Name Drop

Lamar Smith has given me another guest post.  Since it mentions me explicitly I will give some extended commentary at the end.

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The day after the President’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel room were searched by the FBI executing a properly derived search warrant, Mr. Cohen was expected to speak in court on another matter. I recall talking heads opining on this particular point after the presiding judge found Mr. Cohen’s absence “disappointing.”

All the pundits I saw felt that Cohen, by not appearing in court that day, had broken no laws that day.

Kent Hovind is set to open his new Dinosaur Adventure Land in less than a week at his compound in Alabama. As an aside, Kent positively loathes that word applied to his property, that is surrounded by a fence and contains buildings used for different purposes, which is the textbook definition of ‘compound.’

I had intended to hold off on writing about Kent until after the opening until I viewed some of Kent’s latest videos in which he’s mentioned Peter Reilly by name and title.

If you don’t want to sit through all of the nonsense in the clip above, start at about 4:10 in.

Kent told his followers that “Peter Reilly, writer for Forbes Magazine, has gone over our financial information and found that the only mistakes we’ve made are a couple of misspelled words.” Kent’s takeaway was that Peter Reilly concluded that “you guys really know how to take care of your financials.”

I’m going to try and set aside why, exactly, a man claiming a PhD. in Education (Christian) would misspell any words on a document and focus on a larger issue.

Now, Peter Reilly has followed the Hovind case for a significant amount of time and is quite knowledgeable about all the financial moves Kent has made and tried to make.

Peter confirmed in an article, to which I’m sure he can provide a link, in which Mr. Reilly examined Kent’s current filings, found a significant number of misspellings, but no obvious flaws or contraventions of standard accounting practices and apparently reported to Kent, the same. Whether it was really in the panting tones portrayed by Hovind, I’ll let Peter say.

An equivocation, in logical argumentation, is an intentional mixing of terms. Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First,” is the most famous and hilarious example of a series of equivocations used for humorous effect.

Now, when the pundits on cable news said “Michael Cohen broke no laws,” did they mean, specifically, he’d broken no laws by sending a surrogate to appear in court for him that particular day or did they mean that Michael Cohen, though being actively investigated for bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, had never broken any laws?

Any reasonable viewer would conclude that the scope of their opinions was limited to Mr. Cohen’s failure to appear in court on that one day only.

When Kent presents the information, rather gleefully to his followers, that “Peter Reilly, of Forbes.com, has looked at what we’re doing and found only a couple of misspelled words,” he leaves the viewer with the impression that Kent thinks or is saying “Peter Reilly has found we’ve never done anything wrong other than misspell a word or two ever in our entire history.” If those who follow him draw the larger conclusion, I don’t think Kent would mind in the least.

I’ll end here in anticipation of following up after the launch of the new DAL. As you’ll read then ‘launch’ was a carefully chosen term as it reflects Kent’s plans for children who visit Kent’s compound.

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A couple of things.  I mentioned that given the number of typos that creep into my work, I should not be one to critique spelling issues.  It actually was not a spelling error.  The 990 used the word "principal" when they clearly meant "principle".  For some reason that common error drives me a little crazy, perhaps because I have seen it made in notes to financial statements where both words will occur.  Other things that really bug me are confusing imply with infer and e.g. with i.e. 

I had a couple of other nits to pick on the Form 990, but overall even though it would not have gotten out of my office as it was, it did not look so bad.  Of course I did not compare it to underlying data or anything like that.

Kent going on to say he pays taxes that are owed is just hilarious. What he means, I guess, is that he pays taxes that he agrees that he is owes not taxes that the IRS, confirmed by the Tax Court and the Eleventh Circuit have ruled that he owes.

Anyway,I appreciate the plug and hope it will lead to more traffic.