The folks over at PolitiFact's PunditFact have rated a claim I made on a recent episode of The Big Picture as "Pants on Fire," but they've totally missed the point of what I was really saying. Talking about the Keystone Pipeline and the Koch Brothers earlier this month, I said that, "The Kochs stand to make around $100 billion if the government approves the Keystone XL pipeline."

 

That claim comes from a study released last year by the International Forum on Globalization, which argued that the Koch Brothers' stand to make around $100 billion if the Keystone project is ever approved, because of their massive holdings in millions of acres of oil-bearing Canadian tar sands.

 

Now, as they do with all of their fact-checks, the folks over at PolitiFact's PunditFact methodically broke down that study, pointed out what they said were its many flaws, and came up with the conclusion that the $100 billion number was absurd.

 

They even went straight to the source, and asked Koch Industries about the claim, which a spokesman obviously said was false. What else was a mouthpiece for the Koch Brothers going to say?

 

But that's besides the point.

 

In all of their fact-checking and flaw detection, PunditFact missed the point that I was trying to make. So, let's try again.

 

Read more here.

 

-Thom