Howard Kurtz pointed out this morning that the $3 million in funding for Tucker Carlson’s new project — the Daily Caller — comes from a man named Foster Friess. Of particular interest, Kurtz notes that Freiss ‘calls much of the information on global warming distorted and manipulated.’ Looking into this a bit further, it certainly appears as if the primary funder of Tucker Carlson’s new website is a climate change denier.

Writing on his blog, Freiss refers to this speech by Questar CEO Keith Rattie (PDF)as the best thing on global warming he has read.

First of all, this story should never have been called ClimateGate. Given the similarities between this smear job and the Swift Boat attacks on Senator John Kerry, SwiftHack is a far more appropriate name.

I’ve attempted to cover the major points of interest in this story. Consider this post a perpetual work in progress. It will be continually updated. Please leave appropriate links and angles I’m missing in the comments.

For your convenience, the following 6 points each links to the corresponding section of this post:

The scientific consensus on climate change remains strong.

The impacts of catastrophic climate change continue to rear their ugly head.

Hacking into private computer files is illegal.

All of the emails were taken out of context.

The story is being pushed by far-right conspiracy theorists.

Scientists are human beings and they talk frankly amongst themselves.

Howie Klein has the goods on the Solar Technology Roadmap Act, which the House of Representatives easily passed yesterday.

Following up on my previous note to the authors of Superfreakonomics, I’d like to add this addendum: “When you find yourself employing the same tactics as the Chamber of Commerce to defend your views on climate change, you should probably re-evaluate your entire strategy.”

First, the never-ending saga of the Chamber of Commerce’s identity crisis on climate change continues, with the Chamber beginning to go on the offensive. On Tuesday they filed a Digital Millenium Copyright Act notice with the Internet Service Provider of the Yes Men — the activists that assisted the Chamber in making an utter fool of itself on Monday. This essentially strong-armed the Yes Men’s small ISP into shutting down the websites of hundreds of businesses and organizations, for fear of facing the legal wrath of the Chamber. That doesn’t seem very business friendly to me.

Today, Representative Ed Markey pushed this story back to the forefront with a Huffington Post piece. After setting the record straight on Romney’s falsehood and explaining the urgency of clean energy legislation, Markey finishes strong:

So the next time you hear Mitt Romney or other opponents of clean energy and climate legislation railing about the costs of action, you should multiply your suspicion by whatever number they are attempting to sell. Odds are, it is far from even-handed.

While this is a solid piece, and Representative Markey makes his case well, he barely mentions the other Republican politicians who have repeated this lie. I understand the value of pegging this on a potential 2012 Presidential candidate, but there are over a dozen current elected officials in the Republican party who have repeated this lie as well.

Since I last updated the count a few weeks ago, eight additional Republican politicians and party organizations have repeated the lie, bringing the total to 20.

Several members of the United States Senate have a serious credibility problem when it comes to climate change. Chief among them is Senator James Inhofe, whose career highlight was saying on the Senate floor that global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Mr. Inhofe’s most recent assault on the debate over domestic climate legislation was his insistence on repeating a misleading analysis of the costs of climate legislation, despite all evidence to the contrary. Incredibly, when I asked Senator Inhofe’s staff to respond to the fact that his statements on climate legislation were clearly factually inaccurate, they responded with the single-most convoluted statement I’ve ever seen. Ian Malcomb of Jurassic Park had some choice words for this 1700+ word rant as well. This is what we’re up against folks, and it is neither logical, credible nor reality-based. I would engage in a point-counterpoint back and forth with Mr. Inhofe’s staff — as I recently did with Senator Murkowski’s staff on the same issue — but it would clearly be fruitless. Rather than respond to Mr. Dempsey’s largely irrelevant arguments, I’ll simply refer you to this FactCheck.org refutation of the crux of his argument. Flail away, Mr. Dempsey, but reality is on our side.

I mentioned last week that both CBS and Politico were forced to issue corrections on pieces they published citing inflated cost-estimates of a version of climate legislation that was never considered by Congress.

Despite immediate and forceful pushback from the Treasury Department, the Congressional Budget Office and environmental groups, solid reporting by the Wonk Room and the Washington Post, and thorough debunkings by Media Matters and Politifact, several leading GOP elected officials have begun citing the highly misleading figure.