Funny stuff: the Times and the Trump tax stroy

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: AesopFan]

I can just picture the The New York Times gathering a team of actuaries, legal accountants, tax historians, advisers and financial consultants around a big executive office table, piled high with reams of papers and spent coffee cups, saying:

“We’ve got him now…. as soon as people understand: fixed asset depreciation schedules; and if the assets were depreciated legally using straight line or diminishing balance; then we move to whole-value equity pick-up, or minority interest accounting; before digging into section 1031 ‘like-kind’ asset exchanges; partnerships (limited or writ large), carried interest loopholes, pass-throughs, net capital losses/gains, seven-year income averaging and the difference between long-term and short-term capital gains”…

…or something.

Seriously, the ‘Trump-taxes’ story has to be the biggest, funniest, most well documented, and most absurd, ongoing snipe hunt in history. “I was going to support President Trump’s re-election until I saw his depreciated amortization schedule from 1989?”… said no-one, like, ever.

As I said, it’s funny.

But to be serious for a minute, that’s not what the Times was counting on at all in publishing the story. First of all, they need to keep the Trump attacks coming, so even though they probably knew it was a relatively weak story it may have been all they could come up with that particular day. Secondly, they are counting on readers not really understanding the ins and outs of the tax code for businesses of the size and complexity of Trump’s. Most of us don’t, and I certainly don’t, but they were trusting that Trump-haters and even Trump-dislikers would think boy, he says he’s so rich but he lost so much money as well as boy, for a man living so high on the hog he certainly didn’t pay much in taxes compared to me.

Those pouncing, attacking, seizing, warring Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s become obvious and commonplace: when Democrats do something for which they can be heartily criticized, instead of criticizing them the MSM attacks and pounces and seizes on the Republican reaction and characterizes it in aggressive and somewhat sinister terms such as the aforementioned attacking and pouncing and seizing, as well as warring.

Call it MSM jujitsu (in the sense of using an opponent’s force against themselves). I don’t know how successful it is—I’m not their intended audience—but they certainly must think it’s successful because it’s standard operating procedure for the MSM.

And so we have this:

“TRUMP’S ALL-OUT WAR AGAINST HOUSE PROBES”

That’s the headline of a Washington Post story (print edition) about the clash between the White House and House Democrats over the latters’ investigations of the former. The article notes that President Trump “is blocking more than 20 separate Democratic inquiries.” According to the Post, this “amount[s] to what many experts call the most expansive White House obstruction effort in decades.”

Let us pause here for a moment to reflect on how verbally clever that is. In using the word “obstruction” in its vernacular colloquial sense, the Post inserts an echo of one of its pet projects, the idea that Trump was guilty of the crime of obstructing justice a la the insinuations of the Mueller Report.

Moreover, the Post has the big picture backwards. It is House Democrats, having launched more than 20 separate investigations of the president, including many relating to his personal and business affairs (and those of family members), who are waging “all-out war” against Trump. They are engaged in the most expansive harassment campaign against a president in decades, and probably ever.

It’s natural — a matter of simple math — that the more investigations the House launches against a president, the more instances of resistance it will encounter. That’s especially true when House committees insist on unreasonable conditions like refusing to let witnesses bring White House lawyers with them.

Whether the accused is some random Republican, Donald Trump, or Judge Kavanaugh in justified outrage against the flimsiness of the potentially destructive charges against him, the person on the right who uses lawful means to launch understandable defenses of him/herself, and shows justifiable anger at what’s being done by those out to destroy him/her, will be characterized by the press as being the aggressor and wrongdoer.

Brexit redux

The New Neo Posted on by

Polls in Britain are indicating that in the upcoming election for EU representatives, the rather new Brexit Party, headed by Nigel Farage, is poised to do very very well:

That vote is set for May 23. Had Prime Minister Theresa May and her Conservatives honored the Brexit referendum of 2016, Britain wouldn’t have to participate in the blasted EU election. Voters decided, after all, to leave the EU, and a departure date of March 29 was all set. Mrs. May, though, betrayed the referendum. And now Britain has to elect a delegation to sit in the EU “Parliament.”

In that election, the party polling at the head of the field is the Brexit Party. It was founded at the last minute by Nigel Farage. He’s the former head of the United Kingdom Independence Party who led the campaign for Britain to return to being a sovereign country…

The latest poll quoted by the Guardian suggests that 34% of voters will vote for Mr. Farage’s party. Polls suggest support for the Conservatives, as the Tories are also called, has “collapsed,” amid the “Brexit uncertainty,” to just 11%. Labor, bedeviled by charges of anti-Semitism, is polling at 21%. The best showing of any “openly anti-Brexit” party, the Liberal Democrats, is 12%, the Guardian says.

The article goes on to speculate that Farage might even end up parlaying his support into a Prime Minister position some day. At the same time, it cautions that polls can be pretty meaningless.

So what does that leave us with? The usual uncertainty about elections these days.

Although I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of British politics (apparently I’m hardly alone in that), I do have a theory, which is that not only its Brexit stance but also the extreme and increasing leftism of the Labour Party has turned a lot of people off who might otherwise have supported them. Although political parties in Britain generally lean more to the left than their supposed American counterparts, what’s happening to Labour in Britain may be a similar phenomenon to what appears to be going on with Democrats in the US. The candidates have been so busy getting to the left of each other that they forgot that pleasing their leftist base isn’t quite enough to win more general elections.

Here’s an article about the British version:

During an interview by LBC’s Theo Usherwood to Nigel Farage, members of a crowd gathered around the Brexit Party leader voiced their discontent with Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to deliver a clear message on its Brexit stance. After admitting to the LBC presenter they would now rather vote for Nigel Farage than Jeremy Corbyn’s Party at the upcoming European elections despite having been Labour supporters for a long time, Mr Usherwood pointed out the former Ukip leader was the “antithesis” of Mr Corbyn’s policies.

But one woman in the crowd responded: “That’s beside the point.

“I know what I think, I’ve got my own feelings, my own thoughts.

“I voted to leave and I want to leave. Full stop.”

Another passionate Brexiteer in the crowd explained: “In this room, it’s all about trust and honesty.

“It’s filled with the people that all around the country are attending these Brexit rallies.

“And that’s because when Nigel is asked a question on mainstream TV or any interviews he answers it.

Interesting. So for a lot of people there are at least two things going on. One is that they wanted Brexit and they voted for it (even though these particular people were previously on the left), and they are completely turned off by what they see as the betrayal of their wishes by the superior, condescending “elites” of government.

Sound familiar?

The other is that they are also tired of the beat-around-the-bush, jargon-filled, obfuscating answers from said superior, condescending “elites” of government. They prefer straight talk.

I have no idea what will happen in these upcoming elections. But the build-up has certainly been interesting.

Happy Mother’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of what has become my annual Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

Awaiting IG Horowitz’s report: was the criminal justice system perverted by the FBI?

The New Neo Posted on by

Attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing have said that Inspector General Horowitz’s report, due to come out next month, has concluded that the final three FISA warrants pertaining to Russiagate were obtained illegally. I don’t know how their track record of such predictions have turned out, but that would be big news if true.

In addition, there’s this story of what seems as though it may have been attempted entrapment of George Papadopoulos by the FBI in the summer of 2017:

We’ll see how this pans out, I guess.

One thing I do know is that Andrew C. McCarthy—who started writing about what became known as Russiagate back when he was not much of a Trump supporter and when he trusted Comey and Mueller and all the rest—has become what I can only describe as hopping mad [emphasis mine]:

Russiagate has always been a political narrative masquerading as a federal investigation. Its objective, plain and simple, has been twofold: first, to hamstring Donald Trump’s capacity to press the agenda on which he ran (immigration enforcement, conservative judicial nominees, deregulation, and a military build-up, along with skepticism about military interventions, free trade, and NATO); and ultimately, to render him unelectable come autumn 2020…

Access to sensitive law-enforcement information and classified intelligence is a trust. It is extended with the understanding that it won’t be politicized or used to smear people.

Abuse of this privilege mirrors the most objectionable aspect of the Mueller investigation: The abuse of the criminal-justice process — converting it into a political weapon to smear a person the government has not charged with crimes.…

…[T]he anti-Trump partisans…are perverting the criminal-justice process they claim Trump has obstructed. With the transparently eager cooperation of Mueller’s team, they intimate that the president could have been charged and would have been convicted. They suggest that, although not charged, he has not been “exonerated,” effectively imposing on him the burden to establish his innocence.

I don’t want the criminal-justice system to be the prism through which we conduct politics. But if you insist on evaluating the president’s conduct as a criminal-justice issue rather than a political impeachment issue, then he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He is entitled to have the evidence discounted (indeed, it should have been concealed) unless and until he is formally charged. He is entitled to have the burden of proof imposed entirely on the government. For current and former officials who have been involved in the investigation to refrain from charging him, publicize the evidence, and then suggest he is guilty is a willful undermining of the justice process.

That is, they are doing what they accuse Trump of doing.

McCarthy has devoted his life to that criminal justice system. He previously respected it, although of course he knew it wasn’t perfect. And he previously respected the people who worked with him, such as Comey and Mueller, and the integrity of the whole. I don’t think he was extremely naive, but apparently he was somewhat naive, and he’s not happy at the undermining and perverting of a system he knows is (or should be) one of the biggest safeguards of our liberties.

All Americans ought to feel the same alarm, but unfortunately they don’t.

More from McCarthy here:

Desperate to project the illusion of cover-up in the utter absence of cover-up, Democrats proceeded against the attorney general even though (a) Barr did not owe Congress a single comma in the report because federal law calls for it to be confidential (i.e., between the prosecutor investigating the case and his supervisor, the attorney general); (b) Barr nevertheless gave Congress about 95 percent of the report; (c) congressional Democrats did not avail themselves of the opportunity to read other unredacted portions to which he gave access; (d) all of the unsavory information about President Trump – i.e., the stuff in the report that Democrats truly care about – has been disclosed; and (e) Barr only withheld grand jury information which it would be illegal to disclose – meaning: Democrats put the AG to the untenable choice of violating the law or being held in contempt.

Oh, and about that grand jury secrecy rule … it is Congress’s own law. Democrats could easily get the information by just passing a two-line amendment to federal criminal procedure rule 6(e), so that grand jury material could henceforth be disclosed to Congress in special counsel investigations. With the Trump administration trying to show it is being transparent, the Senate would surely pass such a House amendment, and the president would sign it. But Democratic legislators are not taking any legislative action (you know, their job) because they don’t really want the information. They want the issue. They are straining to create the appearance of Watergate, even as Barr has turned over an Everest of information.

You can sense McCarthy’s saying the equivalent of “It’s all so clear; why can’t I make everyone see it?”

Did the NY Times violate tax law?

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe yes, maybe no [emphasis mine]:

Confidentiality, as the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in 1991 in U.S. v. Richey, is essential to “maintaining a workable tax system.”…

Taxpayer privacy is “fundamental to a tax system that relies on self-reporting” since it protects “sensitive or otherwise personal information,” said then-Judge (now Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1986 in another case when she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia…

Federal law – 26 U.S.C. §7213(a)(1) – makes it a felony for any federal employee to disclose tax returns or “return information.” Infractions are punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine as high as $250,000 under the Alternative Fines Act (18 U.S.C. §3571).

Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of The New York Times story, tax returns themselves, as well as tax return information such as these IRS transcripts (which are a summary of the tax returns), are protected from disclosure by federal law. And this provision applies to private individuals as well as government employees, a fact that should be considered by the New York Times’ source.

That’s the letter of the law. However, in practice a newspaper may be safe from conviction under the law [emphasis mine]:

If the newspaper obtained this information from an employee of the IRS, that employee will be in big trouble if he or she is identified.

Could the editors and reporters at the New York Times be prosecuted for publishing this information?

Section (a)(3) of the law makes it a felony for any person who receives an illegally disclosed tax return or return information to publish that return or that information. But it’s unknown if the bar on publication by a media organization could survive a First Amendment challenge.

What we do know is that in previous incidents, the government did not attempt to prosecute the publisher of tax return information…

Are the interests of the government in an effective tax system and that of citizens in maintaining the confidentiality of their financial information outweighed by the First Amendment right of the press, and by and the public’s interest in obtaining financial information on elected officials?

Tthe press is full of garbage and partisanship, but press freedom is still an important principle to defend. However, I’m not for allowing the press to violate this law and publish information such as tax returns, and I mean anyone’s tax returns—as I wrote in my earlier post on the Times’ publication of Trump’s tax information—without that person’s consent.

I don’t think freedom of the press should include freedom from all consequences for anything the press does. It’s a delicate balancing act, to be sure, but it’s tipped too far if the press is allowed one hundred percent free rein. The way Sullivan is applied, for example, has made it nearly impossible to prove defamation of any public figure even if it’s pretty clear that a defamatory story was published with reckless disregard for the truth.

Then again, the monetary penalty for violating this particular tax privacy law is so small (not small for an individual, but for a newspaper) that even if that element were to be enforced against the press it would hardly constitute more than an inconsequential little slap on the wrist (I can’t see that anyone would ever be sent to prison, so I don’t think that the chance of a prison term is really an issue). So I doubt even being found guilty would deter the MSM from publishing this sort of information if they thought it could hurt someone they despise. The possibility of conviction might even motivate them to do it because then the press could claim the mantle of martyrdom.

Herding the Japanese

The New Neo Posted on by

Pocket thinks I’d be interested in this article entitled “The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations: The nation’s famed mastery of rail travel has been aided by some subtle behavioral tricks.”

And Pocket’s got my number, all right, because indeed I am interested.

When I was young, I remember seeing film of how the Japanese handled the crush of rush hour in its subways. It was somewhat terrifying—they had white-gloved attendants shoving people into already overstuffed trains, and even watching it could give a person both claustrophobia and enochlophobia.

Apparently they still do it:

But the article indicates there’s a lot, lot more:

In 2016, for instance, London Underground operator Transport for London partnered with the behavioral science department at the London School of Economics to develop ways of encouraging riders to queue on both sides of station escalators as a means of increasing their capacity in the capital’s Holborn Station. Among other measures, simple hand and footprints were also painted on each side of the “up” escalators. In Australia, researchers conducted an experiment with lighted directional arrows on signposts to improve flows of departing passengers. Using a camera system designed to recognize and distinguish brisk-walking businesspeople from dawdling tourists, for example—green arrows would flash to direct commuters in an efficient route towards the exit.

When it come to passenger manipulation, what sets the stations of Japan apart from their counterparts is both the ingenuity behind their nudges and the imperceptible manner in which they are implemented. Japan’s nudges reflect a higher order of thinking…

Standing at either end of a platform in Tokyo’s labyrinthine Shinjuku Station, one might detect a small square LED panel emitting a pleasant, deep-blue glow. Nestled among vending machines and safety posters, the panel might be dismissed as a bug zapper. But these simple blue panels are designed to save lives…

It is an approach that has proven to be surprisingly effective…

To address the Japanese fear of loitering and vandalism by young riders, some train stations deploy ultrasonic deterrents—small, unobtrusive devices that emit a high-frequency tone. The particular frequency used—17 kilohertz*—can generally only be heard by those under the age of 25. (Older people can’t detect such frequencies, thanks to the age-related hearing loss known as presbycusis.) These devices—the brainchild of a Welsh inventor and also used to fend off loitering teens in the U.S. and Europe—have been enthusiastically adopted in Japan.

Standing outside one of Tokyo Station’s numerous exits on a recent summer day, it was easy to see the effectiveness of this deterrent in action. Weary salarymen and aged obaachan passed under the sonic deterrent without changing pace. Among uniform-clad students, however, the reactions were evident—a suddenly quickened pace, a look of confusion or discomfort, and often a cry of urusai! (Loud!) None appeared to connect the noise to the deterrents placed almost flush in the ceiling panels above.

Much more at the link.

It reminds me a bit of Temple Grandin’s brilliant designs for cattle handling:

I think a lot of people might vote for Trump in 2020…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in part for the entertainment value.

Trump is, among other things, a good comedian with good comic timing. The New York accent doesn’t hurt, either.

And it’s not just comedy, by any means—it’s that Trump isn’t boring. Most politicians, even the better ones, are often very very boring. They drone on. They talk jargon in voices that threaten to become (and often do become) monotonous. They never seem spontaneous. The life seems to have been drained out of them.

It’s interesting, I think, to go back and read a post I wrote in August of 2015, not too long after Trump first became a candidate. I was watching one of his rallies, the first I’d ever seen at the time, and I wrote this:

Trump has mastered not just the “art of the deal” but the art of giving a speech that sounds like ad-libbing stream-of-consciousness but is not…

Trump is a happy warrior, or at least talks like one…How he’ll get around the impediments that stand in the way is unclear, but people don’t want clarity. They like his style. They like his spirit…

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him—although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

That turned out to be prescient, although I never thought he could win the presidency.

Now his opponents seem to know enough to be scared. They used to be contemptuous, and it was no pretense. Now they still act contemptuous, and on a certain level I think many are, although it’s misplaced (“I’m so smart and he’s so dumb!”). But I think that by now they’re all at least somewhat scared, as well they should be. Now they know something of the power of Trump’s appeal. And now they also have to contend with his record of accomplishments as president, too. So even though they have the press 110% on their side, they must know he’s a formidable opponent.

James Comey is trying to do damage control…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and CNN has obligingly given him a Town Hall forum in which to attempt it. Such forums are usually reserved for presidential candidates, and although when last I checked Comey wasn’t running for that office, the field is getting so crowded one can’t be sure.

I watched a few short clips from Comey’s Town Hall and could watch no more. The man simply oozes hypocrisy and weaselly deceptiveness. Example:

“It’s possible” that Comey was a snake in a former life. Many things are “possible”—in fact, just about anything that isn’t impossible is possible. Proving something is impossible seems to be the new standard that Comey (and Mueller, in the obstruction part of his report) seem to be setting for people who are accused of wrongdoing—that is, if their name is “Trump.”

The fact that Comey was once director of the FBI is a chilling thought, one that illustrates not just the Peter Principle but something more ominous.

I saw a few moments of an interview with Rudy Giuliani last night, as well. He was discussing Comey, and he apologized for ever having appointed him US Attorney in NY. Giuliani said something curious, too—that he didn’t know what had changed Comey so much, but something had. I submit that it was two things. The first was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and then an escalation of that syndrome when Trump fired Comey. The second is the corruption that sometimes comes with power.

Heights: fear of falling or urge to leap

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting exploration of that queasy, unsteady feeling many people get when standing close to the edge of a big drop. Some describe it as an urge to jump, but that might just represent a case of crossed and competing signals.

Our fear circuitry, which includes the amygdala and other fast-acting subconscious brain regions, may send an alarm to the prefrontal cortex for interpretation. Your conscious processing, which operates at a slower speed than the fear circuitry, recognizes the alarm signal, but may not know why it was sent.

While your conscious brain would not need to scratch too hard to figure out why your hand recoils from a hot stove, you might be confused why your body automatically pulls back from the edge of a precipice. Because the void is different. You wonder, as Hames explained it: “Why did I back away? I can’t possibly fall. There’s a railing there, so therefore—I wanted to jump.”

Consistent with this theory is the fact that those people most likely to the feel urge to leap (and who’d never considered suicide) also experience more anxiety, including worrying more about their own body reactions. These sensations can include sweating, heart palpitations, dizziness, and shaky knees, all of which are common responses to high places. How you interpret those sensations can mark the difference between triggering panic, if you think “I’m going to die,” or excitement, if you love the rush of a high. “There is a subjective dimension to all of this,” Coelho said, especially when it comes to vestibular signals. “The way you interpret the vestibular system is much more up to you” than the interpretation of sight, because it operates outside of conscious awareness. Those who are most likely to feel the urge to leap also tend to worry more about other life issues, including the fear of going crazy.

These sneaky cell phone apps

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I noticed that my cell phone bill was higher than usual by about ten dollars, and so I called the company. It turned out that a fee for downloading some app had been charged to my account.

The person I spoke to was not allowed to tell me which app it was, and then helpfully offered to expunge the ten dollar charge and put a one cent purchase limit on my account so it wouldn’t happen again. In the future I would have to plug in my credit card information to actually pay for any app that tried to sneak in, which should limit the downloads to those I actually want.

I’ve noticed that sometimes my phone will just be sitting on the counter, supposedly minding its own business, and I’ll see some activity going on. Most of the time I’ve been able to grab the phone and somehow stop the unwanted download, but apparently this time I didn’t catch it in time and it succeeded in invading my phone and charging itself to my account.

It’s all about those apps that come pre-loaded on phones. Apparently not only do Androids have them, but iPhones have them too, just a different set of them. This site refers to the apps as “crapware,” which I guess is as good a name as any, and it tells you how to disable them in some way.

This stuff gives me a headache.