Narratology: Dinner with Lev and Igor

It's always the dinner. Thomas Couture, Les Romains de la Décadence, 1847, Musée d'Orsay, via Wikipedia.

Don't stop me if you've heard this one, or if you think you've heard it. We've all heard it, in fact, or rather most of us have heard most of its elements and been more or less scandalized, but I believe we haven't really heard it as story: I know I hadn't until this morning, when WNYC's Ilya Marritz showed up on the radio to give some publicity to the latest episode of the Trump Inc. podcast, produced by the radio station and Pro Publica, and he didn't exactly tell the story in the way I mean, and neither does the podcast, I think, but I felt I was hearing it for the first time.

So there's this Trump-related superPAC, America First Action, that's been involved in some pretty dodgy things, like the case of Randy Perkins, the founder of a company called AshBritt, who made a donation of half a million dollars to the group the day after he received a supplemental contract award worth about the same amount ($460,000), for cleaning up wildfire damage, to a contract he had with the Defense Department. Which may have been completely unrelated to the donation (Perkins said, "I actually think this administration cares deeply about children and mental health issues"), but was illegal all the same—federal contractors aren't allowed to contribute to political campaign organizations, and when a watchdog organization found out about it the money had to be returned. Or the way it may have illegally taken donations adding up to almost $2 million from a foreign company (Canadian) laundered through its US subsidiary. Or the way the Trump campaign may have illegally coordinated with America First Action and its dark-money sibling America First Policies, with Trump personally soliciting donations for them.

Annals of Derp: Does the NRA buy influence?

Marco Rubio chomps on a moneyburger, as Mr. Adelson and Mr. Koch look on benignly, via Cuban Insider.

According to Mr. Bret Stephens:

The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.

That's funny, Bret, because according to OpenSecrets.org, writing last November, the NRA spent $3.2 million on Marco Rubio's 2016 Senate race alone:

Voters matter less

Images via the late Needtagger.

Shorter David Brooks, "Money Matters Less", New York Times, October 10 2014:

Silly Democrats, worrying themselves sick over that Citizens United decision. Turns out they got plenty of money out of the deal too! Though not so much secret money, I guess. Anyway it hardly matters, since the more money is involved, the less it influences the voters, so it's all good.

Citizens far from United

I've been absorbed in a discussion chez Kos to a diary by Adam B to a remark made (somewhere else) by Eugene Volokh, in reference to the infamous Citizens United decision, and asking what if Congress were to ban corporate speech (i.e., money) on issues of legislation instead of elections—so that Google, say, would not have been able to mount its protest this week against the loathsome SOPA bill. How would we feel about corporate speech then? It was one of those Talmudic questions to which "Not going to happen" is not an acceptable answer—meant to elicit the underlying principles on which that discorporate entity "the Left" bases its objections.

So the conversation turned quickly to the question of whether corporations are persons [jump]