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

This seems like good news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/us/michigan-whtimer-governor-kidnapping-sentencing.html

Feds were pushing for life, though.

So Tulsi Gabbard fills in for Tucker Carlson on Fox News and now she's good?

oh boy pic.twitter.com/DWW3TNt8IP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 28, 2022

Click through to the thread if you'd like to watch her absolutely roast George Santos

Of course they've got the knives out for him. His flagrant bullshitting puts their slightly less flagrant bullshitting at risk.

Santos made the amateur error of telling lies that were 1) very easy to expose and 2) were only designed to make himself look smart and important. That's a big mistake. Looking smart and important doesn't win Republican votes.

The real pros confine themselves to loudly endorsing all the lies the Republican base most ardently believes. This flatters them into thinking they are voting for the next best thing to voting for themselves.

I'm not sure Republicans are all on the same page about Santos. The ones in congress very much want him to stay no matter what because they only have a razor thin majority.

this is a softball for Tulsi and her ilk. Santos obviously was lying about everything and is only half-heartedly pushing back on it. he only has regional appeal. Tulsi can do her limp-dicked McCarthy "have you no shame?" and give the appearance that they Fox News dorks actually police their own while cheering on every other thing that members of the GOP do.

and in two days, the first thinkpiece titled "Why Democrats Forced Santos to Lie" will hit twitterverse

The money behind Santos is interesting.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-george-devolder-santos-got-cash-from-andrew-intrater-cousin-of-russian-oligarch-viktor-vekselberg

this is a softball for Tulsi and her ilk. Santos obviously was lying about everything and is only half-heartedly pushing back on it. he only has regional appeal. Tulsi can do her limp-dicked McCarthy "have you no shame?" and give the appearance that they Fox News dorks actually police their own while cheering on every other thing that members of the GOP do.

― Fash Gordon (Neanderthal), Wednesday, 28 December 2022 03:58 (one hour ago) link

the tulsi praise is garbage. rnc/fox/etc. probably figured that's a pretty easy D flip next election and just cut the cord. he's not a stefanik that could weather the next election cycle on that type of career wizardry based on the redistricting.

Friday!

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/27/trumps-tax-forms-to-be-unveiled-friday-morning-00075641

Good morning!

wherefore art thou qualmsey?

Not surprisingly, Marge Green is defending him.

unrelated, but Congress passing SECURE Act 2.0 on 12/23, which changes the Required Minimum Distribution age to 73, which would require retirement plan recordkeepers to update all automated customer-facing documents, as well as update training materials and retrain existing agents in a month where about everybody takes PTO....expert level trolling, congrats guys.

(yes this affects me but fortunately I'm not on the technology side who is probably flipping out about this).

this feels like another 'rich people' bill because people who aren't well off aren't likely to delay taking their retirement benefits

Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) on Wednesday announced he has cancer, but he said the condition is curable and he expects to work during treatment.

The congressman, who led the second impeachment of President Donald Trump and is a member of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, announced the diagnosis in a news release.

“After several days of tests, I have been diagnosed with Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma, which is a serious but curable form of cancer,” he said. “Prognosis for most people in my situation is excellent after four months of treatment.”

Raskin is one of the few Congress humans who is worth a damn. I stumbled upon and joined a protests he led outside the Saudi Embassy in DC about the murder of Jamal Kashoggi.

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

Santos:

Ahhhh Omg pic.twitter.com/r1g0Nr1XKc

— Tyler Dinucci!! (@TylerDinucci) December 29, 2022

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