Paul D. Thacker, in a New Republic piece, tags Steven Milloy, the “Junk Science” king, with the paid-pundit spray can, that so recently smeared our old friend Michael Fumento:

But, whereas Scripps Howard fired Fumento and apologized to its readers, Fox News continues to look the other way as Milloy accepts corporate handouts. And it’s not just the ExxonMobil money. Milloy has a long history of taking payment from industries that have a stake in the science stories he writes. The ethical standards are clear. “Not disclosing this is wrong,” says Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The real question, then, is why Fox News continues to employ Milloy. Or, in the words of James Hansen, a climate scientist and the head of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “The question is, ‘Why does a major news organization employ such a hack?'”

The interesting bit here is that, while the economic connection to Fumento’s enthusiasm for Monsanto was only recently revealed, Hansen and Thacker have a point about Milloy. His role as a corporate PR shill is well known. Why does Fox keep carrying his work?

Meanwhile, Fumento paid Inkstain’s pathetically few readers a visit last night to let us know that he’s back in the game. And that he thinks I’m a loser. And maybe a pissant. He was a little ambiguous on that last one.