Now, to my delight, I and the entire world learn the French not only have their own Pat Buchanan, but an even greater share of like-minded idiots. I know I should be concerned about rising European neo-fascism, racism, anti-Semitism. But all I can think of is the face of the obnoxious anonymous Frenchwoman I encountered on my last flight into Paris.

I flew into Paris from JFK on a discounted Air France red-eye. I was sitting one row in front of three Arabs who had just been visiting relatives in Paterson, N.J. They were in their 60s, two women and a man, and spoke almost no English or French. They also did not share, to put it nicely, our American notions of crowded-airplane etiquette.

The man, who sat behind me, not only kicked but screamed and punched the back of my chair every time I leaned back. He and the women argued and laughed throughout the night, while the lights were off, and even the squalling babies were asleep. The Air France stewards tried unsuccessfully to quiet them, but gave up.

When dawn finally broke, my annoyance gave way to curiosity, and when I realized the trio behind me were having trouble filling out their customs cards I offered to help. My motives were only partly altruistic, since I was curious about where they were from. Syria, it turned out, and a town I’d never heard of.

As the plane began to descend, the man got busy again, grunting as he pulled down pounds of hand luggage and piled it in the aisle. Nearby passengers looked on in awe, as did I, realizing he was preparing to disembark Middle Eastern-style, in a stampede for the door before the plane touched down. Again, the Air France stewards argued with him, and again, by dint of the language barrier and the man’s sheer stubbornness, they failed.

At last, we were earthbound. Bleary-eyed, grumpy passengers were in the aisles, pulling bags down, waiting for the line to move. While I was pulling my bags down, the man and one of the women shoved past me and made it all the way into first class, knocking people back into their seats in their haste.

The third, a linebacker-size woman with a head scarf, slammed me toward my chair. I stiff-armed her and, in English, told her to sit down and wait.

At this point, a classic, sexy Frenchwoman with bed-head tendrils of curly hair in her face, in the middle of doing the triple scarf twist, rode to the rescue.

“Please don’t push her,” talking to me from two rows back.

“But, but, she’s trampling me.”

“They’ve spent their lives in a small village. They don’t know any better.”

“But they’ve just been to New York!”

“Please don’t hurt her. She could be your mother.”

Oh God, the M word. People were looking at me now.

“But I wasn’t hurting her! In fact, I just helped them fill out their cards!”

I don’t remember the reply, but I know I didn’t get the last word. Half the passengers were eyeing me with disgust. The sexy little French girl oozing concern for Third World travelers had just exposed me as a callous American.

In the eyes of her fellow passengers, I was now Donald Rumsfeld calling Afghan civilian casualties an unfortunate accident. I was the Tomahawk cruise missile, swaggering George Bush, a greedy Enron asshole, an anti-Arab racist and a cold-hearted rich bitch from New York who wouldn’t let an old peasant lady pass her — all rolled into one! Just another First World, sole-superpower bully, insensitive to the customs of people from undeveloped countries.

The French have a phrase for what I experienced over the next several days. It’s called “esprit d’escalier,” and I had an exceptionally powerful case of it. I had just personally experienced what it means to be an American abroad today - and I hadn’t been able to defend myself. My helpless, stuttering response rang in my ears, and each time I heard myself it sounded more quintessentially American in wounded tone and naive spirit.

“But … but … I was hurt!”

“But … but … I just helped them!”

The morally superior Frenchwoman’s defense of the stampeding Arabs pissed me off even more because I know what the French in Paris really think about their own Algerian immigrants. To give but a few recent examples, at one gathering a sleek minx who described herself as a communist regaled me with a lengthy list of the problems of unchecked Algerian immigration. She concluded with something like a call for eugenics.

“They should have made a law requiring them to learn how to be Frenchwomen,” she said of what she described as the overbreeding mothers whose children are forming a new class of street criminals. “At least teach them to go to the gynecologist!”

At another recent dinner, an upper-middle-class father who sends his daughters — though not for long — to a Paris public school, ranted about the way the Algerian pre-teen boys in their class treated his girls. “They tell the girls to look at the floor when they’re around. They have no respect for women. They hate them!”

This kind of talk is going on all the time among the Parisians, people whose hearts — and mouths — bleed for American blacks and Native Americans, Afghan civilians and, yes, stampeding Syrian tourists. I don’t suppose any of them actually voted for Le Pen. But at the least his upset victory should hand them a new humility.

On the other hand, that might be like expecting them to pick up after their dogs and quit smoking.

But the settlements have not stopped and, rather than rebuking Israel, the U.S. government is preparing to reward it more than ever before. This week, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Appropriations passed a bill handing over the most money ever in one year to Israeli defense: just shy of a billion dollars toward three Israeli missile defense projects, called Iron Dome, David’s Shield and Arrow. Last year’s appropriation for the same projects was $235 million. “I don’t know of any joint defense programs in the last 10 years — probably no program with any other country – that has approached a billion,” said a staffer who works with the subcommittee.

In 2009, Obama’s condemnation of Israel was regarded as historic. Although the West Bank settlements have been condemned repeatedly by the UN and international community for decades, and are illegal under the Geneva Convention, no U.S. President had ever criticized them in similar language.

The response in Israel was close to hysterical, with Netanyahu assuring his religio-nationalist base that nothing the American president said would have any effect at all on the building of new settlements, or expansion within existing settlements.

The settlers themselves responded with furious entitlement, matching Fox News’ best xenophobes on the topic of the new American president’s loyalty to Hez and Allah.The Israeli government had other plans too. Before six months had passed, in November 2009, Netanyahu’s government authorized the building of another 900 buildings on disputed territory, a poke in the American eye that drew only the mildest of rebukes from the State Department.

On a reporting assignment into the West Bank settlements for Time shortly after Obama’s Cairo speech, I met settlers of all stripes, from the sane and secular to fire-eyed, Uzi-armed young men sporting dreadlock side-locks, camped on hilltops in Arab territory without plumbing and with five or six toddlers and a pregnant wife each.

Memorably, I met an American family, the Katzes, that had moved from Woodmere, Long Island, to Israel in the 1970s, settling in a fragrant suburban settlement called Efrat not far from Jerusalem. Efrat is one of the quasi legal settlements, in that it is relatively older and established and secure, a gated place where immigrants from the West don’t need to arm themselves, can find pizza parlors and the Israeli equivalent of Little League, and most of the other comforts of home, despite the fact that they must travel in armored buses to cross nominally Palestinian territory. To increase the security of all these settlers, Israel has built dozens of settlers-only highways that now criss-cross the West Bank – exclusive, paved super-highways that Palestinians sometimes lob rocks at from the donkey tracks that constitute their transportation infrastructure.

Family patriarch Israel Katz refused to shake my hand, strictly observing the Orthodox prohibition on physically engaging with a possibly menstruating unrelated female. It was a week after Obama’s Cairo remarks, and Katz was still seething. “Why should America tell Israel what to do?” he asked rhetorically. “Does Israel tell America what to do?”

Since Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, Israeli settlement expansion has continued unabated, and in fact, accelerated. With Orthodox and extreme Orthodox Israelis (called Haredim) increasing as a percentage of the national population, thanks partly to their belief that God requires them to produce as many children as humanly possible, the need for housing grows and grows. More than 310,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, and another 200,000 live in a dozen illegal settlements in east Jerusalem. That fact, and pressure from all religious nationalists who conceive of Israel’s borders as the Old Testament cartographers did, means that no Israeli leader can cave on settlements, not even to an American president.

After Obama charged out of the gate against the settlements, for the United States to now reward Israel with an historic billion-dollar prize for missile defense should surprise no one. The year 2012 is, after all, an election year and, true to political form, no amount of pandering is too much, especially where Israel is concerned.

A certain segment of stridently pro-Israel American Jewry has long been convinced that Obama is “bad for Israel” – the single issue that can make or break a candidate seeking funds and votes from one powerful and politically active demographic. Perhaps a historic pile of money wins them back, perhaps not.

The near-billion appropriated this week must wend its way through about 15 more legislative gateposts before it’s actually disbursed, but those close to the bill expect little resistance. The funds will be divided up between three projects. The Iron Dome – the recipient of the bulk of the new moneys – is intended to protect Israel from the relatively low-level, cheap missiles Hezbollah lobs across the borders. David’s Sling is a short-range ballistic missile defense system, with American firm Raytheon as a subcontractor. The Arrow System is an exo-atmospheric project, still on paper, that would theoretically protect Israel from long range ICBMs, the sort that the Iranians might someday be able to make. Boeing is the subcontractor on that.

According to the Congressional Research Service, Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. As of this year, the United States has provided Israel $115 billion in bilateral assistance.

Progressives complain that Obama didn’t try hard enough on health care, on the banksters, on the wars. But in those cases, at least, he tried. On the matter of the settlements, he did not.

Yesterday, the dating site offered to start buying 30- and 60-second spots on Rush’s show. If approved, the ads will run next month.

In a plot twist Stephen Colbert’s writers might have dreamed up on a slow news day, Wade hailed the doughy bellower as a model for guys who like ‘em young, hot and financially needy.

“Rush Limbaugh, who married a blonde bombshell half his age, is a model Sugar Daddy,” the company announced. “The moniker of a Sugar Daddy is that of an older, successful, wealthy man romantically involved with a younger, beautiful woman, much like the relationship Rush shares with his much younger wife, Lauryn Rogers.”

“Rush Limbaugh is one of the greatest examples of the modern day Sugar Daddy,” Wade said in a press release. “We wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t come forward and support him in his time of need.”

The site now boasts a million site users, has been featured on a full episode of “The Dr. Phil Show.” CNN legal expert “Sunny” Hostin called its “Sugar Baby” members “prostitutes.”  Last year, the site published a list of the Top 20 Universities with the most Sugar Babies, and British GQ Magazine has called SeekingArrangement.com “the future of online dating.”

Wade sees no shame in the Mercantile Theory of Human Relations.

No one is calling Newt Gingrich a slut when he asks his Billionaire Sugar Daddy, Sheldon Adelson, to inject cash to keep his presidential campaign afloat. But, when a woman seeks out a Sugar Daddy to help pay for college, many in mainstream media have no problem likening her to being a prostitute. Such is the hypocrisy of the society we live in.

Wade said he would buy ad spots to support “free speech,” and because Limbaugh’s show “appeals to the largest Sugar Daddy demographic.”

In an August interview with the Wall Street Journal, Wade, who has degrees from MIT, said financially based relationships are actually better than the other sort. “The fact that people are brutally honest up front makes these relationships healthier than others where people beat around the bush. If you know going into a relationship that a person is going to use you and you are going to use them, then it’s healthier because there is a mutually agreed exchange of expectations.”

Wade told the Journal he started the website in 2006 out of personal need.

“I had graduated from MIT and was making six figures, but it was very poor pickings for me. I would write emails [to prospective dates] and get a 1 to 2% response rate. My mom had told me that if you studied hard and were successful the women would line up. I help out girlfriends financially as well as with mentoring. I took those characteristics from my own dating and built a website around that.”

In the cross hairs: Planned Parenthood, the 91-year-old organization that provides birth control, cancer screening, STD testing and abortions to 3 million women a year, from 750 clinics in 49 states. In  the last month, Planned Parenthood was again in the headlines when the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced it wouldn’t fund Planned Parenthood anymore, then reversed itself.

Salon sat down with Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, to talk about how American politics reached the point where access to not just abortion, but to birth control, suddenly became a priority in the national political debate.

Women’s reproductive health issues seem to be defining issues this election year. Did you see this coming?

No. Somehow the Republican primary has become this race to the bottom on women’s issues. They have been trying to outdo themselves. And they are going to wake up in November and realize that the majority of voters are women.

Why do you think this is happening?

After the 2010 elections we saw this total realignment of  Congress and legislatures, based on reproductive issues.  People had been elected on the basis of anger about this enormous economic dislocation. But what we saw was that the House of Representatives was then two-thirds anti-choice. This was not a topic at all in the election. Yet, as soon as they were sworn in, they didn’t focus on jobs, the economy or foreclosures, but the first legislation they introduced was about abortion and healthcare. One of the first bills the House passed was to completely eliminate Planned Parenthood funding.

As a former Democratic strategist, what do you make of this phenomenon?

I think the other issues really take some thought and energy to solve. And it’s a cheap shot to go after women. We are seeing this enormous overreach that the government should be in every part of women’s lives. And we are seeing people across the country saying, “OK, enough is enough. How do you put politics in front of breast cancer screening?”

Did the Komen funding controversy change the way you do business?

The great news for us is that millions of people now know we are a major provider of preventive care including breast and cervical cancer screenings for 700,000 women a year. We heard from men and women across the country, that they they couldn’t believe groups were putting politics ahead of healthcare. We were very pleased to get support from Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong, for example.

Do you expect to get more Komen funding going forward?

That happens at the local level. We are very pleased to be working with them again. Their money goes to our local doctors and screeners. I am quite encouraged. It opens some doors.

Since the 2010 elections lawmakers have introduced more than 1,000 reproductive health bills. Why? And what is Planned Parenthood doing?

I think there was a feeling that women would never object, that we would just take what was dished out. Unfortunately, women are not represented equally in these legislatures.

But, I think we are seeing a real backlash against these efforts against women’s health. We saw the U.S. Senate reject the House’s efforts to end funding for Planned Parenthood. And we gained more than a million new supporters during those months.

Then you see in Mississippi, the most conservative state in the country by practically any measure, that this Personhood measure, which every major Republican presidential candidate has endorsed, was overwhelmingly rejected. People in this country don’t want government intruding into personal and family decisions.

How many of the 1,000 anti-choice measures are becoming law? 

A lot of them. I was just in my home state of Texas. The Legislature had just ended family planning and basic preventive care for 300,000 women in Texas. And Gov. Perry was out bragging that he closed 11 Planned Parenthood centers. These were  all along the Rio Grande and they only provided preventive care, no abortions at all. Here he is out bragging and women in the state are paying the price.

Do you have Republicans on your board or supporting Planned Parenthood?

We have tons of  Republicans. The great irony is a lot of our Planned Parenthoods were started by Republicans. Mrs. Barry Goldwater in Arizona. Richard Nixon signed the first family planning law into effect: the one that Mr. Romney has pledged to eradicate, the one that serves 5 million American women a year. That was signed into law by Nixon. Among Republicans, there is a history of support for access to healthcare and rejection of the intrusive laws being passed by the more extreme members of the party now. The sad thing is, traditional Republicans are being threatened and bullied by the folks in their own party.

You just handed me a Planned Parenthood candidate questionnaire that Mitt Romney signed in 2002, answering “yes” to the questions of whether he supported Roe v. Wade and access for poor women to abortion. What has happened to him?

It’s very tough to be a moderate Republican and stay in office. Ten years ago Mitt Romney was trying to get the Planned Parenthood endorsement. Today, as a leading candidate for president, he has pledged to completely eliminate Planned Parenthood, to end the family planning program, and he has endorsed the Personhood amendment. He is unrecognizable from when he was governor. That is a very good example of how extreme the Republican primary system has gotten. The thought we would have a major candidate running for president in America that wants to end family planning is just extraordinary.

Romney is the moderate. Santorum leans a bit farther over the edge.  

It is extraordinary that someone wants to be president of the United States who has absolutely no regard for women and women’s ability to make any decisions about personal healthcare. What’s disheartening is every time he moves to the right, Mitt Romney moves with him. What’s really of concern for women is that these guys can’t be trusted.

What did you make of Darrell Issa’s all-male panel on contraceptives and the Affordable Care Act, saying the issue is about liberty, not women.   

Well, I don’t think Mr. Issa has ever taken birth control. Where they are totally missing the boat is that women in America don’t see birth control as a social issue. It’s a health care issue.  The average American woman spends five years getting pregnant and having kids and then she spends an average of 30 years trying not to get pregnant. So trying to prevent an unintended pregnancy is a lifelong pursuit for women. Birth control is a basic healthcare issue and it’s an economic issue. Many women will save $600 a year from this [Affordable Care] benefit alone. I can’t say it enough: 99 percent of women in America, if they have ever been sexually active, use birth control. And 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control. This is  just not a controversial topic!

Did you predict that they would go after this benefit?

We worked for the passage because we knew it would be good for women. But I have been stunned to see that the Republican Party has taken up as the issue they want to be working on in Congress:  ending birth control. I look around me and see all the things this country needs. And the thought that they make that their priority is astounding,. This is why people have so little regard for Congress now. People ask: What are they doing to help me in my daily life? And for women who don’t have time for politics, who are raising their kids, trying to put dinner on the table, working two jobs, that’s money I can use for groceries? And now, men are talking to other men about how they can get rid of this benefit for women.

Are we living in regressive times for women in the U.S. right now?

I do think in the last 12 months it is literally a tale of two cities. On one hand, there are enormous opportunities for women, getting preventive care covered. On the other hand, there are political forces trying to take us back to the 1950s.

 When you arrived in 2006 , you said, “I feel like we need to go into the 21st century. Clearly, we are going to get there kicking and screaming.” Still, 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider.  That’s not progress, is it?

We’ve made a lot of progress. We are really seeing change in the coming generation. I hear from a lot of people saying, oh we fought so hard in the 1960s and young people don’t appreciate how far we have come. But I think in the last year we have seen young people engage in a way they never have before. When the House voted to end our funding,  we saw young people, including young men, all across the country on college campuses, get involved. We signed up more than a million new activists and supporters. During the Komen thing, we had literally 1.3 million tweets — an explosion!  These are young people.  And we are seeing young men take these issues on, they are not just women’s issues. They can’t imagine going back to a time when birth control was an issue.

But PP will always be a target for the pro-lifers.

Yes. They want to end all access to safe and legal abortion. Planned Parenthood does more to prevent unintended pregnancy than any organization. It’s unconscionable that the U.S. has the highest rate of unintended and teen pregnancy in the industrial world. There is so much we can do in this country to prevent that. I have been so disturbed to read the things that Mr Romney is saying, because I feel surely he must know better, this is a country where there is a lot we can do to improve people’s lives, instead of making women’s healthcare a political issue.

Do you foresee a time when women won’t be fighting to protect basic reproductive rights?

I think there is always going to be a part of society that is trying to keep women back, but I think we are making progress. Ninety-five years ago Margaret Sanger was arrested for handing out not birth control, but information about birth control. Last year we saw 30 million people online looking for information about birth control. We are making progress.

Read Gleick’s statement on Hufffington Post.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication

He concluded: “I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.”

Heartland Institute president Joseph L. Bast promised legal action in a statement: ”A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.”

In 2009, someone hacked into the emails of climate scientists arguing the finer points of the science. The Heartland and other pro-energy groups used those emails to claim that the science of man-caused climate change is inconclusive. That hacker has never been outed.

Some people don’t want to hear it. Supporters of industries that profit from the fossil-fuel status quo routinely challenge those facts, and treat them as political talking points. This week, a dirty trick played on one of the chief industry front groups, the Heartland Institute of Chicago, a major source of “climate denialism,” as the fact-based scientists like to call it, revealed just how politicized the issue has become.

On Tuesday, an individual claiming to be a Heartland donor persuaded the group to email him or her the group’s annual budget, its fundraising plan and a 2012 strategy paper, outlining the organization’s intent to insert contrarian views of climate change into the nation’s elementary schools.

The dirty email trick was reminiscent of a similar ploy in 2009, when someone hacked into emails of a British science consortium that advises the U.N. on climate change and released them publicly, revealing an argument between scientists on some of the evidence. At the time, Heartland touted the private emails as proof that scientists do not in fact agree on the causes of global warming, a development they call the “Climategate” scandal.

After reviewing the new Heartland documents, Gavin Schmidt, a scientist with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who models and studies climate change, told Salon:

This is exactly the kind of thing we see people doing, and we know they have been actively promoting the fringe voices, trying to influence teaching curricula, trying to lobby legislators, trying to undermine the conclusions of bodies. But it is good to know who is actually funding them.

Heartland, which bills itself as anti-regulatory and libertarian, annually produces climate change “denier” conferences and pays expenses for elected officials to attend. For example, the budget shows that Heartland allocated $304,704 for scientists supporting its contrarian views in 2012.

One of these scientists is Fred S. Singer, a physicist and National Weather Bureau satellite center founder, who is said to receive $5,000 a month. The same day as the document leak, a science watchdog named John Mashey released a detailed investigation into Singer and his Science and Environmental Policy Project, indicating that he failed to properly fill out income forms for the foundation. Singer has previously worked with Heartland arguing that secondhand smoke is harmless. One of Heartland’s funders, according to the documents, is Phillip Morris.

Other scientists, researchers and pseudo-scientists on the Heartland payroll include a former California TV weatherman, Anthony Watts, who runs an anti-climate change science blog called WUWT (Watts Up With That). Heartland budgeted him $90,000 for a “special project.”

On his blog yesterday, Watts admitted taking an unspecified sum:

Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.

The Heartland budget allocates more than half a million dollars for “government relations” and another $800,000 for communications. Besides the big-budget annual climate conference, another $25,920 was budgeted for eight “Heartland Capital Events” identified as “events in state capitals for elected officials,” at $3,240 each.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Heartland is legally barred from using its tax-free income of $7.7 million to lobby for or against legislation. The fact that the group appears to be intending to do just that could transform the group’s ongoing public relations disaster into a legal problem. Heartland’s activities are no surprise to environmentalist watchdogs, but actual proof of moneys spent on lobbying activities might affect their legal status, if the IRS bothers to investigate.

Besides trying to influence public (and lawmaker) opinion on fossil fuels and climate change, Heartland works on other overtly political projects that have nothing to do with climate change.  The group gave $612,000 for something called “Operation Angry Badger,” aimed at the nonscientific goal of supporting Wisconsin’s anti-union Gov. Scott Walker, who is targeted for recall by progressives.

Worried that liberal (and, in their view, overpaid) public schoolteachers are turning young minds green with impunity, Heartland planned to pay a coal industry consultant named David Wojick about $25,000 per quarter, to create a curriculum to counter global warming education in schools.

“Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political,” the document states. “Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success.”

Heartland is not alone in attacking the issue through the schools. Three states (Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota) have passed so-called Environmental Literacy Improvement Act bills — written by energy industry shills — that require schools to teach climate change “denial” along with conventional climate science. Other states are considering such measures.

“The big issue is that they are using charitable status to lobby,” Schmidt asked. “They are not an educational outfit. They are doing this to influence legislators. To what extent is it appropriate for them to be filing nonprofit status?”

A strategy paper indicated that Heartland has targeted Forbes and the New York Times as outlets for its message. Forbes has “begun to allow high-profile climate scientists … to post warmist science essays that counter our own,” the documents says. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate change and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”

The paper recommended cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences, “such as Revkin at DotEarth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW communicators.”

“Mugging of a private organization”

Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely, reached by Salon on Wednesday, declined to comment on whether Heartland engages in lobbying. He insisted that at least one of the leaked documents  (the “strategy” paper) is a “fake” and therefore he wouldn’t concede the authenticity of any of the others, although he didn’t deny it either. The organization did publicly apologize to donors whose names were revealed, indicating that at least some of the information is accurate.

Was there poetic justice in an email trickster obtaining internal documents from Heartland, just as Heartland used hacked emails of climate scientists arguing over details to promote the alleged “Climategate” scandal.

Lakely rejected the notion:

There are profound differences between this online mugging of a private organization that is not receiving public funds, and what happens to organizations where taxpayer dollars and international funds are involved. There is a level of accountability that the public is entitled to and that is not remotely parallel to ambushing a private organization’s private documents. I expect [progressives and environmentalists] to make those comparisons, but we are not a public entity.

Lakely also denied that Heartland’s efforts have helped turn a scientific debate into a circus of political claims, counterclaims and dirty tricks. “What the Heartland Institute has been encouraging for a long time is a scientific discussion,” he said.  “We invite people who even hate the Heartland Institute to engage in civil open and public debate about what the science says is happening to the planet.”

Among the listed donors were big pharmaceutical companies and insurers (financing the Heartland’s “Choose Your Medicine” project aimed at fighting what it calls “Obamacare”). The Charles Koch Foundation kicked in $200,000 to the healthcare effort. Energy companies and trusts affiliated with them were behind financing for the climate projects.

After the documents leaked, some of the listed donors distanced themselves from Heartland. Microsoft told the New YorkTimes that its $59,908 donation was not in cash, but in software that it routinely provides nonprofits. A Glaxo Smith Kline spokeswoman confirmed the company’s $50,000 donation but added, “We absolutely don’t endorse their views on the environment.”

The document leak inspired much glee among enviro-bloggers like DeSmogBlog and Think Progress Green, but NASA’s Schmidt said tainted science is a serious problem that exists beyond Heartland’s lobbying efforts.

“I don’t think Heartland is either powerful or particularly well-funded,” he said. “They do channel money to these small number of skeptics who make a living being skeptics. But those people would exist without them. The politicization of this topic has come about because people perceive there are political consequences to this problem. What is surprising is that scientists who are just doing their job get pulled up and investigated just because somebody doesn’t want to agree with their results. And that has been driven to a large part by groups like Heartland. “