Category Archives: morality

Money Laundering and Elections

Posted on by
Reply

Non-profits organized and licensed as 501(c)(3) entities get donations to them characterized as tax deductions, and they are prohibited from engaging in any form of political campaign for or against a candidate. Non-profits organized and licensed as 501(c)(4) entities, on the other hand, are allowed to engage in political campaigns, including direct partisan politics.

So far, everything’s jake.

However.

Quite a number of 501(c)(3)s sent all of their donations to 501(c)(4)s explicitly to help fund politicians’ campaigns and to allow their donors’ donations engage in those direct partisan politics. That’s strictly, narrowly legal.

Here are three examples, though, of something more nefarious.

  • Democracy Matters Foundation provided 96% of its 2024 expenditures to its affiliated(!) 501(c)(4), Democracy Matters, some $31.38 million
  • Guarantee Our Votes Project spent just 0.2% of its $13,919,873 on 2024 legal and office expenses; the remainder went to donations like $13.85 million to America Works USA
  • America Votes Education Fund in 2024 gave $20,748,002 to its 501(c)(4) affiliate(!) America Votes. It claimed a token $532 in office expenses and $274 in fundraising expenses that year, and it had no paid employees

Should that sort of thing be legal? It looks like money-laundering to me.

Responsibility

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer to The Moneyist wrote that

…political issues came up, and our daughter-in-law wanted to discuss and debate them with me. I calmly reminded them of our previous agreement [that there would be no political discussions among them].
Since January, our son and his wife have stopped communicating with my wife and me. They have refused to return our phone calls or respond to our texts. We have been told that our daughter-in-law does not wish to have contact with our family.

The letter writer added that we have also tried to respect the boundaries they have established.

First, it’s not just the daughter-in-law who has broken off contact. So has the son, who plainly has gone along with his wife, perhaps actively sides with her for the same reasons she has for refusing contact. It’s not inappropriate for a husband to support his wife over his parents, so there’s nothing to be read into that aspect. Both son and daughter-in-law are affirmatively not wanting further contact with the parent; that’s the boundary they’ve set.

Against that, the letter writer wonders if he and his wife should cut the two out of their will(s). A potential complication is that the letter writer has another son, only mentioned for his existence, so I assume (yes, yes) that this son is on good terms with the letter writer.

My position is this, because I tend to be a bit black and white on such things. The son and daughter-in-law have taken themselves out of the letter writer’s family. The only tie, such as it is, remaining is the accident of birth involving the son. Their removal of themselves—as the letter writer notes, they were not driven out—also took them out of any familial-related connections and obligations.

The parents would be well-served to acknowledge their son’s decision, not impose themselves on him—honor the boundaries they have established—and rewrite their wills (each parent should have his/her own will), and allocate their estate elsewhere. That’ll be hard to do, emotionally, but it’s necessary according to the son’s and his wife’s boundaries. That reallocation might also lead to friction between the son and daughter-in-law and the other son, but that’s among those three; it’s irrelevant to the fact of the two having decided to leave the family altogether.

Hate Speech According to Leftists

Posted on by
Reply

The latest example is provided by the Portland, Oregon, Portland Public Schools school district. The district has banned a mother

from her children’s school for a year because she engaged in sidewalk advocacy against its secret gender curriculum and social transitions of gender-confused students, claiming her “hate speech” violated its harassment policy….

That ban included preventing her from witnessing her son’s graduation from Meriwether Lewis Elementary School. Her daughter remains at risk of the school’s indoctrination program, a program of which the school district is so embarrassed, I surmise, that it felt constrained to keep it hidden away from concerned parents.

Regardless of the district’s apparent embarrassment over its program, or its dishonest desire to keep its treatment of the parents’ children from them, it has made its attitude toward speech very clear with the ban and its claimed reason for it.

Hate speech, according to the district, is any speech that disagrees with its Leftist ideology. Contra the Just the News characterization of the school district’s position, though, this attitude—toward free speech and toward transgender abuse of children—isn’t far-left; it’s increasingly becoming mainstream Left.

Obsessive-Compulsive

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are beating each other up over who should hold sway over Party—socialists or Establishment Democrats. Their serious policy differences and the power struggle that otherwise would fracture Party, though, are not stopping them from linking arms in order to go against President Donald Trump (R). Consider the just concluded Party primary election in Michigan to determine who should represent Party in the US Senate. Democratic Socialist of America member Abdul el-Sayed edged Establishment Democrat Haley Stevens. El-Dayed’s campaign was marked by vitriol toward Stevens. However,

Ms Stevens, who spent the campaign avoiding the subject of Mr El-Sayed’s not-quite-spoken animus, last week ventured a diagonal allusion to it. “You want to blame all your problems on Jewish Americans,” she said in an online post. But she also vowed to support him in the general election—a paradox that nicely captures her party’s pusillanimity on the Jewish question.

Hours after her defeat, Stevens posted on X:

I love Michigan and am so proud to have put up my hand to serve. I spoke with Abdul a few moments ago to offer him my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November. Thank you, Michigan.

She loves Michigan, or she hates President Donald Trump (R) and/or Jews that much? Trump, not Rogers, since both el-Sayed and Stevens, were running against Trump, not Rogers. Jews, since el-Sayed never hid his antisemitic bigotry under a bushel, while Stevens tacitly agreed with his bigotry through her silence on that.

And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) endorsement of el-Sayed within hours of his primary victory. The Jewish Party mucky-muck looked past el-Sayed’s hatred of him and his religious confreres to make his endorsement explicitly about his own hatred of Trump.

Democrats are united by a common purpose: putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate. We look forward to working with Abdul….

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are so deeply immersed in their anti-Trump obsession that they’re compulsively supporting the candidate whom they so deeply despised before the Primary and who has such strong contempt for them and such raw hatred of so many Americans.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party our nation is facing in the fall mid-terms. Weak-kneed on honesty, lacking entirely the courage to denounce bigotry, embracing the destructive policies of the Democratic Socialists of America, accepting violence-embracing, if not outright inciting, rhetoric (you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message).

Still Just Love Taps

Posted on by
Reply

In response to Iran’s “surprise” attacks on US forces in Jordan, the US answered with a powerful response.

US forces carried out a “heavy wave” of strikes, attacking dozens of targets, including military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities, said US Central Command after the strikes were completed. “The strikes aimed to further diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces, commercial shipping, and neighboring Gulf countries,” the command said.

And President Donald Trump (R):

We are going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn.

This is nothing but a few wholly inadequate love taps, though, to use Trump’s on phrase. His dislike for the killing and destruction war causes is well known, but here he’s letting it cloud his judgment.

The only way to diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces is to destroy those threats’ physical capability to act on their enmity. If we know where those targets, those command centers, missile and drone facilities,… are, we need to hit and destroy all of them, in rapid sequence if not simultaneously, not just bang some of them in onesies and twosies strikes. The terrorists must be completely disarmed, as many of their—now IRGC—leadership killed as we can reach, and the surviving leadership blinded by eliminating their command centers, surveillance facilities, military radar systems.

Worse from Trump’s perspective (were he to get better advice from his civilian advisors), the tit-for-tat that is this turn-taking foolishness only runs up, for the mid- and long-term, the casualty count and the physical destruction.

It’s time to be serious. Hit Iran with continuous waves of strikes strong enough actually to be worthy of being called “heavy.” Diplomacy can easily and straightforwardly be carried out while these strikes are ongoing rather than during pauses, which are strongly beneficial to the terrorists: safe passage to a meeting site can easily be granted and enforced for Iranian decision makers’ travel.