Author Archives: DaleneX56466

A man drove a truck through a crowd of protesters as tensions over the Dakota Access pipeline escalate.

by DaleneX56466 Posted on October 11, 2016

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton appeared side-by-side in a Miami campaign stop that framed the climate-change challenge in an unusually optimistic light.

“Climate change is real. It’s urgent. And America can take the lead in the world in addressing it,” Clinton said. She focused on the U.S.’s capacity to lead the world in a climate deal and as a clean energy superpower in a speech that mostly rehashed familiar policy territory.

Clinton ran down her existing proposals on infrastructure, rooftop solar, energy efficiency, and more, though she omitted the more controversial subjects, like what to do about pipeline permits, that have dogged her campaign.

Though Clinton and Gore largely framed climate change as a challenge Americans must rise to, they didn’t miss an opportunity to jab at climate deniers.

“Our next president will either step up our efforts … or we will be dragged backwards and our whole future will be put at risk,” Clinton said.

Besides Donald Trump, Florida’s resident climate deniers Marco Rubio and Rick Scott got special shoutouts.

“The world is on the cusp of either building on the progress of solving the climate crisis or stepping back … and letting the big polluters call the shots,” Gore said.

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A man drove a truck through a crowd of protesters as tensions over the Dakota Access pipeline escalate.

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Weekend Catch-Up: How Did Donald Trump Lose $916 Million?

by DaleneX56466 Posted on October 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Surprisingly, I had some real-life stuff to attend to this weekend, which means I’ve only just caught up on the latest Trump meltdown. I might as well share it with you, since maybe a few other people need to catch up too.

On Saturday, the New York Times published copies of the first page of Donald Trump’s 1995 state tax returns from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. They show that Trump declared a net operating loss that year of $916 million—about $1.5 billion in today’s dollars. Questions abounded:

Where did the tax returns come from? They were sent to the Times anonymously, so no one knows. But rumors swirled around Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife, who might have gotten them as part of her divorce proceedings in 1999.
Did Trump really lose that much money in a single year? It seems all but impossible. Among millionaires who declared losses in 1995, the average amount was $614 thousand.
It seems likely, then, that Trump’s gargantuan loss was basically an accounting fiction of some kind. John Hempton, an Australian hedge fund manager and former expert on tax avoidance for the Australian Treasury, has a theory that Trump may have “parked” the debt from his bankruptcies with a dummy party offshore, where it was never collected but never officially forgiven. This would allow him to declare $916 million in losses even though he never truly lost anything.
What was the point of all this? Most likely, the Times speculates, it was used as a tax loss carry forward, which allowed Trump to declare zero income—and thus pay zero taxes—for as long as 18 years.

So how did Team Trump respond to this? Notably, nobody denied anything. Rudy Giuliani declared that Trump was an “absolute genius.” Chris Christie also applauded Trump’s genius, and remarked improbably that this was a “very good story” for Trump. Trump himself said nothing except that he had paid lots of other kinds of taxes, and that yes, he is a genius:

Needless to say, Trump knows nothing about tax law at all. He has accountants and tax advisors who do all this stuff for him. Nonetheless, the main message from Trumpville is that Donald Trump is a genius.

Elsewhere, reaction was a wee bit more restrained. It turns out that lots of people think that billionaires probably ought to pay income tax. All of us little people have to, after all.

So what’s next? Well, when the New York Times was asked if they have any more of Trump’s tax returns, they answered “No comment.” That might mean there’s more to come. Next Sunday’s debate should be fun, shouldn’t it?

POSTSCRIPT: Team Trump is trying to bury this story by directing all their attention to Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades; suggesting that maybe Hillary has cheated on Bill; and blathering about Hillary being mean to the women who accused Bill of misdeeds in the 90s. It’s not working. Nobody really cares much about this stuff anymore, and even the small interest that remains was wiped out by the tax story.

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Weekend Catch-Up: How Did Donald Trump Lose $916 Million?

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Are Young Women Complacent About Abortion Rights?

by DaleneX56466 Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide?

Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.

I won’t even pretend that I understand this answer. Complacency about what? Abortion? Politics in general? And what does this have to do with Hillary Clinton?

Beats me. But it doesn’t really matter. Everyone assumes that DWS was talking about complacency toward abortion rights, and young feminists aren’t happy about her sweeping criticism of an entire generation. Generally speaking, though, the response has been that there are plenty of young women who work hard on abortion rights these days, which is certainly true. But DWS isn’t denying that. What she’s saying is that there are fewer young women today working hard on abortion rights. Or perhaps that they don’t have as much passion as they used to have.

That got me curious. Is this true? Is there any evidence for it? Unfortunately, I couldn’t really figure out how you might measure it. I doubt there’s any historical data on the number of abortion activists broken up by age and gender. There’s plenty of poll data on attitudes toward abortion, but that doesn’t help—and attitudes haven’t changed a lot anyway. Is there any kind of survey data (broken up by age and gender) that shows how strongly people feel about abortion rights? Or how often it’s a significant factor in voting? Not that I could find.

This isn’t really very important, and I suppose someone could just ask Wasserman Schultz to explain what she meant. But I’m still curious: is there any data at all that might point in one direction or another when it comes to generational attitudes toward abortion activism? Anyone have any ideas?

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Are Young Women Complacent About Abortion Rights?

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