Yes, a man who isn’t getting his way and says “this isn’t going to end well”, many women know this really means “ this won’t end well for YOU”. Women of the US don’t need an Abuser in Chief.
— Lynda Read (@LyndaRead8) September 30, 2020
In 2012, he borrowed $100 million against his equity in Trump Tower in Manhattan, one of his more valuable properties. A year later, he withdrew $95.8 million from his share of a real estate partnership that owns buildings in New York and California. And in 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds.One might presume that, given he's going to be getting a pension from his presidenting and the various wingnut welfare gigs he'll get, that Trump will be at little risk of living in a refrigerator carton under a highway bridge, but yesterday's story had a bit of outright tax fraud outlined. Ivanka Trump, as you may recall, was an employee of the Trump Organization, which Trump wholly controls. Trump paid large consulting fees to his daughter for work that was part of her day job to begin with:
These one-time maneuvers, coupled with the more than $427 million from “The Apprentice” and licensing deals, would probably have provided enough cash to cover his golf course investments. But they cannot be repeated, and in at least one case — the Trump Tower mortgage — they need to be paid back.
In addition, he has huge balances on loans, soon to come due, from Deutsche Bank, including $160 million on his Washington hotel in the Old Post Office building and $148 million on the Doral golf resort. Neither of those businesses is turning a profit.
Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.So what Trump did was gift his daughter a shitload of money and then deduct it from his taxes as "consulting fees".
In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income: In Azerbaijan, Mr. Trump collected $5 million on a hotel deal and reported $1.1 million in consulting fees, while in Dubai it was $3 million with a $630,000 fee, and so on.
Mysterious big payments in business deals can raise red flags, particularly in places where bribes or kickbacks to middlemen are routine. But there is no evidence that Mr. Trump, who mostly licenses his name to other people’s projects and is not involved in securing government approvals, has engaged in such practices.
Rather, there appears to be a closer-to-home explanation for at least some of the fees: Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.
The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.
He’s broke, he lives in our house, and he’s been stealing from us.
— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) September 27, 2020
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.There is a lot of detail in the story, including how Trump may be committing tax fraud by describing residential real estate as investment property. That is under investigation in a case that has the potential to send Trump to the Sing Sing Retirement Home.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed.
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The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.
A-10s and helos operating from a highway:
The annoying music ends as soon as the airplanes start flying.
(People: The plural of "aircraft" is "aircraft'. There is no such word as "aircrafts".)
The weather has been getting colder here at Chez Misfit. I took out a pair of jeans to wear for the first time in months. When I draped them over the footboard of my bed at night, Chip took a lot of interest in them. He was rubbing his face on the legs and then rabbit-kicking them.
Then it dawned on me: His catnip pillow had gone missing. What if...?
Sure enough, I opened the dresser drawer where my jeans and shorts are stowed. Under some of them, near the bottom, was his catnip pillow. How that got in there is an unsolved mystery. But at least, the pillow had been found.
He got right to it:
He isn't lacking for other toys.
President Trump's campaign is reportedly in discussion with state and national Republicans to "bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority."The Republicans are hoping that their efforts at voter suppression will pay off and that they don't have to so nakedly seize power. Trump may end up telling his armed militias to go into the streets.
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Trump has been clumsily telegraphing this plot for months — not generally the smartest way to overthrow a government, which is best done in secret. It would unfold like this: The election result is closer than expected, and the ultimate winner remains unknown on election night, with millions of mail-in ballots to be counted in the decisive swing states. Trump declares victory when the (incomplete) election night count favors him, and then launches legal maneuvering to force states to stop counting mail-in ballots, papered over with some feeble pretext about the fraud the president himself keeps encouraging his own supporters to commit. Thanks to post-2010 gerrymandering, Republicans control both houses of the state legislature in nearly every contested state, and the president would presumably direct them to pass laws certifying Trump's slate of electors, even if updated counts show Democratic candidate Joe Biden ahead. Et voila, a second Trump term.
“People wonder about the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Graham said on Fox News on Thursday. “I can assure you, it will be peaceful.”First off, we all know, by now, the value of assurances and promises by Miss Lindsey. They are worth less than a steaming pile of dogshit.
“I promise you as a Republican, if the Supreme Court decides that Joe Biden wins, I will accept the result,” Mr. Graham added. “The court will decide, and if Republicans lose, we’ll accept the result.”
President Donald Trump again declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the Nov. 3 presidential election.For over 220 years, one of the hallmarks of this country has been a peaceful transfer of power between presidents. Now, we have a president who is calling into question that tradition.
“We’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference, responding to a question about whether he’d commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
President Donald Trump, looking to shore up support in the U.S. Farm Belt during a tight race for re-election, is taking steps to help producers of corn-based ethanol using a list of policy goals that a group of Midwest senators discussed with him a year ago, according to two sources familiar with the matter.Right. 3.65 years in office and, only now, he starts to move om things important to boost the use of ethanol.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the White House may not approve tougher FDA guidelines for authorizing the emergency use of any coronavirus vaccines.We all know that if somebody told Trump that a vaccine composed of hydroxychloroquine and sodium hypocholrite in a suspension of dihydrogen monoxide would work, Trump would issue an order approving it without any testing.
"That has to be approved by the White House," Trump said. "We may or may not approve it."
Scientists in Houston on Wednesday released a study of more than 5,000 genetic sequences of the coronavirus that reveals the virus’s continual accumulation of mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious.There's a possibility that the virus might also become less lethal. Or if it starts mutating a lot, a vaccine will be less than effective.
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David Morens, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reviewed the new study and said the findings point to the strong possibility that the virus, as it has moved through the population, has become more transmissible, and that this “may have implications for our ability to control it.”
Morens noted that this is a single study, and “you don’t want to over-interpret what this means.” But the virus, he said, could potentially be responding — through random mutations — to such interventions as mask-wearing and social distancing, Morens said Wednesday.
“Wearing masks, washing our hands, all those things are barriers to transmissibility, or contagion, but as the virus becomes more contagious it statistically is better at getting around those barriers,” said Morens, senior adviser to Anthony S. Fauci, the director of NIAID.
We now know the disease. We didn’t know it. Now we know it affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects. That’s it. ... You know, in some States, thousands of people, nobody young below the age of 18, like nobody. They have a strong immune system. Who knows? Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune system, but it affects virtually nobody.So only elderly people with other conditions, you know, Trump's base (and Herman Cain), have died. They don't count to Trump. And all of those people who are not senior citizens and who have died from COVID-19? Piffle.
9/22/2020- The Pledge #LindseyGraham #LindseyGrahamSaid #LindseysWordMeansNothing #ForkedTongue #LindseyTheHypocrite #RepublicanHypocrites #SCOTUS https://t.co/4BEs9sITQq pic.twitter.com/ZC37RCqnOl— Clay Bennett (@BennettCartoons) September 21, 2020
A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.I guess they needed those fancy dress uniforms for going to funerals of soldiers who died of Covid? The Pentagon took the position that it could claim any need it desired was due to the pandemic and then spend money on it.
Trump was not called to greatness. He wasn’t even called to above-average competence. He was called to implement a game-plan we’d already written with a disease control bureaucracy that was the envy of the world, the administrative infrastructure and personnel of the world’s most dominant and powerful state, and a practically bottomless well of resources. (None of our peer countries has the massive advantage of minting the world’s reserve currency.) If Trump had merely said, “Tell me what to do!,” had done it, and otherwise had stayed out of the way, I believe it’s almost certain that at least 100,000 dead Americans would now be alive.How many people would still be alive if Trump had even marginally attempted to do his job, you might ask. This many:
The CDC has reversed the testing advice that was inserted by the Trumpist appointees who were more concerned with following the diktats of their Orange Overlord than recommending what was grounded in medicine and science.
This comes after the New York Times story dropped about how the political appointees, including, apparently, a certain nutbag, changed the guidance. The story went on to describe how the Trumpanzees at the Department of Health and Human Services have basically been vandalizing the CDC's website to ensure that it is in accord with Trump's propaganda, rather than disfavored things such as "science" and "facts".
It's gotten to the point that all I can muster the energy to do is point out the stupidity of the Trump Administration and its evil machinations. Outrage will have to be presumed.
Speaking of outrage, the AP has identified who ICE's Dr. Mengele is.
May your name be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good and sweet year.
(I wished that for everyone last year; how'd that work out?)
This was Trump at the ABC Town Hall:
BARD: Yes I did. The wearing of masks has proven to lessen the spread of COVID. Why don’t you support a mandate for national mask wearing? And why don’t you wear a mask more often?
TRUMP: Well, I do wear them when I have to and when I’m in hospitals and other locations. But I will say this. They said at the Democrat convention they're going to do a national mandate. They never did it, because they’ve checked out and they didn’t do it. And a good question is, you ask why Joe Biden -- they said we’re going to do a national mandate on masks.
STEPHANOPOULOS: He’s called on all governors to have them. There’s a state responsibility…
TRUMP: Well no, but he didn’t do it. I mean, he never did it. Now there is by the way, a lot of people don’t want to wear masks. There are a lot of people think that masks are not good. And there are a lot of people that as an example you have…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Who are those people?
TRUMP: I’ll tell you who those people are -- waiters. They come over and they serve you, and they have a mask. And I saw it the other day where they were serving me, and they're playing with the mask...I’m not blaming them...I’m just saying what happens. They're playing with the mask, so the mask is over, and they're touching it, and then they're touching the plate. That can’t be good. There are a lot of people. If you look at Dr. Fauci’s original statement...you look at a lot of people, CDC, you look at a lot of people’s original statement, they said very strongly, George, don’t wear masks. Then all of a sudden they went to wear masks. The concept of a mask is good, but it also does...you’re constantly touching it, you’re touching your face, you’re touching plates. There are people that don’t think masks are good.That is a lot of craziness on full display. First off, Trump seems to be confused over who has the power to set national policy and who does not. A reasonable person would have understood that political candidates don't set national policy. But by Trump's reasoning, everyone has the power to set national policy, so I guess that Trump would say that it's my fault there's no mask mandate?
By the Power Vested in Me As a Barely-Read Blogger, I, Comrade Misfit, Hereby Decree That Everyone Shall Wear a Fucking Facemask When They Leave Their Abodes. Those Who Refuse to Comply Now Have Their Legal Middle Names Changed to: "The Asshole". (Example: "Donald The Asshole Trump, Jr.")
As most of you know, the — the level that we’ve had in our country is very low, and those people are getting better, or we think that in almost all cases they’re better, or getting. We have a total of 15. ... So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.It is now beyond dispute that Trump was lying as hard as he ever has when he said that. We know that Trump told Woodward that he had received a briefing from his National Security Adviser on January 28th that the coronavirus was the biggest national security threat that Trump would face.
Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.This is the sort of evil shit that the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs.
The nurse, Dawn Wooten, was employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company. The complaint was filed with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.
Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed.
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“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” the detainee said.
According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist – outside the facility – who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
If Bob Woodward thought what I said was bad, then he should’ve immediately, right after I said it, gone out to the authorities so they can prepare and let them know.What "authorities" does he have in mind? The Inter-Galactic Overlords? The International Criminal Court?
Nobody with a firing brain cell did not know the truth about the deadliness of the Coronavirus when these conversations were being taped by Woodward.
The only people who refused to believe all the scientists and doctors and the smart people and deny all the images of death and grief and destruction on the screens right in front of their faces were die-hard Trump Culters or Republican sociopaths who short-sightedly valued the “economy” over the needs of Americans. (Which tanked even worse than it could have. And those people actually took plenty of precautions because, fuck, dying from COVID is what the little people do.)
At some point, we have to hold The Stupids accountable for choosing to ignore what the vast majority of the rest of us decided was the right thing to do. Trump included. THEY caused the deaths of many, many innocent people and even now are persisting in places like ND/SD, not because Bob Woodward didn’t immediately release his tapes in March, but because they are fucking, God-damned stupid people.
I love what we do in NM with these folks: tell them to STFU and put on the mask or GTFO of my business, restaurant, gym or clinic. We fine or shut down businesses who give the Gov’s orders the finger. We’re persisting with our rules even though were at an R0 of 0.75. Mostly because we’ve got the whiny Red parts of our state acting like this is either a hoax or the fucking end of the world because they have to wear a mask to Walmart, so Gov. Lujan is being absolutely merciless in her refusal to release restrictions. I. LOVE. IT.
At some point a few weeks ago, I just stopped agonizing over what this Governor or that Legislator or those cities did or did not do in response to the Coronavirus and focused on what my community and state was doing. Because I don’t give any more fucks about these people. What kind of “Rugged Independence” is it that you’ll literally do a 180 degree reversal your beliefs just because the Great Orange MAGA Man has declared it to be the New Truth?
Every step of the way on Corona, Trump has revealed himself as the complete and utter failure we all knew he is. Every stupid decision, every news conference where he told people to inject bleach, every loud mouthed demand for a state or a city or a sports team to “OPEN NOW!!” has led to the giant lead in the polls for Biden, and in a sad, tragic way, it had to happen for us to get rid of this demon. God forbid he’d have done a marginally decent job and just let the smart people handle this, we’d be looking at a shoo-in this fall.
The rest of us are the sane ones. They’re the minority. Fuck them. We owe them NOTHING. And when this is over they should get absolutely NO MERCY. Their party needs to be run so deep into the ground it never finds its way out of the swirling hot magma at the center of the Earth.
Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to revise, delay and even scuttle weekly reports on the coronavirus that they believed were unflattering to President Trump.The Trumpanzees in senior positions are cooking the books so that Trump doesn't look as bad as he really does. They've brought in some quack from Canada to try and push Trumpifying the science through.
Current and former senior health officials with direct knowledge of phone calls, emails and other communication between the agencies said on Saturday that meddling from Washington was turning widely followed and otherwise apolitical guidance on infectious disease, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, into a political loyalty test, with career scientists framed as adversaries of the administration.
Caputo doubled down in a statement to Politico by insisting that the HHS was reviewing CDC reports to “make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic — not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC.”Anyone who babbles about "the deep state" should be tossed into a locked ward and put on a heavy dosage of lithium. (Yes, that includes The Donald.)
Coronavirus infections in the Dakotas are growing faster than anywhere else in the nation, fueling impassioned debates over masks and personal freedom after months in which the two states avoided the worst of the pandemic.They could be breaking out in pustules and eating their neighbors, but they'll still vote for Trump, so he doesn't care about them, either.
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South Dakota has also posted some of the country’s highest positivity rates for COVID-19 tests in the last week — over 17 percent — an indication that there are more infections than tests are catching.
For the second time this month, Hyundai is telling some SUV owners to park outdoors because an electrical short in a computer could cause vehicles to catch fire.If you have one of those puppies, you had best park it outdoors until you can determine if its subject to the recall and, if it is, they fix it.
The Korean automaker is recalling about 180,000 Tucson SUVs in the U.S. from 2019 through 2021 to fix the problem. The company says corrosion can cause a short circuit in defective anti-lock brake circuit boards that can cause a fire even if engines are off.
A California sheriff's deputy has been arrested and placed on administrative leave for allegedly burglarizing a home after responding to the death of an elderly man.I wouldn't put it past a court to find that qualified immunity protects this guy, if no other court has held that it's wrong for cops to steal from dead guy's homes.
Steve Hortz was a 12-year veteran of the Orange County Sheriff's Department prior to his arrest on Thursday, the police department said.
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On Wednesday, an attorney representing the family estate called the police department to report some items missing from the home and shared home surveillance video that depicted Hortz entering the property at least three times and "exiting with stolen property," according to a police statement.
In the first instance on July 27, Hortz entered while in uniform. He returned on Aug. 10 and Aug. 16 while in civilian clothes and stole weapon safes, ceiling fans and other boxes with unknown contents, authorities said.
The Trump administration has secretly siphoned nearly $4 million away from a program that tracks and treats FDNY firefighters and medics suffering from 9/11 related illnesses, the Daily News has learned.It took a hell of a lot of years to even get the Worth Trade Center Health Program up and running and Trump treats it like any other fund, something he can loot with abandon.
The Treasury Department mysteriously started withholding parts of payments — nearly four years ago — meant to cover medical services for firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics treated by the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program, documents obtained by The News reveal.
A Department of Homeland Security official said in a whistleblower complaint that he was pressured by more senior officials to suppress facts in intelligence reports that President Donald Trump might find objectionable, including information about Russian interference in the election and the rising threat posed by white supremacists.Trump doesn't want people knowing about continuing Russian interference because the Russians are supporting him. Trump also doesn't want any discussion of the threat posed by white supremacists because they are his people.
The official, Brian Murphy, alleged that senior DHS officials also pressed him to alter reports so they would reflect administration policy goals and that he was demoted for refusing to go along with the changes and for filing confidential internal complaints about the conduct.
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Murphy said in his complaint that he was directed by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy DHS secretary, to modify a section of a report to make the threat posed by white supremacists less severe. He was told to play up the threat posed by left-wing groups to echo administration talking points around civil unrest following the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
Meanwhile, a powder keg is building. FBI background checks for gun sales hit 3.9 million in June—an all-time high. Many of them were for first-time gun buyers—by definition untrained, possibly rash in their actions. An estimated 20 million Americans carry a gun when they leave their homes. It takes just a few trigger-pullers to set off a conflagration; even in intense insurrections, such as the postwar rebellion in Iraq, only 2 percent of insurgents actually fired their weapons. (Emphasis mine)That twenty million number links to an article with this description:
Gun Sales Skyrocket Amid Pandemic And Unrest Fears> Nearly 20 million Americans are packing when they travel out of the house…and that total is growingThe thing is, nowhere within that article is the 20 million figure even mentioned. It's part of the headline, that's all. The article goes on to undercut Slate's fear-mongering with this paragraph towards the end of the article:
Notably, states that have conceal-carry provisions have seen a decline in violent crime whereas states that do not allow conceal-carry have crime rates 11 percent higher than the national averages according to Gun Facts. After passing their conceal-carry law, Florida’s homicide rate fell from 36 percent above the national average to four percent below. Likewise, Texas saw their murder rates fall 50 percent faster than the national average after their conceal-carry law passed.Why that is so doesn't take much thought: Criminals don't care for being shot, which explains why "hot burglaries", those carried out when people are home, are far more common in hoplophobic nations.
The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.Maybe it's a coincidence that Billy Boy is making this move while the Trump campaign has been burning through cash, in part because they've hired a bunch of grifters and paying huge salaries to the mates of the Trump boys. Some of what the Trump campaign has been blowing cash on smells like hush money, as well as big payouts to Trump businesses.
In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.
Nine drug companies pledged Tuesday that they will not submit vaccine candidates for FDA review until their safety and efficacy is shown in large clinical trials. The move is intended to bolster public confidence amid the rush to make a COVID-19 vaccine widely available, and counter fears of political pressure to have a vaccine before the November presidential election.That they even felt a need to say this speaks volumes about the fears of political interference in the vaccien approval process that they expect to be attempted by Donald Trump.
The CEOs of AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer are among those who signed the pledge to follow "high ethical standards and sound scientific principles." All three companies are conducting large studies of potential vaccines for the disease that has killed nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. and nearly 900,000 worldwide. The other biopharmaceutical companies are Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novavax, BioNTech and Sanofi.
John McCain liked wars. I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them. And, frankly, I was never a fan of John McCain.I don't know why the White House puts up those transcripts. When one reads them, they look like a word-salad that was barfed out of the mouth of a raving lunatic who cannot keep a coherent strain of thought in his head.
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I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.
