US Politics, December 2022: "They're now the working class party, man."

this guy is the grift that keeps giving

The odds of him completing a term seem slim.

🐦[Kevin McCarthy has the support of gay Republicans, Catholic Republicans, Jewish Republicans, poor Republicans, ultra-rich Republicans... and that’s just George Santos.
— Mark Russell (@Manruss) December 28, 2022🕸]🐦

He does seem hilariously like some Russian oligarch's idea of an American candidate. In the indie comedy version of this, he was concocted by an inept cell of slacker agents who spend most of their time getting high.

https://i.imgur.com/96HQb6m.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbGnU96ByYQ

if he were a russian asset, Tulsi wouldn't have been going after him so hard. Or maybe she's mad he was such a bad liar.

https://i.imgur.com/r8WBNBm.png

he made up everything, won his election 55-45 and wikipedia doesn't have a photo of his opponent, bob dylan

now that's the american dream

phew! positive update on one of the AZ recounts:

Kris Mayes, the Democratic candidate for attorney general in Arizona, prevailed in a recount by a margin of 280 votes over Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican, bringing clarity to one of the last undecided races of the midterms.

Dems in array!

Democrats fell just short of an ambitious goal of confirming 100 new federal judges as time ran out on the 117th Congress, but they are optimistic they can continue to reshape the courts over the final two years of President Biden’s term.

The Senate’s top two Democrats say their ability to outpace the concerted Republican judicial push of President Donald J. Trump’s first two years, with a total of 97 judges seated, was especially noteworthy considering they did it with a 50-50 Senate, an evenly divided Judiciary Committee and little cooperation from most Republicans.

And the personal and professional backgrounds of the judges they confirmed were markedly different from the past. The Senate named scores of women and people of color to the courts, many with specialties in defense and civil rights work as opposed to the corporate law partners and prosecutors who were the norm in previous administrations of both parties.

“It’s remarkable to think that an 11-11 committee, with the Republicans we have on that committee, was able to achieve this,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, led the judicial push.

Nice.

There's the tax returns.

good morning!

what's going on, folks?

!!!

haha it's the big day qualmsly!

Qualmsey! We made it!

This seems like a good time for a YSI? joke.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/30/documents-trump-tax-returns/10965563002/

2 The structure of the organization must be understood to understand the flow in which the tax items were reportable. Mr. Trump is the beneficiary of a revocable trust, noted as request number 2 above. The trust is characterized for Federal income tax purposes as a grantor trust, a disregarded entity for tax purposes. As a disregarded entity, the items of income, deduction, gain, loss, and credit accruing to the trust appear directly on the Federal income tax returns of Mr. Trump. The trust in turn has an ownership in various pass-through entities (partnerships and S corporations) and the items of income, deduction, gain, loss, and credit from these entities flow to the individual Federal income tax returns of Mr. Trump (because the trust is a grantor trust). These pass-through entities own interests in other pass-through entities, the income, deductions, gains, losses, and credits from which flow upwards to the owning entities. In short, the items from the lowest tier entities flow up to the next higher level of pass-through entities and keep flowing upwards, eventually appearing on Mr. Trump’s Form 1040s.

donald trump - the big guy who understands the plight of the little guy!

So basically his taxes are an MC Escher illustration?

🫡 qualmsley

honestly though -- when they came at him in the debates over not paying taxes and he came back with "that makes me smart," it was one of his canniest moves. if this got him jail time (lol) that'd be great but the number of people who'd vote for Donald Trump who will, after learning that he goes to great lengths to defraud the IRS, then withdraw their support...it's gotta be zero. his people like that he's screwing over the IRS, because when they see their paychecks and look at the withholdings, it stings. that they can't benefit from his ability to game the system using legacy wealth & hired hands doesn't affect them -- as long as somebody's sticking it to the assholes who make my paycheck smaller, that's good enough for me, and that, I think, is the perception not just among the fringe J6 types but among the "did my neighbor actually vote for this asshole?" types.

yeah, I said this upthread. People constantly cheat the IRS; Trump's a hero for getting away with it.

You can pretend it's 5-D chess
And you can cheat the IRS
And the Pepe the Frog boys are on the loose again

JCLC otm

His fans' perception has nothing to do with possible legal consequences, though, which is why the returns matter.

i'd agree, but the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has already had the returns, for more than a year now.

His returns show numerous business enterprises that he said had no earnings at all, only expenses — a pattern that the House committee says should have raised red flags for auditors. On one 2015 speaking engagement, for instance, Trump says he was paid $50,000 but spent $46,162 on travel expenses for the gig. (The tax return doesn’t say where Trump traveled to give that speech, which was one of his lowest-paid engagements; he reported making as much as $450,000 as a speaker on other occasions.)

If the IRS completes its audit work and validates some of the concerns raised by the report, the likelihood that Trump could subsequently face serious legal trouble — something beyond adjustments or fines — appears to be low. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which has been conducting a criminal investigation of Trump since the summer of 2018, has had access to Trump’s tax returns for more than a year and has not charged him.

That's largely because the previous DA, Cy Vance, infamously punted the case and his successor Bragg expressed concerns about the merit of the case in his second public turd stepping in office.

Office has bungled it from the jump

Today's favorite headline:

Kari Lake Says She Would Have Been Graceful if She'd Lost Arizona Election

LOL

ok let me tell you something that's been bothering me about these people for a while. not necessarily Trump but the people like MTG and Boebert whose rhetoric is basically straight up fascism and genocide, but then they drop a phrase like "Grouchy Fauci" in there. it feels so weird but not really because you know these aren't serious people to begin with, had they not been elected they'd be selling diet pills and auditioning for Survivor. its why all these scholars' warnings of "we are diving head first into fascism" aren't really resonating with me. I mean maybe they're right but it's not the kind of fascism we've seen in the past. it's way too stupid for that.

Fascism with a human face

The irony in "that makes me smart" is that the only decisive part Trump played in filing his taxes was to instruct his CFO to use bogus numbers so he could defraud the government. Creating that tangled maze of companies and trusts was entirely done by his underlings.

Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.

The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.

The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.

“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”

The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot,” adding, “He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”

It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast to coast.

But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/29/north-shore-leader-santos-scoop/

along the same lines, josh marshall wrote about the North Shore Leader's work not getting picked up last week:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hey-the-local-paper-was-all-over-notorious-liar-and-weirdo-george-santos/sharetoken/T56e6Lrn7D8E

worth reading (imo) because it also talks a bit about whose responsibility it is to do oppo research (which i totally just typed "op-ed research", lol) and some of those dynamics, if one is interested in that side of things. in this case, though, it appears that the local newspaper did all the op-ed research for them, and no one bothered to read it or forward it to anyone.

i wonder how much of it had to do with his opponent in the primary? i made a bob dylan joke (hilarious!!) the other day because this is wikipedia's account of the election results:

https://i.imgur.com/gODX6p0.png

robert zimmerman does exist, though. he seems like a game show host

https://i.imgur.com/v20eICo.png

Seems like it was an open secret among republicans

Top House Republicans were well aware of Santos's dishonesty before the election/NYT article, w/ several expressing late concern/incredulity that he might win. Here's what I wrote in @CookPolitical on September 1st: pic.twitter.com/1e5u7RFjOI

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 30, 2022

x[ Wrong Dude

it appears that the local newspaper did all the op-ed research for them

*facepalm*

A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast to coast. But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time.

WaPo forthrightly reports that newspapers like the WaPo can no longer be trusted to even notice important stories being investigated and printed by smaller newspapers.

robert zimmerman notices that there is a trace of a wrinkle visible on the tail of his pristine dress shirt, near the bottom hem
robert zimmerman punches the wall in an explosive rage and immediately dips his face into cold water and screams as bubbles form in the sink

dishonesty is the best policy. watch the police and the taxman miss me!

the year has changed again

U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life