Flight Plans

Guns and Hate:  The NRA is in disarray, involved in a leadership crisis pitting long time chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre and current darling of the right, one time Iran-Contra convict Oliver North in a battle over financial improprieties and excessive spending on, among other things, the contract with their long term public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, a firm that also pays North large sums of money.  Over the weekend LaPierre accused North of extorting him by trying to force him out with threats to release compromising information, an accusation that instead ended up with North announcing his own departure.  On the legal front, Maria Butina, the red headed Russian spylette was sentenced to 18 months for her illegal activities which included infiltrating Republican and conservative circles through the NRA and the NY State Attorney General announced that she was opening an investigation into the NRA’s financials, one that could lead to the loss of its tax-exempt status.  None of this prevented Trump and a long list of other Republicans including VP Pence and Senator Ted Cruz from attending and delivering speeches at the NRA convention in Indiana.  Before leaving for  Indiana, Trump doubled down on his Charlottesville comments, the one where he equated protesters with neo-Nazis by saying that there were “good people on both sides,” and also expressed his undying admiration for the “best” general ever, the slave owning, secessionist Robert E Lee.  During his NRA speech Trump championed gun rights and announced the end of US participation in an arms treaty designed to discourage the sale of conventional weapons to countries that do not protect human rights, aligning the US with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.  While the celebration of guns, guns and more guns continued in Indiana, across the country in San Diego a hate filled lone gun man who may have been responsible for the earlier burning of a Mosque loaded up his AR-type assault weapon and headed to a San Diego area synagogue where he shot and killed one Jewish Shabbat/Passover worshiper who was still mourning the recent passing of her mother, while injuring three others, including the congregation’s Rabbi who lost one finger and may lose another and a young girl whose family recently moved from Israel to San Diego to seek safety from missiles launched from Gaza into her previous town, Sderot.  After the synagogue shooting Trump who of course would never acknowledge that pandering to White Supremacists and the purveyors of automatic weaponry contributes one iota to an accelerating wave of anti-Semitic, anti-Moslem and anti-immigrant murder sprees called the injured Rabbi to deliver some “thoughts and prayers.”   Notably despite the increase in hate crimes, the Trump administration has defunded Homeland Security’s anti-domestic terror program out of concerns that going after domestic terror which despite Trump’s preferred narrative is largely a white supremacist, rather than a Islamic terrorist problem, doesn’t sit well with his base.  Sadly, the NY Times proved this weekend that anti-Semitism isn’t just a problem of the extreme right by publishing and then, under pressure, quickly retracting an extremely offensive political cartoon in the paper’s International edition, one that their own Op-Ed writer Bret Stephens called out as a despicable trope reminiscent of the worst Nazi propaganda.  Initially, the NY Times said that since so few people actually read their International edition, the “slip” could be explained away by lax oversight.  Under continued pressure the editors finally came forward with an apology, albeit, one that still ignores the bigger question as to why anyone working for the NY Times, US or International, would ever think that the publication of such a cartoon should ever be permitted and wouldn’t have been had any other ethnic group been its target.

Testimony Battles:  Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, who somehow or other has managed to escape any further investigation into his own dark “gym” past, has brokered a deal between the Trump administration and the  House Oversight committee, one that smooths the way for Carl Kline, the former White House security official who approved Jared Kushner’s security clearance, to go forward with his testimony in front of the Oversight Committee.  It’s not really clear that the deal that Jordan worked out meets the demands of Elijah Cummings and the other Democrats on the Committee but it is being lauded as a first attempt of accommodation from the White House.  Kline is now due to testify on Wednesday, May 1.  Separately, Attorney General Barr is also due to testify on Wednesday in front of both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, but he is threatening to refuse to participate in the House hearings  because he is unhappy about House Chairman Nadler’s plans to supplement the usual five minutes of questioning time given to each member of the committee with another thirty minutes of questioning from both a Democratic and Republican staff lawyer.  Apparently, Barr is afraid that the Democrats’ legal representative might actually ask him some really tough questions that he’d rather not answer.  Though he isn’t scheduled to testify yet, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is likely to find himself in the hot seat soon enough.  On Friday it was reported that in an effort to either keep his job, keep Mueller safe or both, he made some concessions to Trump and may or may not have promised to “land the plane” of the Russian investigation in a way that Trump would find satisfying.  Questions are now being asked as to whether or not Rosenstein, who first was a villain for writing the memo that justified former FBI Director Comey’s firing, but then became a hero for appointing Mueller, is back to being a villain or more likely just another highly compromised character in the long simmering Trump/Russia epic.  In any case, it’s not clear that Rosenstein actually made the “land the plane” comment, some suspect that it was Attorney General Barr who leaked the story about Rosenstein using that expression to the Washington Post, in order to spread the blame for the way he, Barr, handled the Mueller report rollout.  As to the Russians, despite Trump’s refusal to admit that they have been engaging in election interference, his handpicked FBI Director, Wray, says that they did in 2016, did in 2018 and are expected to continue to in 2020.  During a weekend campaign speech in  Wisconsin, Trump called all of those Obama era FBI people out as scum, if Wray keeps up with all that honesty he could get swept into that scummy pile.  One more point on election interference, during the 2018 mid-terms, now former Florida Senator Nelson claimed that there had been an incursion into at least one Florida county’s system, at that time his opponent the then Florida Governor, now Senator, Scott pushed back saying that Nelson’s assertion was false news.  Well it turns out it was true, just another one of those things absent from the Barr summary but included in the Mueller Report.