Year 4, Month 8, Day 2: Who Cooda Knowed?

The Silicon Valley Mercury News (CA) reports on the bizarre fundraiser Google hosted for (gasp!) Jim Inhofe:

July 10

Mountain View-based Google is taking some heat for hosting a fundraiser for a U.S. senator who is an outspoken disbeliever in man-made climate change, despite the company’s green rhetoric.

Google’s Washington, D.C., office will host a lunch Thursday, at $250 to $2,500 per plate, to benefit Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., just a month after Google chairman Eric Schmidt said those who deny climate change and global warming are liars.

Climate change activists plan to picket outside in order to “remind people of Google’s professed culture of ethics, environmental stewardship, and respect for scientific truth which help make Google products so popular,” according to a news release. “They’ll also remind people of Sen. Jim Inhofe’s long record of unethical environmental destruction and promotion of anti-scientific conspiracy theories on behalf of the likes of Koch Industries, his biggest corporate funder.”

The protesters say they’ll deliver 10,000 signatures of people from across the nation, calling on Google CEO Larry Page to end his company’s support for politicians like Inhofe.

“We regularly host fundraisers for candidates, on both sides of the aisle, but that doesn’t mean we endorse all of their positions,” a Google spokesperson replied to my email Wednesday. “And while we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.”

This one was easy and fun to write. July 15:

We should be fair to the people who run the world’s most popular search engine.

Perhaps they just didn’t know how to find out about James Inhofe’s obsessive climate-change denialism (“inhofe climate denial” worked pretty well for me). Perhaps they couldn’t find the right search string that would have unearthed the Oklahoma Senator’s gleeful self-description as the number-one “Enemy of The Earth” (“inhofe enemy earth,” in case you’re wondering). Perhaps they’d never noticed that the Center for Biological Diversity last year awarded Inhofe the “Rubber Dodo” award in recognition of his relentless work pushing humanity and countless other species toward what biologists tactfully call an “evolutionary bottleneck” (try “inhofe rubber dodo”).

Or perhaps, given that the Senator’s entire legislative career has consisted of putting his vote up for sale to the highest bidder (“inhofe political corruption”), Google’s executives figured they might be able to simply buy him off. Who knows?

Warren Senders