As always, please go to the links for the full article/ op ed.
The National
A former pro football player who serves on the National Rifle Association board was paid $400,000 by the group in recent years for public outreach and firearms training. Another board member, a writer in New Mexico, collected more than $28,000 for articles in NRA publications. Yet another board member sold ammunition from his private company to the NRA for an undisclosed sum.
The NRA, which has been rocked by allegations of exorbitant spending by top executives, also directed money in recent years that went to board members — the very people tasked with overseeing the organization’s finances.
In all, 18 members of the NRA’s 76-member board, who are not paid as directors, collected money from the group during the past three years, according to tax filings, state charitable reports and NRA correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.[snip]
Among the revelations that have burst into public view: CEO Wayne LaPierre racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at a Beverly Hills clothing boutique and on foreign travel, invoices show. Oliver North, forced out as president after trying to oust LaPierre, was set to collect millions of dollars in a deal with the NRA’s now-estranged public relations agency, Ackerman McQueen, according to LaPierre. And the NRA’s outside attorney reaped “extraordinary” legal fees that totaled millions of dollars in the past year, according to North.Be it the Extremely Stable Genius, his Fox "news" boosters, Bible- banging hypocrites, the NRA, or any collection of right- wingers, the common denominator is selling fear to the suckers.
Another common denominator is corruption:
A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump.
Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.
Kushner, who is married to Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka, kept a stake in Cadre after joining the administration, while selling other assets. His holding is now valued at up to $50m, according to his financial disclosure documents.Who's the incompetent little sleazeball doing government favors for now in exchange for the $90 million, you ask?
Virginia Heffernan identifies and expands on one of many bad character traits of the Extremely Stable Genius:
The Mueller report amply chronicles President Trump’s staggering, decades-long crime spree. Like an iron skillet to the head, the extent of Trump’s corruption seems to have stupefied voters, legal scholars and, of course, Congress, all of whom are currently at a loss for a remedy.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in her run for the Democratic nomination for president, put it best: “If he were any other person in the United States, based on what’s documented in that report, he would be carried off in handcuffs.”
But because our norms appear to be inadequate to the current catastrophe in the White House, Trump is not yet in handcuffs. So while Congress equivocates about the Mueller report and its implications for impeachment, voters ought to recognize a more homespun truth that it doesn’t take a degree in con law to understand.
The president is a cheater.
“Howard Beale is a fictitious TV newsman who found his way into the line of fire because of his pursuit of the truth, and I would like to dedicate this to all the real journalists around the world, both in the press and the print media and also broadcast media, who actually are in the line of fire with their pursuit of the truth. The media is not the enemy of the people. Demagoguery is the enemy of the people. Thank you very much, good night.”You can see Cranston's full remarks at the link.
... Being a progressive in the opening years of the 20th century didn’t require strict adherence to a party line or blanket support for a set of specific legislative proposals. Because there was no progressive “movement,” in the singular and definitive meaning of the word, progressivism could draw freely from all sectors of society without demanding even broad consensus on basic questions like the morality of economic concentration or the right of women to vote. It was a malleable and shifting coalition of people who recognized common problems, believed in a rational and fact-based approach to resolving the challenges of modern society and animated public life with an innovative and optimistic spirit.That's just one of many "finds" in Infidel 753's latest link round- up. Many links, many topics, so little time. Go!
