White Courtesy Telephone highlights the fact that the story that was the great liberal campaign finance reform conspiracy [otherwise known as "Pewgate"] has had all the legs of this little guy:

It has now been more than a year since discussions of Pewgate made the rounds of the Blogosphere, and Mr. Treglia has not been brought to justice.  This, dear readers, is because there simply was no crime committed.  In fact, Mr. Treglia’s actions didn’t even qualify as naughty.

As WCT points out, Pewgate turns out to be very little to do with nothing. Conspiracies in the right-wing blogosphere tend to die quickly and quietly.

The New York Times weighed in last week on Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who ruled against the Bush Administration's NSA spying program. Judicial watch is accusing Judge Taylor of having a conflict of interest because she sits on the board of the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan. Seems the foundation has made grants to the A.C.L.U., which opposes the NSA program. The grants were not related to the NSA.

Just one question for Judicial Watch. Say, hypothetically, Judge Taylor had ruled in favor of the Bush Administration's NSA policy. Would we be hearing from you?

Say it ain't so. Businessweek examines competition among donor advised funds, community foundations, and [post-Buffetmania] private foundations:

With so much at stake—literally, tens of billions of dollars flowing annually into private foundations, community foundations, and donor-advised funds—it should come as no surprise that competition for control of those dollars should exist. The competition among commercial donor-advised funds is quite pervasive and very public. Yet a more subtle form of competition exists among community foundations in their struggle for charitable assets.

Faced with the rapid growth of commercial donor-advised funds and the powerful appeal of family foundations, community foundations have been struggling to preserve their donor base and increase their assets. For answers, community foundations have turned to a cadre of consultants and advisers, retuned their marketing messages, and gone on the offensive. Often, the target of their antipathy is the private foundation, for reasons that are not altogether clear—except, perhaps, that private foundations continue to dwarf community foundations in both number and amount of total charitable assets, and thus represent the largest potential source of new donors and new assets.

The community foundation vs. donor advised fund discussion has been happening for quite awhile. The idea that private foundations may offer a third option for would-be philanthropists is no doubt a nightmarish scenario for your average community foundation CEO. I await the announcement of the opening of the Ford Foundation's development office.

The kind folks over at CRC have updated their post and pointed out an egregious error in my latest post about CRC's earth-shattering new study that uncovered liberal bias in the grantmaking of the foundations of Fortune 100 companies. I wrote:

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.

Page two of the print article detailing CRC's research says:

For a complete list of the foundations and their grantees, see the August 4, 2006 highlight at http://capitalresearch.org.

It's always helpful, especially when employing the somewhat delicate art form of sarcasm, to get the facts right. Maybe I was distracted by the high-school-yearbook-quality of the adjacent photo of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Diamond. Whatever the case, I've been sufficiently, and deservedly, chastised by CRC for my error.

CRC is free to use this oversight on my part as reason to dismiss me as a "self-marginalizing" critic. I'll continue to keep a look out for the release of a "study" from CRC that does anything other than confirm the organization's liberal conspiracy theories. Until then, CRC will continue to influence only its ideological soul mates.