I have a shiny new set of crayons and will use all the brightest colors to respond to David Hogberg's post at the American Spectator about my criticisms of the latest eye-opener from the Capital Research Center.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I can muster up enough intelligence to understand the point that "all the giving is a matter of public record." I wasn't questioning the data itself, but rather how it was interpreted. Foundation grants are generally made for specific projects. As I wrote, if a corporate foundation gave a grant specifically to the Brookings Institution for the publishing of a book extolling the virtues of welfare reform, categorizing those dollars as "left" is misleading.

Having some indication of why specific organizations received their categorizations would have made the study much more transparent. What data was used for categorizing the organizations? Web sites? Annual reports? A survey? Word of mouth? Given the entirety of one organization's work, what tipped them to one side or the other?

I dared offer my opinion [while calling out CRC for its subjectivity] on the accuracy of its categorization of Focus on the Family. Whatever one believes constitutes a "traditional value," Focus on the Family was quite vocal about its support for the Bush tax cuts and even more so for privatizing social security. Excluding [if indeed it was considered - more on that below] Focus on the Family's support for more government regulation of the television industry, my point, delivered however inelegantly, was that Focus on the Family is an example of a pretty straightforward call.

After some reconsideration [god forbid!], with the exception of "traditional values," and its leftie counterpart, "liberal values," I don't have a problem with CRC's criteria. The rest are fairly obvious. But did the Parents Television Council get an appropriate allocation of "left" points for its pressuring companies to pull their ads from a television show [how anti-free market can you be, really?] like Rainbow Push received for, as CRC's article calls it, Jesse Jackson's corporate "shakedowns?" And did the many organizations listed on the "right" that feel the FCC needs to play the role of television and radio censor get any "left" points for that particular little love affair with government regulation? And of the many, many environmental organizations on the "left" list, none was doing anything that might have landed them on the "right" [these guys and these guys seem to be straight down the political middle]?

As to my "distortion" of the Bank of America matching gifts, CRC states on its Web site that "Bank of America's charitable arm unapologetically funds ecoterrorism." Even if, for a mere $300, that statement is true, nothing about it indicates the authors feel the matching gift to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an example of "indifference" on the part of the Bank of America Foundation.

Yes. I'm a lousy speller.