monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump’s tax cuts have so far failed to deliver on one key promise

Commentary: How Trump Is Letting Businesses Steal Money From Workers

Written by Sam Berger who is the senior adviser at the Center for American Progress.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization. The Center presents a liberal viewpoint on economic and social issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_American_Progress

Try and find some unbiased support for your claim

“I Refuse To Be Victimized By Notions of Virtuous Behavior”

Now I see how much trouble. If the New Democratic Socialists get their way 2018 will be the year that evidentiary rules are eliminated from America’s pesky judicial system. The NDS don’t feel you should have to produce evidence to substantiate your claims. After all, “my truth” is what counts. They don’t really believe in absolute truths and that should be good enough for you too. So screw the rule of law, it seems to be based on absolutes. Which they don’t believe in, did I mention that?

BOOM: SCOTUS Agrees To Hear Case That Could END Facebook’s Liberal Tyranny

Zuckerberg may have finally pressed his luck too far.

The ‘bold’ step they took of nuking a few hundred Facebook Sites, ClashDaily among them — just before an election, mind you — may come back to bite him in the ass.

Especially when Leftwing activist group Media Matters — who cheered the nuking of these meddlesome pages — has had a detailed strategy on how to squeeze the political right out of our Digital Public Square for a while now.

Trump tweeted he has no ties to Saudi Arabia. A Fox News account proved him wrong.

“For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter),” Trump said. “Any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS (of which there is plenty)!”

This is not true — as a Fox News-affiliated Twitter account quickly pointed out.

Fox News Research, a research group for the Fox News media company, published a rebuttal tweet less than an hour after the president’s remarks, delineating a history of Trump’s transactions with the Saudis that date to the early 1990s.

Quote:

Fox News Research
✔
@FoxNewsResearch
Trump & Saudi Business:
•1991: Sold yacht to Saudi Prince
•2001: Sold 45th floor of Trump World Tower to Saudis
•Jun 2015: I love the Saudis...many in Trump Tower
•Aug 2015: "They buy apartments from me...Spend $40M-$50M"
•2017: Saudi lobbyists spent $270K at Trump DC hotel

10:10 AM - Oct 16, 2018

the timeline begins with a personal deal between Trump and Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz al Saud, when the president sold the latter his 281-foot yacht in 1991. The boat, nicknamed Trump Princess, was first handed over to creditors after the real estate mogul was found to be $900 million in debt.

The next item refers to a series of business transactions between Trump and Saudis — most notably a 2001 sale of the 45th floor of the Trump World Tower in New York City for $4.5 million.

“Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me,” Trump said in 2015. “They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

The relationship between the president and the Saudi government has been under intense scrutiny over the past two weeks due to the disappearance of Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist, an event that has caused a global uproar and created a rift in the nation’s foreign ties.

Pump and Trump

Since Donald Trump’s fortunes came surging back with the success of “The Apprentice” 14 years ago, his deals have often been scrutinized for the large number of his partners who have ventured to the very edges of the law, and sometimes beyond. Those associates have included accused money launderers, alleged funders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a felon who slashed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass.

Trump and his company have typically countered by saying they were merely licensing his name on these real estate projects in exchange for a fee. They weren’t the developers or in any way responsible.

But an eight-month investigation by ProPublica and WNYC reveals that the post-millennium Trump business model is different from what has been previously reported. The Trumps were typically way more than mere licensors or bystanders in their often-troubled deals. They were deeply involved in these projects. They helped mislead investors and buyers — and they profited handsomely from it.

Patterns of deceptive practices occurred in a dozen deals across the globe, as the business expanded into international projects, and the Trumps often participated. One common pattern, visible in more than half of those transactions, was a tendency to misstate key sales numbers.

In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.

Another pattern: Donald Trump repeatedly misled buyers about the amount (or existence) of his ownership in projects in Tampa, Florida; Panama; Baja and elsewhere. For a tower planned in Tampa, for example, Trump told a local paper in 2005 that his ownership would be less than 50 percent: “But it’s a substantial stake. I recently said I’d like to increase my stake but when they’re selling that well they don’t let you do that.” In reality, Trump had no ownership stake in the project.

The Trumps often made money even when projects failed. And when they tanked, the Trumps simply ignored their prior claims of close involvement, denied any responsibility and walked away.

The cycle is exemplified in Panama City, where the Trumps were involved in a project to build a massive tower and complex known as the Trump Ocean Club. The project’s unfortunate turns included bankruptcy, then, years later, the forcible ejection of the Trump Organization from managing the hotel.

There, as elsewhere, the Trump Organization disclaimed responsibility. It emphasized that it had merely licensed the Trump name to developers who handled everything from construction to marketing. “The Trump Organization was not the owner, developer or seller of the Trump Ocean Club Panama project,” it said in a statement last year. “Because of its limited role, the company was not responsible for the financing of the project and had no involvement in the sale of units.”

That was false. For starters, Trump arranged financing — his promised commission: $2.2 million or more — by bringing in investment bank Bear Stearns, which issued the bonds that paid for the Panama project’s construction.

Trump touted himself as a “partner” of the developer. His daughter Ivanka briefly boasted that she had personally sold 40 units. (A broker on the project said he couldn’t remember her selling even one.) Meanwhile, Ivanka told a journalist at the time that “over 90 percent” of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.

Not only were the Panama sales figures inflated, but many “purchases” turned out to be an illusion. That was no coincidence. The building’s financing depended on obtaining advance commitments from buyers, often before concrete had started pouring. But in between the sale of the bonds in 2007 and 2013, the year the building went bankrupt, buyers of 458 units in the 1,000-unit building abandoned their purchase contracts. Those buyers forfeited more than $50 million in deposits, and they never took possession of finished units. Given that the “buyers” were often shadowy shell companies or other paper entities, it was nearly impossible to discern who the actual purchasers were, let alone why they backed out.

Trump licensed his name for an initial fee of $1 million. But that was just the beginning of the revenue streams, a lengthy and varied assortment that granted him a piece of everything from sales of apartment units to a cut of minibar sales, and was notable for the myriad ways in which both success and failure triggered payments to him.

Consider the final accounting: In the wake of the project’s bankruptcy, a 50 percent default rate and his company’s expulsion from managing the hotel, Donald Trump walked away with between $30 million and $55 million.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a long list of questions about its transactions. The White House didn’t have a comment.

The micropenissed should care for his own family, or go get fucked by Kayne West.

I have .1 Nigerian in my DNA, does that mean I can claim to be a black man?

Or perhaps wildlife officials in Idaho are expected to protect wildlife, and not just jet off somewhere else to butcher wildlife (i.e.) baboons.......think about it this way, it's a little like being employed in the school system, but for relaxation you fly to to a war torn region and violate children.

I know, I know that this won't make sense to folks who think others are trying to take their guns away.......but I have guns for protection......I have never had to fight off a family of baboons with nursing infants....tsk tsk tsk.....maybe the 'hunter' (sic) donated the nutritious baboon meat to the natives??? You know, like the endangered animal meat the Trump boys (tweeedle dee and tweedle dum) donate after they are tired of butchering giraffes and other dangerous animals.....a true humanitarian.

Quote:

The micropenissed should care for his own family, or go get fucked by Kayne West.

What brought that on?

A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump

One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.

The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.

“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”

This new paper fits with a sizeable slate of studies conducted over the past 18 months or so, most of which have come to the same conclusions: There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.

This isn’t just a matter of historical interest or ideological ax-grinding. Understanding the precise way in which racism affected the 2016 election should shape how we think about the electorate in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. More broadly, it helps us understand the subtleties of America’s primordial divide over race — and why racism will continue to fracture the country politically for the foreseeable future.

The results were quite striking. First, attitudes on race and immigration were crucial distinguishing characteristics of both Trump and Clinton switchers. The more racially conservative an Obama or third party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Trump. Similarly, the more racially liberal a Romney or third-party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Clinton.

Second, class was largely irrelevant in switching to Trump. Keeping racial attitudes constant, white working-class voters were not more likely to switch to Trump. The white working-class voters who did switch tended to score about as highly on measures of racial conservatism and anti-immigrant attitudes as wealthier switchers.

Third, the correlations between measures of economic stress and vote switching were either weak or non-existent. There’s just little evidence supporting the “economic anxiety” or “economic populism” explanations for the Trump surge.

The Reny et al. findings may seem counterintuitive: How can people who wanted a black man to run the country somehow become attracted to Trump because of his racial demagoguery?

The unspoken premise behind this question is an assumption of a certain kind of white redemption narrative: By voting for Obama, white America exorcized its racial demons. But the truth is nothing of the sort. For one thing, Obama lost the white vote by 12 points in 2008 and 20 points in 2012.

For another, voting for Obama once or even twice doesn’t automatically mean that someone is not prejudiced against black people or immigrants. It’s possible to support Obama in particular while maintaining overall anti-black or anti-immigrant attitudes. In those cases, some other factor, like the Iraq War catastrophe or financial collapse, may have predominated over white voters’ racial hang-ups in the 2008 and 2012 election.

The 2016 election was different.

One reason is that Obama’s second term featured a significant amount of racial conflict. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and subsequent week of protest and unrest, kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.

A second reason is that Obama’s very presence in office was racially polarizing. Michael Tesler, a scholar at the University of California-Irvine, has documented in detail how Obama’s very presence in the White House polarized America along racial lines. It would make sense that this effect would grow stronger the longer Obama was in office, setting the stage for a major backlash in his final year.

Third, and arguably most importantly, the two candidates turned the election into a kind of referendum on American race relations. Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.

Clinton, for her part, positioned herself as a champion of racial justice. While Obama’s rhetoric on race was typically post-racial, positioning the country as more united than divided, Clinton got out front on issues like police violence and immigration. There are plenty of valid reasons for this — Clinton was more worried about failing to turn out minority voters, Obama was more worried about alienating skittish whites, and there was no way to respond to Trump’s campaign without tackling race head-on.

The result, though, is that racial issues became the key political dividing line in a way they were not in either 2008 or 2012.

Now, Reny et al.’s statistical analysis can’t show all of this on its own. You should never draw conclusions this large from one statistical analysis, as it could suffer from any number of problems.

However, this analysis of the election is supported by a wide and deep body of research, the vast majority of which shows that concerns about identity and race were the decisive issues in the 2016 election. This was true in the Republican primary and the general; it’s also consistent with research on far-right parties in Europe whose xenophobic appeals are similar to Trump’s. There is a complete lack of statistical evidence, by contrast, for the “economic anxiety” theory.

American politics are likely to only get more polarized on racial lines. Trump and Trumpism are, for the time being, the core of the Republican Party; the Republican message on race and immigration will match his as such. California Rep. Duncan Hunter, for example, is running a nakedly anti-Islam reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar (who is a Mexican-Arab Christian by background).

The implications, both in 2018 and in the long term, could be significant. Reny et al. compare this period to the post-civil rights era, a period where the historically Democratic South transformed into modern-day red America primarily in backlash to the Democratic embrace of civil rights:

Quote:

History suggests that significant changes in voting across party lines, particularly for the presidency, precede changes in party identities, the basis for realignments. This sequence of events played out during the Southern realignment (i.e., Democrats voting for GOP presidential candidates but maintaining their party attachment) and here we provide evidence that it may be happening again after two terms with a black president and during an era of mass demographic change due to immigration. Racial conservatives and those with the most punitive immigration views are moving right and were the most likely to switch to Trump in 2016. Our data suggest the same is happening in the opposite direction as those with racially liberal or pro-immigration views may be sorting into the Democratic Party.

This prediction may or may turn out to be accurate. But it’s plausible, and there’s no use burying our heads in the sand by pretending this is about class when it isn’t.

Definitely not a mob: Multiple reports of left-wing partisans attacking GOP candidates, staffers

Kristin Davison and other officials for the Nevada attorney general’s campaign said the “battery” left her “terrified and traumatized” — and with bruises on her neck and arms.

“Politics is a little bit aggressive these days, but this is just insane. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Davison, 31, told Fox News on Wednesday…

“He grabbed my right arm, my leg was lodged between the door and the wall. He twisted my arm, and contorted it behind my back,” she explained. “I was scared. Every time I tried pulling away, he would grab tighter, and pull me closer into him.”

Are the dreaded liberals