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Trump Plans to Reward Tax Cheats |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44720"><span class="small">The Washington Post Editorial Board</span></a>
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Wednesday, 19 April 2017 08:38 |
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Excerpt: "Attacking the IRS is a particularly expensive way to play to the crowd. It rewards tax cheats at everyone else’s expense."
Donald Trump. (photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call)
Trump Plans to Reward Tax Cheats
By The Washington Post Editorial Board
19 April 17
 HERE IS something inspiring about the annual civic ritual playing out on Tuesday. Millions of people will submit tax forms, poring over details to get them just right, even though very few will ever be audited. They are dutifully, if not necessarily cheerfully, paying the price of admission into a civilized society.
Still, we’re not so naive as to believe that compliance would be unchanged if cheaters were never caught. That is one reason President Trump’s proposal to slash Internal Revenue Service funding is such an abysmal idea. The president last month suggested reducing the national tax collector’s $11.2?billion budget by $239 million — this after Republicans already have cut $1 billion from its budget since taking over Congress at the beginning of this decade.
Attacking the IRS is a particularly expensive way to play to the crowd. It rewards tax cheats at everyone else’s expense. Commissioner John Koskinen estimates that the government loses at least $4 for every $1 cut from the IRS and is losing some $4?billion to $8 billion a year due to inadequate funding.
The agency’s workforce has contracted by some 17,000 employees in recent years while demands on the agency, from preventing identity theft to enforcing Obamacare’s individual health-insurance mandate, have expanded. Fewer employees means less enforcement: Last year the agency conducted the fewest audits since 2004 — when the U.S. population was about 30 million smaller, the Associated Press notes — and its audit rate has declined to a point not seen since 2003. The more the integrity of the tax oversight system comes into doubt, the more tax-day shenanigans people will attempt — and the more even honest people will wonder why they bother paying such close attention while less scrupulous people get rewarded.
Fewer IRS employees also means worse customer service. Though by some measures service has improved over the past year, it is still far below what it should be. Some callers needing help still have trouble getting through to live people in a reasonable amount of time.
“I was particularly surprised that at looking at the IRS numbers that the IRS head count has gone down quite dramatically, almost 30 percent over the last number of years,” Steven Mnuchin said in his confirmation hearings as treasury secretary. “I can assure you that the president-elect understands the concept of where we add people and we make money,” he said. “That’s a very quick conversation with Donald Trump.”
It may have been quick, but apparently the logic was not as self-evident as Mr. Mnuchin expected. The country will quite literally pay.
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What Steve Bannon and Mel Gibson Have in Common |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Tuesday, 18 April 2017 14:23 |
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Pierce writes: "I'd like to highlight a bit of Olivia Nuzzi's story about the downfall of Steve Bannon within the upper echelons of Camp Runamuck in D.C. (Nuzzi's hiring by New York is the best personnel move of the past few years not made by Danny Ainge.)"
Steve Bannon. (photo: Getty Images)
What Steve Bannon and Mel Gibson Have in Common
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
18 April 17
They're both big fans of a bonkers 19th century nun.
 'd like to highlight a bit of Olivia Nuzzi's story about the downfall of Steve Bannon within the upper echelons of Camp Runamuck in D.C. (Nuzzi's hiring by New York is the best personnel move of the past few years not made by Danny Ainge.) All the stuff about the West Wing knife-fighting is interesting but, as a career RC with something of a sweet-tooth for the eccentrics in the history of Holy Mother Church, I was stopped in my tracks by this passage.
The embattled chief strategist to President Donald Trump is a student of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th-century nun and German mystic whose visions, documented in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, served as inspiration for The Passion of the Christ, the 2003 film by Mel Gibson (who, incidentally, Bannon once reportedly tried to work with on a movie about, among other things, Adolf Hitler and eugenics). In that book, in a chapter favored by Bannon, this is how Emmerich describes hell: "All in this dreary abode tends to fill the mind with horror; not a word of comfort is heard or a consoling idea admitted; the one tremendous thought, that the justice of an all-powerful God inflicts on the damned nothing but what they have fully deserved, is the absorbing tremendous conviction which weighs down each heart." Those poor souls in hell are notable not for their misfortune, but for their deservedness."
Oh, dear Jesus, you should pardon the expression, not her again.
As noted above, Blessed Emmerich, an altogether splendid 19th century nutball, was one of the sources for Mel Gibson's sacred snuff film, in which, among other acts of cinematic embroidery, Jesus gets thrown off a bridge wearing what appears to be an anchor chain. Emmerich claimed to have had religious visions from childhood on, but she really went to town after entering a convent in Westphalia. There, having become ill and taken to bed, Emmerich began to have visions of the past and of the future. This enabled her to fill in some of the gaps in the gospel accounts of Jesus' life and, especially, the accounts of his death. For example, Emmerich asserted that the couple at whose wedding Jesus turned water into wine were so moved that they immediately took vows of perpetual chastity, which must have been a considerable drag.
Emmerich is primarily known for The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ After the Meditation of Anne Catherine Emmerich. This purports to be an account of Emmerich's visions, and it was written by a poet named Clemens Brentano, who did not take dictation or anything like it, but, rather, went back to his rooms and wrote down what he said were Emmerich's words. Later, various people published more of Brentano's ghostwriting, including a four-volume life of Christ. Unfortunately for devotees, and for modern readers, Brentano's account of Emmerich's visions included passages about Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies and about how Ham, the son of Noah, was the father of the world's "black, idolatrous, and stupid nations."
(All of this and more can be found in Paula Fredrikson's seminal treatment of Gibson's movie, which set off holy hell when it was published in The New Republic.)
Moreover, HMC never has known what to make of Emmerich. When the cause for her beatification was advanced, a huge dispute erupted over the material Brentano had published.(Were the writings merely meditations or authentic visions? Both? Neither?) In 1928, the Vatican stopped the process entirely. It did not resume until 1973 and, when it did, the writings were specifically excluded from it. Without them, of course, Emmerich simply was another sickly nun of the 1800s. And, in any case, the idea that an adherent of this crackpottery ascended to the highest councils of this government is just another truly weird development in what appears to be an ongoing parade of them.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 18 April 2017 11:30 |
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Boardman writes: "On April 13, for the first time in combat, the US used its GBU-43B, a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) explosive that weighs 21,000 pounds and creates an air blast equivalent of 11,000 tons of TNT. The aerial fireball effectively sets the air on fire within a one-mile radius, above and below ground, incinerating, burning alive, or suffocating anyone within its reach."
U.S. Special Operations personnel prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a mission in Afghanistan. (photo: U.S. Department of Defense)
In Afghanistan: America’s Longest War Will Never Be Won
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
18 April 17
“I’m very, very proud of the people. Another—really, another successful job. We’re very, very proud of our military. Just like we’re proud of the folks in this room, we are so proud of our military. And it was another successful event.”
– President Trump’s answer to the question, “Did you authorize that bomb?
he US war in Afghanistan, by proxy and/or direct intervention, is approaching the end of its fourth decade. And now the US is running short on big bombs to use there that are still smaller than thermonuclear weapons. On April 13, for the first time in combat, the US used its GBU-43B, a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) explosive that weighs 21,000 pounds and creates an air blast equivalent of 11 tons of TNT. The aerial fireball effectively sets the air on fire within a one-mile radius, above and below ground, incinerating, burning alive, or suffocating anyone within its reach. Official reports, as in The New York Times, were suitably bland and non-specifically threatening:
U.S. forces in Afghanistan on Thursday [April 13] struck an Islamic State tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan with “the mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclear weapon ever used in combat by the U.S. military, Pentagon officials said. [emphasis added]
To hear mainstream media and the Pentagon tell it, this is just war business as usual for the current NATO mission, “Operation Resolute Support.” The official line is that the mission of 8,400 US troops there is training and support, not combat (except sometimes fighting terrorists). Just before the big bomb drop, on April 8, a US Army Special Forces officer (Staff Sgt. Mark R. De Alencar, 37) was killed in action when his unit was attacked during anti-ISIS combat operations in Nangarhar Province, along the Pakistan border. That’s where the MOAB was dropped (in one of more than 460 US airstrikes in Afghanistan this year). Nangarhar Province has been a difficult to conquer military terrain for at least 2,500 years (Alexander the Great held it for a few years after 331 BC). These days, no one really controls Nangarhar, much less the rest of Afghanistan, certainly not the Afghan government, despite NATO and independent US support. Conventional wisdom at the moment has it that the Taliban is winning, though it’s not clear what that might mean. Despite US attention to ISIS forces, real or imagined, ISIS is nowhere close to controlling the country and is at war with the Taliban as well. That reality makes Sean Spicer’s highlighting of an essentially irrelevant explosion in a relatively remote location somewhat surreal:
The GBU-43 is a large, powerful and accurately delivered weapon. We targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters used to move around freely, making it easier for them to target U.S. military advisers and Afghan forces in the area. … The United States took all precautions necessary to prevent civilian casualties and collateral damage as a result of the operation. Any further details, I would refer you to the Department of Defense on that. [emphasis added]
Other than the novel notion that one might “move around freely” in caves and tunnels, the press secretary’s announcement is so opaque that one wonders if the White House knows what actually happened. This sense is reinforced later in the same press session when a reporter asks: “On the GBU-43 bomb – the first time it’s ever been used. Why did you choose this particular location? And would you say that this bomb won’t be used again in another flashpoint around the world, like Syria? Like North Korea, for instance?” The question assigns a significance to the bomb that has yet to be demonstrated. But the question’s policy points with regard to Syria and North Korea are nevertheless germane. Spicer does not even try to address that, but again defers to the Pentagon, as if that’s where policy is being made these days.
When the White House and the Pentagon promote “a strike on an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan tunnel complex in Achin district, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, as part of ongoing efforts to defeat ISIS-K in Afghanistan” they are focusing on a currently minor opponent with a long historical shadow. This is the same region in which the US failed to capture bin Laden before he escaped into Pakistan’s tribal region. According to the US, over the past six months or so it has reduced ISIS-K’s strength in Achin district from as many as 3,000 fighters to some 600 presently (though it’s not clear how many may have tactically withdrawn to Pakistan). The air blast took out another 30-90, according to different reports, and “only” another 10-12 civilians, including four children. The commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, indicated that there were no reports or evidence of civilian casualties, although US and Afghan forces had withdrawn to a safe distance before the bomb blast. As the Times headlined it April 14:
A Giant U.S. Bomb Strikes ISIS Caves in Afghanistan
But here’s the funny thing about the cave and tunnel complexes in Nangarhar Province: the US helped create them. During 1978-1988, the US, through the CIA, supported the mujahideen opposition to Soviet control and invasion of Afghanistan. Although the US has now used the “mother of all bombs” to attack caves and tunnels built with US support, the US couldn’t hope to destroy them because they were built deep into mountains to be largely impervious to aerial attack. Referring to “ISIS caves” is both ahistorical and misleading, since ISIS is merely the current tenant. The US did not use its “bunker buster” bomb, the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which delivers a larger payload than the MOAB. Nor did the US use any of its somewhat smaller, non-nuclear bunker buster bombs on the bunker-like complex of caves and tunnels.
The MOAB is an anti-personnel weapons, it’s designed to annihilate soft targets, especially people. One of its predecessors, named the BLU-82B, or “Daisy Cutter,” was used in Vietnam to cleanse suspected Viet Cong areas of most living things for a one-mile diameter. The Daisy Cutter was also used in Iraq and Afghanistan, before the last one was dropped on a Utah test range in 2008. Its primary use has often been psychological more than strictly military.
The US, in the person of Gen. Nicholson, chose to use the weapon with the media-friendly nickname “mother of all bombs,” which of course it isn’t at all, though it does serve very well as a good, shiny-object distraction for the media. With an explosive power of 11 tons of TNT, the MOAB is not even as big as the “small” Hiroshima atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” with its 15 kilotons of explosive power. The “mother of all bombs” is a tiny dwarf next to the US arsenal of nuclear weapons rated by the megaton (1,000 kilotons) of destructive power. The most powerful US nuclear bomb (as distinct from a warhead) is the B83, a “nuclear bunker buster” (or 1.2 million tons, more than 100,000 times the size of the “mother of all bombs”).
Nuclear weapons have remained unused in war since 1945, subject to an international taboo that President Trump is eroding, perhaps quite deliberately. Using a nuclear weapon in Afghanistan remains, for now, “unthinkable,” as they say. But how close to “thinkable” is it becoming for North Korea? And who decides what’s thinkable now, who’s doing the thinking? Depending on the time of year, prevailing winds would carry radioactive fallout from an attack on North Korea either to Japan or China. President Trump and the White House provide almost no clarity or guidance to their thinking, as this April 13 shouted press exchange illustrates:
SHOUTED QUESTION: How about that bomb, sir? Did you authorize that bomb?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I’m very, very proud of the people. Really another successful job. We’re very, very proud of our military. Just like we’re proud of the folks in this room, we are so proud of our military, and it was another successful event.
REPORTER: Did you authorize it?
TRUMP: Everyone knows exactly what happened. So, and, what I do is I authorize my military. We have the greatest military in the world, and they have done the job, as usual.
We have given them total authorization, and that’s what they’re doing, and frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately. Take a look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare it with the last eight years. There is a tremendous difference. Tremendous difference.
We have incredible leaders in the military, and incredible military, and we are very proud of them.
REPORTER: Does this send a message to North Korea?
TRUMP: I don’t know if this sends a message, it doesn’t make any difference if it does or not. North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of…. [emphasis added]
The president went on to suggest vaguely that China will resolve the North Korea problem somehow. But what he has just described is unconstitutional government. He has confirmed the abdication of civilian control of the US military. If there are any exceptions to the “total authorization,” the administration has not made clear what they or, or even if they include nuclear weapons. It’s small comfort that this abdication by the president is a bookend to the similar abdication by the Congress on September 14, 2001, in a resolution giving “total authorization” to the president to make war at will. That Congressional action, driven by the panic of 9/11, was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. It passed both houses without any reflective consideration and with only one vote in opposition – Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat (two cowardly Republican Senators, Larry Craig and Jesse Helms, were “present/not voting”). Barbara Lee has been trying in vain ever since to have the authorization rescinded and to return the country to traditional constitutional order, under which the power to declare war belongs to Congress.
Insofar as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has contributed to making the US an increasingly militarized, emerging police state, the terrorists are winning, mostly with our help.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Five Things to Watch in the Georgia Special Election |
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Tuesday, 18 April 2017 08:00 |
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Hagen writes: "The highly anticipated Georgia special election is coming down to the wire Tuesday as Democrats look to deliver a major upset and turn the House race into a referendum on President Trump."
Jon Ossoff speaks to the media during a visit to a campaign office. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Voting Machines Stolen Ahead of Georgia Special Election
Five Things to Watch in the Georgia Special Election
By Lisa Hagen, The Hill
18 April 17
he highly anticipated Georgia special election is coming down to the wire Tuesday as Democrats look to deliver a major upset and turn the House race into a referendum on President Trump.
All eyes will be on whether Democrat Jon Ossoff can win outright, or whether he and one of the Republican candidates will compete in a June runoff to fill the seat vacated by Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
Here are the five things to watch for Tuesday:
Does Ossoff win outright?
That’ll be the biggest question of the night and the most closely watched part of the vote.
Ossoff will face candidates of both parties Tuesday in the “jungle primary.” Polls show him hovering in the low 40s — a promising number for a Democrat in the district that Trump won by 1 percent of the vote, but still not close enough to the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
Democrats hope to avert the runoff and send a clear signal to Trump and Republicans that even GOP seats in districts that went for Trump aren’t safe from midterm challenges. An early Ossoff victory would also boost Democratic spirits and fundraising, raising expectations for a wave election that hands Democrats a House majority. Even if Ossoff doesn’t clinch a majority of the vote, he’s still expected to make the June 20 runoff. But he will have a much steeper climb winning the seat in a runoff, when the 18-candidate race will be narrowed to just Ossoff and a Republican with the national party’s backing.
Ossoff has generated excitement among Democrats, hauling in an unprecedented $8.3 million in three months. If he goes to a runoff, he’ll be challenged to keep up that momentum and record fundraising over the next two months.
Which Republican makes the runoff spot?
If Ossoff fails to win a majority, he’ll likely face one of 11 Republicans from the primary field in June.
There are several leading contender among the crowded GOP group, but which one could win the second-place spot to make the runoff is a big question mark going into Election Day.
Former Georgia secretary of State Karen Handel was an early favorite, but she’s been hit with a barrage of attacks from her Republican rivals and their allies. The conservative Club for Growth targeted her as a “career politician. Fellow GOP candidate Dan Moody, a former state senator, took his own jab at Handel with an ad featuring an elephant wearing a pearl necklace — a permanent fixture in Handel’s wardrobe.
But Handel entered the race with the highest name recognition, thanks to two failed statewide campaigns and her high-profile resignation from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation over the organization’s funding for Planned Parenthood.
Polling shows three other top GOP contenders behind Handel: Moody, former state Sen. Judson Hill and former councilman Bob Gray.
Gray has aligned himself closely with Trump, even though the president only carried the district by 1 point. But he’s clashed with Republican Bruce LeVell, who led Trump’s national diversity coalition and has challenged the authenticity of Gray’s support for the president.
LeVell campaigned with Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, but he polls far behind the rest of the GOP field.
Does Ossoff run up the vote in the right counties?
Georgia’s 6th District, which based in Atlanta’s suburbs, spans three counties: Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton.
DeKalb County is the most Democratic of the three. Ossoff is expected to do well in DeKalb precincts like Brookhaven. But if Ossoff fails to establish a base of votes there, strategists in the state say the race will likely go to a runoff.
That’s because Cobb and Fulton will be tougher terrain for Democrats.
Ossoff is not expected to perform well in northern Fulton areas like Alpharetta and Johns Creek, places with strong ties to some of the leading Republicans.
But if Ossoff performs better than expected in northern Fulton, that could be a game-changer.
“If Jon Ossoff is getting 10 to 20 percent of the vote up there, that’s a really great night for him,” said Tharon Johnson, a Georgia Democratic strategist.
In Cobb, Ossoff is expected to have a hard time all across the county. Hillary Clinton won the county overall in the 2016 presidential race, but did not carry the portion that falls in the 6th District.
Strategists say Ossoff could do well in east Cobb, an area with a large population of educated, female GOP voters that saw many votes for Clinton.
“He’s got to come to as close as he can to get percentages similar to what Hillary Clinton got in that district in Cobb in order to win without a runoff,” Johnson said.
In the GOP field, Hill used to represent a portion of Cobb, so high turnout there could mean a good night for him. But with many of the leading GOP contenders likely to split the vote in Fulton, the Republican field will likely come down to which candidate can get the majority of votes in DeKalb in order to make the runoff.
With early voting split, which party will have stronger turnout at the polls?
Three weeks of early voting came to an end last Friday with more than 46,000 ballots cast, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Democrats appeared to have a substantial early-voting advantage in the beginning, but Republicans have reportedly closed the gap.
Georgia strategists and political observers say that Republicans typically have stronger turnout on Election Day as well as absentee voting, while Democrats usually have an upper-hand in early voting.
The number of voters choosing Democratic and Republican ballots is nearly even, according to a Journal Constitution tally.
Georgia voters aren’t required to choose a party when they register. While they must select one of the party’s primary ballots, they don’t have to vote for that party’s candidate.
With both parties nearly even in early voting, Democrats and Republicans alike will need to count on strong Election Day turnouts.
How will Trump react?
Trump has largely stayed out of the race, save a Monday tweet slamming Ossoff as a “super liberal” and claiming that he supports illegal immigration and tax increases. Ossoff fired back in a statement, calling Trump “misinformed.”
It remains to be seen whether he’ll weigh in on the race after the results, but last week’s Kansas special election suggests that Trump will be watching — and might find it hard not to claim victory if Ossoff fails to avert a runoff.
Prior to the Kansas election, Trump tweeted his support for GOP nominee Ron Estes. After Estes won, performing worse than Trump had in 2016, Trump falsely tweeted that Democrats “spent heavily” in the race.
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