I've had people say it's a hardening, actually ~ US presidential election 2016 part 9/11 never forget

the spin this morning from the Trump camp is to amplify the "that makes me smart" answer he gave a while back - Giuliani calling him a "genius," Gingrich on the same lines, etc

And his 40% will buy that but I have to imagine the low info voters are going to be turned off on a guy that capitalized on the employees he failed

trump-s-long-list-tweet-shaming-taxes-n658061

Oops

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-s-long-list-tweet-shaming-taxes-n658061

Is the next debate tomorrow? Same time? I only just got my sleep pattern back to normal.

Mailing that stuff to the Times from Trump Tower is the best thing ever.

More best thing ever, Guiliani talking about Alicia Machado: "...she's had an unfortunate past, she was the driver in a bank robbery (stops himself mid-sentence)--never mind about her."

Lol, no she wasn't. It was an assassination.

I think the VP debate is next. I assume that will largely be about Trump as well, with Kaine/moderator making him defend Trump BS.

(And also, she got acquitted.)

Lol, no she wasn't. It was an assassination.

Who was she driving, Ted Cruz's father?

the spin this morning from the Trump camp is to amplify the "that makes me smart" answer he gave a while back - Giuliani calling him a "genius," Gingrich on the same lines, etc

I mean, does anything in the NYT article suggest that Trump actually lied or cheated on his taxes? What I gathered was that he (or his accountant) just knew the rules and benefited from a system that is (or was) very generous to millionaires in the real estate business? The situation is gross but I'm not totally clear on how people see the ethics of this: do people think he should have intentionally avoided declaring the loss (or understated its value) and increased his tax bill on moral grounds? (I'm not 100% opposed to that idea but I haven't heard anyone openly argue this as a general principle.) To what extent should someone do this? Until they pay the average national percentage? The larger problem would seem to be with the tax code, either way.

Who was she driving, Ted Cruz's father?

― (SNIFFING AND INDISTINCT SOBBING) (Tom D.), 2. oktober 2016 16:21 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Her boyfriend, who was trying to kill his brother-in-law at his wife's funeral, because he - the boyfriend/brother, not the husband/brother-in-law - blamed him - the husband/brother-in-law, not the boyfriend/brother - for driving his pregnant sister to suicide.

I half think that the journalists took one of her telenovelas to be real. And also, again, she was acquitted as there was no proof she even was at the funeral.

the VP debate is on Tuesday

I'm seeing a lot of Trump ads on TV all of a sudden, and I love it, because I live in NJ - he's basically pouring money down the drain if he's advertising in the NY/NJ media market. He's gonna lose this state like 85/15.

Xxxpost it isn't that he did anything illegal, but he has criticized others publicly for non-payment of income taxes and if true, he basically got to run companies into the ground and benefit from the lies he ruined.

But really...it's hard to spin this when you refuse to be forthright about it. Had he released his own return, he could have had a chance to control the narrative.

Now he can't and it will appear he was hoding the fact.

I mean this isn'even reason number 2,345 why people shouldn't vote for this idiot, but he can hardly paint himself as a man of the people.

*lives
*hiding
*albatross

It also runs contrary (on a superficial level) to his persona as a brilliant businessman, tho that shit has been public knowledge

Yeah, it's not necessarily that he did anything illegal, it's that the concussive impact of this fraction of a fraction of one year's tax return reaffirms every negative narrative of Trump as bad at business, personally greedy, uncharitable, eager to game the system, etc., and his steadfast refusal to release returns just magnifies suspicion and morbid curiosity.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtxVTtwW8AEaC_4.jpg:large

otm (also what a dweeb)

Oh well yeah, I was sort of assuming the rest of that stuff was obvious but fair enough. I always thought that he was a 'good businessman' in the sense of 'good at making himself rich'.
xp

He is (allegedly) good at making himself rich, but only at the expense of others: not paying bills, taking bankruptcy, letting everyone else drown while he floats on a life preserver of money. But there is every reason to question the veracity of his claims of extreme wealth, too. Which Clinton has done, to an extent. Plus this tax return leak opens the door for Clinton to basically say anything she want out loud about his returns, not terribly unlike what Trump did re: Obama's birth certificate and college records except well within the realm of reason and expectation. It also opens the door for more leaked returns, perhaps some more damning, which is not what anyone under various investigations wants.

Xpost this is really the type of thing that is targeted at low info voters. The rest don't usually get swayed by an October surprise unless it involves murder or cunnilingus

I have it on good authority that Trump eats shit.

Two other things that came up this morning: one panelist pointing out that the illegal immigrants Trump rails against pay 12 billion in taxes a year (don't know if that figure's accurate; I'm sure it's being checked out) while he may have paid nothing for 20 years, and footage of him from earlier in the campaign saying how awful it is that rich people he knows pay almost nothing in taxes.

Anyway, it won't matter to anyone already voting for Trump. But it will keep him busy for the next few days--agree with the idea that these stories matter less than his reaction to them.

Has he reacted, or did they take his phone away again?

I think just the one Tweet that's circulating: "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them. #failing@nytimes." More to follow.

From that WaPo article:

“So you see, the media, everybody helped me get to February,” she said, referring to the day the state police took her off to the hospital. “I didn’t get there on my own. But I’m supposed to be the one to pay the price for it for mouthing off? I need to learn my lesson?”

When I went to your schools? I went to your churches? I went to your institutional learning facilities?

The return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.

omg the call is coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

Sund4r:

does anything in the NYT article suggest that Trump actually lied or cheated on his taxes?

No, but it's better this way! Clinton suggested that the reasons Trmp doesn't release may include (1) That he's not as rich as he claims, and/or (2) that he doesn't pay taxes.

This hits both! He's a losing loser who loses (I mean, how do you lose like almost a billion dollars when you're such a smart winner with a great brain?) AND he's a leech, who claims to support veterans but won't pay his share.

AND he's a sneak who constantly asks whether Obama is hiding something, whether Clinton is hiding something. This provides the perception that he himself has been hiding something, something yuge. It undermines his narrative.

If he truly thought tax avoidance showed how bloody smart he is, how shrewd and system-knowing, he'd have made his tax savings into an ad.

tldr: or, what Josh in Chicago said.

I'm slightly sad this buries the previous day's headline, which was that the Trump Foundation isn't actually permitted to raise money in New York.

Not a slam-dunk disqualifier, but it also undermines the "I can reform the system because I know the system better than anybody" narrative.

i guess this isn't really the thread for it but:

tuition-free college exists in countries with higher education systems that are structured and funded in vastly different ways than they are here. and it existed in the past for some american schools when our higher education institutions looked almost nothing like what they do today.

yes - - - - which is why he was proposing a dramatic change in how the higher education would be structured and funded. (though not an unprecedented model - the federal government using big seductive grants to force states to conform to desired standards is how we use highway money, for example, all the fucking time.) it's almost as if bernie was campaigning on a platform of dramatic, even "revolutionary" change, that depended explicitly on tons of previously apolitical people being drawn into the process because it was going to start talking about inequality and serious adjustments to the class structure through a whole range of very major policy proposals, of which free college was probably not even the most dramatic.

you might say that just makes his pie-in-the-sky proposals that much more pie-like and further up into the sky, but my point is that you can't read sanders's proposals as if they are normal democratic "we're gonna fight for this minor tax credit" type pitches, where you evaluate them on what's likely to pass with the current congress and what they'll have to trade in return. sanders was proposing a much more serious shift in priorities, trying to inspire people by enlarging the scope of what they imagined possible and who they assumed politics was for - - - you can push for big things, real things. for someone like me that's spent his adult life complaining about democrats not doing that, it was exciting and i think it will continue to have real, material, long-term effects.

but it's more than that: free college would actually solve a real problem that matters in people's lives, and even a watered-down crappy compromise version of it would also be real fucking helpful, so shifting the window of possibility on this is totally worth doing on its own merits. i said something like this at the time - - - okay, suppose imaginary president sanders can't get free college through the legislature. what if he only got college discounted fifty percent? what if that was enough carrot-and-stick to rein in half (or pick another number) of the insane surges in tuition around the country? what if free college stalled in congress but the other three or four things he was pushing for on student loan interest (etc.) made it through? hell, even the tax on wall street financial transactions he proposed to pay for it would be a good in itself, as part of the project of containing out-of-control income inequality.

trump is trying to con people, as you concede. but it's a con because not only would the wall be a pointless, wasteful, and evil scam, the shortchange compromise version of the wall would also be a pointless, wasteful and evil scam. it gets people excited and expands the electorate to no meaningful end, addressing no real problems and pointing the way to no real solutions. if you think that sanders's college plan is basically the same because the plan as described had a slim shot at legislative success in january 2017, i don't know what to say. i mean this is a board that i think generally views obamacare as a lame compromise sell-out versus a real fight for single-payer, and yet also a worthy legislative achievement that has helped a lot of people's lives in real ways. would you say that 2008 obama, campaigning on the public-option version of the scheme, was basically doing the equivalent of "build the wall"?

sorry i know there are a million sanders posts by me making variants of the same point but i think it unfairly demeans what his candidacy was doing (and paints his supporters unfairly as dupes), while also underselling just how evil trump's use of "build the wall" actually is.

I think the con in 'build the wall' was in saying that he would get Mexico to pay for it. A borderwall isn't really that unusual in itself.

true, especially since it already exists

Are there examples of border walls the size of the US-Mexico border that are large and fortified enough to block migration that were not built with slave labour?xp

This bankruptcy thing is so hard I wish someone,anyone, in politics was willing to take on trump's crayzee expertise and could splain it to us and him.

I should find out who wrote my bk law text and see if she's avail to battle, she was good, had a blog back then. jk it was Warren.

I'm not an engineer but I thought this seemed believable.
xp

this fuckin guy https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/782611648976678913

Lol which guy

Nate Silver is broken

Yet directly below he writes:

Plausible is not likely though. Our model gives Johnson a 2-3% chance of winning NM, but only an ~0.2% chance that causes a deadlock.
94 retweets 238 likes

this guy wants clicks

(cf. https://www.google.com/amp/theconcourse.deadspin.com/i-think-nate-silver-is-broken-maybe-1787096019/)

okay that johnson scenario is pretty flagrant from nate "don't draw crazy conclusions from one poll" silver. it also requires clinton to lose all three of nevada, florida, and north carolina; if that were happening we'd expect her to be doing so badly nationally that she loses new mexico anyway and so that would be the story to chase. but it's just one poll and the wider picture shows her lead expanding dramatically since the debate, so that scenario would seem to be getting less likely by the minute. way to go, Team Statistics.

xposts

Silver lookin for Aleppo poll #s

also "build the wall," as a continuously repeated campaign promise to stoke passionate rallies, would be a sickening development - and also a con - even without the "...and mexico will pay for it!" angle. it's a racist fantasy that depends on other racist fantasies: the nation overwhelmed by teeming hordes of the Other, just pouring across an imaginary line in the grass and taking our jobs, our children, everything! "build the wall" only makes sense if you conceive the border like that, and the idea that this is what immigration (illegal or otherwise) looks like in this country is a lie.

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/781585796243435520

Aren't you supposed to not announce your surprises in advance?

https://twitter.com/rogerjstonejr/status/782443074874138624

Yeah, wtf, Nate Silver. I have a friend who freaks out over every one of his updates, and I tried to explain that his work has been hovering in useless outlier territory for a while now, And this Gary Johnson bs proves it.

Good waiting for the other shoe to drop hypothesizing here:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/just-a-hunch--2