I am forever grateful to Matthew Vadum at the CRC-Greenwatch blog [those greens need watching, you know; we might all end up with some clean air to breathe] for his thoughtful consideration of my post about the Capital Research Center's recent article detailing how many Fortune 100 companies are, through their corporate grantmaking foundations, inadvertantly [or secretly] aiding the regimes of Castro and Kim Jong Il.

I'll concede on a couple of points, and my responses to Vadum are detailed below:

1] I did, in fact, offer in my criticism a simplified explanation of the academic research process. I found it difficult to outline the many flavors of academic research models in a less-than-500-word blog post. However, if there's a single research project during which CRC suddenly realized theory A was totally off the mark ["the federal government can't find its ass in the bathroom"] and published the evidence in the form of an argument for theory B ["gee, maybe the federal highway system thingy is ok"], I can't find any evidence of it. I'm open to suggestions.

2] I was not aware that CRC published on its Web site the entire list of the recipient organizations of the corporate foundations it examined. As standard practice, it's helpful to mention in a print article the fact that additional data is available online. Then I'll know to go and look for it. Vadum did not respond to my point about two of the organizations listed in the article. The Cato Institute, defined as "right" for purposes of CRC's study, recently published a book castigating the Republicans for their less-than-sound fiscal policies. The Brookings Institution, defined as "left" for purposes of the study, recently published a book praising welfare reform. If, say, the Bank of America Foundation funded Cato and Brookings specifically for these book projects, right is left and left is right.

3] Given CRC's mission statement, it's very difficult to believe that as researchers were going about categorizing organizations as "left" or "right," the "left" bucket wasn't a lot bigger than the "right" bucket. It would've been some extra work, but having some indication of just why the organizations received their designations would've been helpful. It's not that I don't like the definitions themselves. Large organizations, in particular, are involved in a variety of issues; sometimes they side with conservatives and sometimes with liberals. Given CRC's political philosophy, it's not too far-fetched to believe that the tiniest of liberal indicators landed an organization on the "left" side of the fence regardless of the organization's overall focus.

4] Maybe the reason corporations won't give CRC data on their contributions that aren't made through their foundations is that if they do CRC will find a $50 employee match as reason to call them eco-terrorists. Kind of saps the veep of public relations' desire to truthfully fill out the CRC survey.

Finally, it's always helpful to have a free spell check service. We bloggers are well aware that our credibility is rooted in our grammatical correctness.