketplace of ideas"--and it has exposed the lengths to which some people will go to buy intellectual influence. [there is more]

I about puked when I saw Reagan on the cover of the latest TIME. He was the start of all this undermining of democracy and the conservatives are still pulling the wool over the public's eye. They all should have been tried and sentenced for treason for the Iran-Contra.

Read "Why Conservatives Can't Govern" to see what I mean. It's not just fraud.

But don’t be misled. Bush and Rove know how to play this game. They play by their rules, the rules that conservative administrations have followed since Nixon. And that’s the real lesson. The phrase “conservative misrule” is a redundancy. The two words mean exactly the same thing.

Robert L. Borosage, March 19, 2007