Thanks for the tip, Lexington Institute!..You guys are REALLY on the Ball!

"Philip Peters, a Cuba analyst at Washington-based Lexington Institute, a nonprofit think tank that promotes free markets."
Writes the Wall Street Journal today.

Is that ALL they do, WSJ? Might I refer your intrepid investigative staff to this info. first broken on Babalu blog?

And to this article that expands on it a bit, wherein it reads:

"Canada's Sherritt works quietly in Washington, giving money to a former State Department employee, Phil Peters, to advance its interests. The money to Peters goes through contributions to the Lexington Institute, where Peters is a Vice-President. Because the Lexington Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, there is no public record of Sherritt’s funding. This has allowed Peters to advise and direct the Cuba Working Group (a Congressional anti-embargo cabal) in ways beneficial to Sherritt while presenting himself to the Group as an objective think-tank scholar with a specialization in Cuba .”

Adding more suspicions are the “free-market” Lexington Institute's consistently curious priorities. For instance, the U.S. government and various states ban U.S. oil companies from drilling in thousands upon thousands of square miles off the U.S. Coast. These areas, primarily on the outer Continental Shelf, hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. By government decree Alaska ’s National Wildlife Refuge, holding an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, is also off limits to oil drilling. This leaves America 's energy needs increasingly at the mercy of foreign autocrats, despots and maniacs.

For various reasons all U.S. based free-market think-tanks, from CATO to Heritage and from the American Enterprise Institute to the Independence Institute, bemoan this drilling ban and proselytize against it. Yet the Washington D.C. based Lexington Institute (champion of “free-markets and limited government”) remains utterly mute on the issue.

On the other hand, the U.S government bans U.S. oil companies from drilling in a small area 45 miles off the Florida coast that contains no more than 9.3 billion barrels of oil. The Lexington Institute (who claims interest only in issues that constitute “national priorities”) promptly comes to the fore in high dudgeon, calling this ban “an absurdity” and claiming that most U.S. Oil co’s would agree with them.

Why the discrepancy, some might ask?" (hint: that small area 45 miles off the Florida coast belongs to the Castro brothers, who employ Sherritt as their mineral mining "partners".)

Just 'askin, WSJ...????????