Biden Should Not Debate The Clown Unless He Provides His Tax Records...

News & Politics
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[SIZE=7]Biden’s Big-Tent Strategy Seems to Be Working[/SIZE]

Biden’s Presidential campaign has successfully navigated at least three significant political challenges since March.

Since capturing the Democratic nomination, Biden has repeatedly acknowledged, implicitly and explicitly, that, for many Americans, the 2020 election is mainly about getting rid of his opponent. This dynamic was clear during the primaries when a majority of Democrats told pollsters that their top priority was selecting someone who could defeat Trump. It’s evident today in the endorsements that the former Vice-President has picked up, from groups ranging from the Lincoln Project, an organization of Never Trump Republicans that are running ads attacking the President and supporting Biden, to Indivisible, a group of progressive activists whose home page blares, “beat trump and save democracy.”

To the members of these groups, and to many other Americans, Biden’s role is to serve as a human lever to pry a disastrous President out of the White House. Defying the concerns of some political professionals who watched his primary campaign, the former Vice-President is shaping up to be an effective crowbar. Since wrapping up the nomination, in March, he and his campaign team have successfully navigated at least three significant political challenges.

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The first was uniting the Democratic Party after a chaotic primary season. To this end, Biden has reached out to the Party’s progressive wing and tacked to the left in some of his own policy proposals. He created a Unity Task Force—including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other supporters of Bernie Sanders—that released a lengthy set of recommendations earlier this month. Biden now supports Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan, which would make it easier for financially strapped people to discharge their debts. He has put forward a proposal to insure free tuition for many students at public colleges, modeled on an earlier Sanders plan. His climate-change strategy sets a target of 2035 for the creation of a zero-emissions power grid, which is just five years later than the deadline laid out in the Green New Deal. Some Sanders supporters are still scornful of Biden, but there has been no repeat of the internecine conflict that occurred in 2016.

The second task facing Biden was to fashion a coherent response to the tumultuous events of 2020. That’s where his Build Back Better plan comes in. The members of his policy team have worked on the assumption that the coronavirus-stricken economy will need substantial financial support for years. They think that this presents an opportunity to make it greener, more worker-friendly, and more racially inclusive. Biden’s proposals include spending two trillion dollars on projects to move beyond fossil fuels; seven hundred and seventy-five billion dollars on expanding care for preschoolers and the elderly; and a hundred and fifty billion dollars on supporting small, minority-owned businesses. He’s also promised to insure that forty percent of the investment in green-energy infrastructure benefits disadvantaged communities, to expand rent subsidies for low-income households, to facilitate labor-union organizing, and to introduce a national minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour.

The third challenge that Biden faced was to avoid giving Trump an easy target. The pandemic has made the dodging part easier. Hunkered down in Wilmington, Biden largely has left the President to dig his own hole—which he has done, ably. But Biden has also reached out to Trump Country. The first of his Build Back Better speeches was delivered in Rust Belt Pennsylvania: it included calls to restore American manufacturing and “buy American.” As well as adopting some of the languages of economic nationalism, Biden has rejected certain progressive proposals, such as defunding the police and enforcing a complete ban on fracking, that might alienate moderate whites in battleground states.

None of this means that Biden is a lock for the Oval Office. Between now and November 3rd, something could conceivably shift the momentum against him, such as a Vice-Presidential pick that backfires, a major slipup in the debates, or a surprising economic upturn. Right now, though, the challenger’s strategy of keeping the focus on the incumbent and pitching a broad tent that accommodates anyone who wants to see the back of Trump is working well.

[I]John Cassidy[/I] has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com.

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Trump’s all-out war on mail voting is backfiring on him in battleground states.

New private polling shared first with POLITICO showed that Republicans have become overwhelmingly concerned about mail balloting, which Trump has claimed, without evidence, will lead to widespread voter fraud. A potentially decisive slice of Trump’s battleground-state base — 15 percent of Trump voters in Florida, 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 10 percent in Michigan — said that getting a ballot in the mail would make them less likely to vote in November.
Trump won each of those states by a thin margin in 2016, and less than 1 percent of Joe Biden voters said getting a ballot mailed to them would make them less likely to vote. Overall, 53 percent of voters in Florida and about half in Michigan and Pennsylvania expressed health concerns about casting their ballots in person and prefer voting by mail in November.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHKMV_3D3QE:5

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The poll is part of a late flurry of research trying to gauge swing-state voter attitudes as the coronavirus accelerates the trend of more and more voters casting their ballots by mail. While there are concerns that the U.S. Postal Service may not be able to handle the crush of ballots, some Republicans fear that Trump’s regular fulminations against mail voting will depress GOP turnout in the fall. He has repeated baseless claims of widespread fraud associated with mail voting, and late last week the president floated the idea of delaying the election because of it, which he does not have the constitutional authority to do.
“He’s sowing the seeds of his own downfall with his rhetoric around vote by mail,” said Katie Merrill, a Democratic strategist whose consulting firm, BaughmanMerrill, commissioned the polling by FM3 Research, a respected outfit that polls for a range of clients including Democratic campaigns and municipal governments. “It really was like President Trump looked at the crosstabs of our poll when he tweeted. He tweeted exactly to his base what they are thinking.”
Large majorities of the swing-state voters expressed concerns about their health, with 70 percent viewing the pandemic as an “extremely” or “very serious” problem. Trump’s supporters skew older than Biden’s, including people who believe their health is at risk. Because of this, pollster Dave Metz said it’s more likely that the president’s supporters shy away from going to the polls in person, particularly if state and local health officials issue warnings against doing so.
“He probably has more to lose in that scenario,” Metz said of Trump.
Mail voting, which has been around for decades, had traditionally been viewed as a non-ideological issue in several states.
“I think when he talks about an 80 percent issue, where 80 people of the people are [for an expanded vote by mail], of course, it’s gonna hurt Republicans down the ballot,” said former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination and has since voiced support for Biden. Weld wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post begging Republicans to ignore the president on mail voting.
Conservative campaign operatives have also worried that the president’s dismissal of the method will hurt their programs to encourage voters to take advantage of the option, allowing Democrats to build up a big lead. There are early signs that that is coming to pass: In Florida, 302,000 more Democrats have enrolled in the state’s vote-by-mail program than Republicans.
And if nothing else, Republicans should embrace mail-in voting for their own political futures, argued Kevin Kosar, the vice president of research partnerships at the free-market think tank R Street. “There’s no obvious Plan B, other than being able to receive ballots via mail and either drop them by mail or return them to drop boxes.”
Despite frequent criticism from Trump, 85 percent of voters in the three swing states view the Postal Service favorably, the polls found.
Merrill and Metz told POLITICO they conducted the three surveys to get a sense of the landscape around mail balloting because the country is in uncharted territory with the pandemic. But they also want to help set realistic expectations around the timing of election results, including anticipated post-Election Day reporting delays associated with mail vote counting.
On the question of timing, the poll found massive gulfs between the two parties in the three states. Biden voters by a margin of 93 percent to 4 percent say they are willing to wait for delayed results if it means more people could vote by mail. Trump voters said they want the results as soon as possible, 75 percent to 13 percent, according to the survey.
Undecided voters’ attitudes more closely mirrored Biden supporters. Sixty percent of them said they were okay with waiting for results, versus 24 percent who said they wanted immediate results.
The poll was conducted from June 30 to July 20 with an online sample of 2,596 likely voters drawn from voter registration files. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.9 percent.

All three states polled allow for no-excuse absentee voting, meaning any voter can request an absentee ballot, regardless of their age, health or where they’ll physically be in their county on Election Day.
None of the states have what’s typically referred to as universal vote-by-mail, in which all registered voters are mailed a ballot, regardless of if they requested one or not. Only five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington — do so as a regular practice. Two more states — California and Vermont, along with Washington, D.C. — have announced plans to mail ballots to voters due to the pandemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ME3pRyR9cg:4

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Most states in America offer no-excuse absentee voting. Ahead of the November election, 42 states and the District of Columbia will, at a minimum, effectively allow for no-excuse absentee voting. The vast majority of Americans will have a mail-in option available to them, should they choose to use it.
Election experts also say that the term vote-by-mail can be a misnomer for voters. Voters often have the option to return their ballots at a dropbox or to their clerk, instead of through the postal service, and in-person voting options are also usually offered even in municipalities that mail all voters a ballot.
And this year, amid the coronavirus, more states are making it easier to request ballots than they have in the past.
In late May, for example, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, announced that she would mail request forms for ballots to all voters in the state for the November election. Trump was furious about Benson’s decision and threatened to cut federal funding for the state, though he did not follow through.
Democrats in the FM3 Research poll were far more likely to say receiving a ballot in the mail would make them more likely to vote, 53 percent compared with 21 percent of Republicans. Some 35 percent of independents would be more likely, it found.
“If you can’t think about it for the greater good, at least think about it for your own political survival,” said Kosar, the think tank researcher. “Because having a Wisconsin-type mess, having people have to stand in line, having you — the people’s representatives — blamed for a sudden spike in COVID cases … Do you want any of that on you as an elected official?
“I would hope not. Because that’s what’s going to happen,” he added. “There will be retribution for badly run elections.”

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Jonathan Swan just put on a clinic on how to interview Trump. This video is Terrifying to watch… o_O


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

For the second time in a month, Trump’s attempt to sit down for an interview with a journalist willing to challenge him ended in disaster.
Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios began with him telling a dizzying string of lies about his coronavirus response and the state of the pandemic in the country. It ended with Trump making the death of civil rights leader John Lewis about himself. It didn’t go any better in between.
Over the course of 37 minutes, Swan repeatedly exposed Trump’s inability to respond to the most basic of follow-up questions.
Trump’s difficulty with push-back is often concealed when he answers questions besides a loud helicopter or in the friendly confines of Sean Hannity’s show. But the Swan interview, which came out just two weeks after Trump’s similarly disastrous performance on Chris Wallace’s show, highlighted the degree to which Trump is unable to defend his record in the face of even mildly challenging questions.

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Perhaps the most terrifying part of the interview came early on when Swan peppered Trump with a string of questions about why he isn’t doing more to fight the coronavirus and why the virus has hit the US so much harder than other comparable countries.
Asked how he can say the pandemic is under control when roughly 1,000 Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, Trump said, remarkably, that “it is what it is.”
“They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is. … It’s under control as much as you can control it.”

On the topic of America’s struggles with coronavirus testing, including long wait times for test results that render testing almost worthless, Trump resorted to making stuff up.
“There are those that say you can’t test too much. You know that?” Trump said at one point.
“Who says that?” Swan responded.
“Read the manuals. Read the books,” answered Trump.
“What books?” Swan challenged, but no answer was forthcoming. Instead, Trump said that “when I took over we didn’t even have a test” — as if the Obama administration was supposed to develop a test for a virus that didn’t exist until nearly three years after Trump’s inauguration.

A few minutes later, just as he did on Wallace’s show, Trump waved around pieces of paper with charts and graphs in an unconvincing effort to make it seem as though the US coronavirus death toll of more than 150,000 isn’t as bad as it seems.
“Right here, the United States is lowest in … numerous categories … ah, we’re lower than the world,” Trump stammered, which prompted Swan to respond, incredulously, “lower than the world? In what?”

“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan continued. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc. … Look at South Korea: 50 million population, 300 deaths.”
Trump responded by suggesting South Korea is faking its numbers. But when Swan challenged him on that point, Trump quickly changed the topic back to his pieces of paper.
“Here’s one right here. You take the number of cases. No, look. We’re last. Meaning we’re first,” Trump said.
“I mean, 1,000 Americans die a day,” Swan responded. “If hospital rates were going down and deaths were going down, I’d say terrific, you deserve to be praised for testing. But they’re all going up!
Watch the exchange:

In the minutes that followed, Trump failed to explain the contradiction between his claims about being a voracious consumer of intelligence reports and that he was never informed about intelligence that Russia was offering bounties for US troops in Afghanistan that was reportedly in said briefs. “I read a lot. I comprehend extraordinarily well. Probably better than anybody you’ve interviewed in a long time,” the president claimed.
He also revealed total confusion about the difference between absentee and mail-in voting, struggled to explain why he recently extended his well-wishes to accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (“Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well, I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck.”), and dismissed video footage of federal law enforcement officials using a baton to beat a Navy veteran who was protesting in Portland.

“I think that actually, antifa should be investigated, not the law enforcement,” Trump said.
[SIZE=5]Trump’s race relations remarks pour fuel on the fire[/SIZE]
But perhaps Trump’s most tone-deaf remarks were reserved for the end when Swan asked him a string of questions about racial inequalities and his reaction to the death of John Lewis.
Presented with a statistic that succinctly illustrates systemic racism in the country — “Why do you think Black men are two and half times more likely to be killed by police than white men?” Swan asked — Trump dodged with an equivalency.

“I do know this: that police have killed many white people also,” he said.
After Trump claimed he’s done “more for the Black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, whether you like it or not,” Swan asked him: “You believe you did more than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act?”
“How has it worked out?” Trump responded. “If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did. How has it worked out?”
The interview closed with what should’ve been a softball — “How do you think history will remember John Lewis?” Swan asked. But instead of paying lip service to Lewis’s record as a Civil Rights icon, Trump denigrated him for the pettiest of reasons.
“I really don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration,” Trump said.
“Taking your relationship with him out of it, do you find his story impressive, what he’s done for this country?” Swan followed up.
“He was a person that devoted a lot of energy and a lot of heart to civil rights. But there were many others also,” Trump demurred.

The interview was recorded last Tuesday and aired Monday evening on Axios’s HBO show. In a sign of how it went, Trump — who regularly promotes softball interviews he does with the Hannitys of the world in the hope of getting as many people as possible to tune in — didn’t mention it on Twitter or elsewhere.

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/4/21354055/trump-axios-interview-jonathan-swan

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I still wish Biden doesn’t yield to debates, and many people agree with me…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday doubled down on her argument that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should not debate President Trump, claiming the Republican incumbent and his “henchmen” have no “fidelity” to facts or the truth.

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Asked during an interview on “Morning on CBS” whether she still believed the former vice president should skip the three scheduled debates, Pelosi said:
“Oh, I do. Not that I don’t think he’ll be excellent. I just think that the president has no fidelity to fact or truth and,
actually in his comments the last few days, no fidelity to the Constitution of the United States… He and his henchmen
are a danger, with their comments, are a danger to our democracy. So I don’t want to give him - I mean, why bother?
He doesn’t tell the truth.”

Pelosi first suggested at the end of August that Biden should cancel his debates with Trump, saying she didn’t want the forums to become an “exercise in skullduggery.”
“I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States,” she said at the time.
“Now I know that the Biden campaign thinks in a different way about this.”

Biden and his campaign rejected the proposal.

“As long as the commission continues down the straight and narrow as they have, I’m going to debate him,” he said.
“I’m going to be a fact-check on the floor while I’m debating him.”

The first debate, which will be hosted in Cleveland, Ohio, by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, is scheduled to take place Tuesday, Sept. 29.

According to an aggregate of polls by RealClearPolitics, Biden leads Trump nationally by more than six percentage points.

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We finally get a glimpse of The Clown’s taxes before the debate… Trump’s taxes have been largely a mystery since he first ran for office. During the 2016 campaign, the then-candidate broke with presidential election norms and refused to produce his tax returns for public review. They have remained private since he took office.

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As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses, and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million. Trump has consistently refused to release his taxes, departing from standard practice for presidential candidates, saying they are under audit.
The expansive Times report paints a picture of a businessman who was struggling to keep his businesses afloat and was reporting millions in losses even as he was campaigning for President and boasting about his financial success. The tax information obtained by the Times also reveals Trump has been fighting the IRS for years over whether losses he claimed should have resulted in a nearly $73 million refund.

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2020/08/06/trump-boom-bust/97dcf5b16221e9770ad8236ba1c27c1ad21ce329/bust-narrow.jpg
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians, and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

Trump himself denied the Times’s reporting during a press conference on Sunday, calling the story “totally fake news.”
“The IRS does not treat me well. They treat me like the Tea Party,” he continued referring to claims from GOP figures that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted GOP-leaning groups during the Obama administration.
The Times’s reporting revealed that the president faces payments on more than $300 million in loans that will become due in the next few years, while revenue from his time hosting “The Apprentice” on NBC has largely dried up and he has largely sold his stock portfolio.
Trump reportedly made hundreds of millions from his work and related licensing on “The Apprentice" over the years, which was apparently invested back into Trump Organization businesses. But the Times analysis of Trump’s finances finds those businesses have continued to lose millions, resulting in Trump avoiding payments on income taxes while earning millions from “The Apprentice” due to losses at other businesses.
The Times reports that Trump’s tax records show $47.4 million in losses in 2018, despite Trump announcing in a financial disclosure that he made at least $434.9 million. Other details revealed by the Times include that the Miss Universe pageant was most profitable under Trump and generated $2.3 million for him as a co-owner of the pageant.

Summary:

Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes for the years 2016 and 2017, as he successfully ran his 2016 campaign for president and began his first term as president of the United States, according to tax records obtained by The New York Times, revealed Sunday in a report that claims Trump spent years avoiding paying any federal income taxes because he lost more money than he made.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the press prior to his departure from the White …GETTY IMAGES

[SIZE=6]KEY FACTS[/SIZE]
Before 2016, Trump did not pay any income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years, according to [I]The New York Times[/I].
The New York Times claims it has obtained tax data dating back almost two decades and covering hundreds of companies that make up the president’s business empire.
According to The New York Times, most of Trump’s “core enterprises,” like his golf courses, report losing millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars a year.
Since 2000, Trump has reported $315.6 million in losses from his golf courses, while his Washington hotel reported over $55 million in losses through 2018, according to the records, just two years after the hotel had opened.
Trump denied the information in the report during a news conference Sunday.
The collection of records do not show any previously unknown financial ties to Russia or its president, Vladimir Putin, nor does it reveal any more information about a $130,000 non-disclosure agreement payment to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had an affair, with the payment being the focus of the Manhattan district attorney’s probe into Trump’s tax history.
Additionally, the Times reported Sunday that Trump’s tax information reveals specific examples of the potential conflicts of interests between the President’s business with his position.
The President has collected an additional $5 million a year at Mar-a-Lago since 2015 from new members. A roofing material manufacturer GAF spent at least $1.5 million in 2018 at Trump’s Doral golf course near Miami while its industry was lobbying the government to roll back federal regulations, according to the Times.
It also found that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid more than $397,000 to Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel in 2017.
The Times reported that in Trump’s first two years in office, he has collected $73 million in revenue overseas, with much of that coming from his golf courses but some coming from licensing deals in countries, including the Philippines, India, and Turkey.
The Times said all of the information obtained was “provided by sources with legal access to it.”
A previous New York Times investigation published in 2018 reported that Trump had helped “his parents dodge taxes” in the 1990s, including “instances of outright fraud” that allowed him to amass a fortune from them
Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, starting at the age of 3.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

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