What Hillary Calls 'Absurd Conspiracy Theories' Don't Seem So Absurd
Heck of a morning for the Clinton Foundation.
Jeff Dunetz, summarizing the New York Times:
The latest revelation . . . involves a deal which enabled Russia to own about 20% of the uranium production capacity of the United States for a $2.35 million donation to the Clinton Family Foundation. According to the report a Canadian based company Uranium One, owned the uranium assets was being purchased by Russian state atomic energy agency Rosatom a deal which had to be approved by various U.S. agencies including the State Department. As the State Department was mulling of the deal, the Chairman of Uranium One donated the $2.35 million from his family foundation to the Clintons.
It gets worse, not only was there much more heading into the Clinton foundation that the $2.35 but a significant portion wasn't reported.
Before Mrs. Clinton could assume her post as secretary of state, the White House demanded that she sign a memorandum of understanding placing limits on her husband's foundation's activities. To avoid the perception of conflicts of interest, beyond the ban on foreign government donations, the foundation was required to publicly disclose all contributors.
To judge from those disclosures — which list the contributions in ranges rather than precise amounts — the only Uranium One official to give to the Clinton Foundation was Mr. Telfer, the chairman, and the amount was relatively small: no more than $250,000, and that was in 2007, before talk of a Rosatom deal began percolating.
But a review of tax records in Canada, where Mr. Telfer has a family charity called the Fernwood Foundation, shows that he donated millions of dollars more, during and after the critical time when the foreign investment committee was reviewing his deal with the Russians. With the Russians offering a special dividend, shareholders like Mr. Telfer stood to profit.
State Department decisions for sale!
Here's Reuters, with a separate scandal for the Clinton Foundation:
Hillary Clinton's family's charities are refiling at least five annual tax returns after a Reuters review found errors in how they reported donations from governments, and said they may audit other Clinton Foundation returns in case of other errors.
The foundation and its list of donors have been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks. Republican critics say the foundation makes Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, vulnerable to undue influence. Her campaign team calls these claims "absurd conspiracy theories."
The charities' errors generally take the form of under-reporting or over-reporting, by millions of dollars, donations from foreign governments, or in other instances omitting to break out government donations entirely when reporting revenue, the charities confirmed to Reuters.
When you're re-filing your tax returns, that's a concession that this isn't all just "absurd conspiracy theories."
Why Liberals Don't Care That Their Leading Voices Don't Pay Taxes
As you probably saw yesterday, Jillian Kay Melchior kicks tush and takes tax-delinquent names:
Touré Neblett, co-host of MSNBC's The Cycle, owes more than $59,000 in taxes, according to public records reviewed by National Review . . .
Last month, New York filed a $4,948.15 tax warrant against Joy-Ann Reid, who serves as managing editor of theGrio.com and until earlier this year hosted MSNBC's The Reid Report, and her husband, Jason.
Last week, the Winston-Salem Journal reported that Melissa Harris-Perry, who hosts an MSNBC show named after herself, and her husband, James Perry, owed around $70,000 in delinquent taxes, according to a federal lien filed in April 2015. Harris-Perry told the newspaper that she and her husband had made a $21,721 payment toward that debt on Tax Day.
Meanwhile, Al Sharpton's tax problems have been the subject of extensive coverage by National Review and other publications. In November, the New York Times estimated that Sharpton and his entities owed as much as $4.5 million in taxes, penalties, and interest, a sum the MSNBC host disputes.
Besides the personal embarrassment, there's the collective embarrassment to liberals of having four well-paid spokesmen for their cause, who dismissed conservative complaints that the American people are overtaxed, calling for higher taxes while neglecting to pay what they owe.
Erik Wemple, media-beat writer and critic for the Washington Post: "In the collective ethic of MSNBC, there can be no excuse for tax delinquency. And there's even less of an excuse for MSNBC's non-response to all this news. National Review fetched no response from the network. When the Erik Wemple Blog knocked today, the network again clammed up. A spokeswoman offered to go off-record with an explanation of things. We responded that we weren't interested in spin that we couldn't publish. Is it that hard for MSNBC to take a simple stand in favor of our common civic obligations?"
Notice something missing in the response to Melchior's story: any good progressive of any prominence scolding the MSNBC quartet for failing to pay taxes. Every mid-April, lefties pop up in the letters to the editor sections, declaring things like, "as a parent and a part of this country -- I don't mind paying taxes. In fact, I see it as part of my duty as someone who loves this country and benefits every single day from the investments we make as a society." They're not just irked that we have the audacity to want taxes lower and government smaller; they're irked that we have the audacity to loudly complain about paying the taxes we owe. They contend we ought to be gathering all those receipts and punching the numbers into TurboTax with a smile.
Revelations like the ones about the MSNBC hosts confirm our suspicion that liberals don't think taxes are too high because they're not paying all of what they owe. I suppose we could see it as self-implemented tax cuts.
If I remember correctly, a little while back Ace of Spades explained some glaring contradiction in liberal behavior by saying, "They're not in the making sense business. They're in the maximizing-tribal-advantage business." To the average progressive, calling out Sharpton or Touré doesn't really do them any good. If anything, it calls attention to their own hypocrisy, or might suggest that conservatives have a point about tax rates and the complexity of the tax code. Rather than potentially concede any ground, liberals will ignore it and pretend it didn't happen.
From my "Unruly Progressives" piece:
Ultimately, not that many liberals care whether their brethren are following their own book of rules. They've demonstrated a remarkable acceptance for one another's hypocrisy . . .
When the average liberal gets up in the morning, he doesn't want to hear about how his allies and comrades aren't living up to their professed standards. He wants to hear about how bad the opposition is . . .
Progressives and liberals spend much less energy, time, and elevated blood pressure fighting each other — at least beyond the comments section of liberal blogs. They're much quicker to refocus on the big picture and unite in the battle against the Right. Even as titanic a battle as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's 2008 primary fight was resolved within a few months, with Hillary serving in Obama's Cabinet. Many progressives organize their worldview in the reverse order: They pick the good people — themselves — and everything else is negotiable. And as it's currently practiced, liberalism doesn't really require much of anything.
The set-up of each party's presidential primary fits the nature of the two sides pretty accurately. Conservatives -- particularly at this historical moment -- are eager to have a big, passionate, far-reaching argument about first principles and ideals: interventionism vs. isolationism, "big-government conservatism" vs. libertarianism, real free-market economics vs. a big-business agenda, experience vs. the need for new blood and new approaches. Liberals are going along with a flawed heir-apparent nominee, eager to get to the part of politics they love best, beating the bloody tar out of the GOP nominee, and convincing as many people as possible that he's evil incarnate.
Hollywood's Highest-Paid Leading Man Gets Grief for Being Relatively Apolitical
If you had said to me 15 years ago that Robert Downey Jr. would be the Hollywood actor I would admire the most, I would have thought you were crazy. I was irked enough at the way he sleepwalked through his role in U.S. Marshals.
Here we are, in 2015, and besides being an always-entertaining actor, extremely active in charities and good causes, he's making clear he just doesn't want to get sucked into political debates:
After four minutes of questions about Tony Stark and two very tense, very awkward minutes of questions about his "dark periods," Robert Downey, Jr. stood up and bailed on an interview with Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy. But not before telling Guru-Murthy he's "kind of a schmuck."
"Are we promoting a movie?" Downey asked, after Guru-Murthy tried to get the actor to elaborate on something he said to the late David Carr in a 2008 New York Times interview.
To wit:
"You can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can't. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every [sic] since."
Downey clearly didn't want to analyze some "half-assed" thing he said last decade, and begged off by saying "I couldn't even really tell you what a liberal is," but Guru-Murthy haltingly tried to push the issue.
The last straw came when Guru-Murthy asked a tangled question about whether Downey thinks he's free of drugs and alcohol, and maybe his father or something?
"Bye!"
Hint: When a phenomenally successful Hollywood actor like Downey says something like, "I wouldn't say I'm a Republican or a liberal or a Democrat . . ."
(whispers)
He's one of us! But don't tell anybody!
ADDENDA: I'm scheduled to appear on the panel with Greta tonight. |
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