Author Archives: JoleenRayner

Bombshell New York Times Report Reveals Details From Donald Trump’s 1995 Tax Records

by JoleenRayner Posted on October 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The New York Times dropped a bombshell of an investigation Saturday night when it published fragments from Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return.

Tax experts hired by the Times said that the $916 million dollars in operating losses listed by Trump in the 1995 document may have allowed him to avoid paying federal taxes over a possible 18-year period.

A lawyer for Donald Trump threatened the Times with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action,” declaring the publication of the GOP nominee’s records illegal. Trump’s campaign itself responded to the report by issuing a statement that read, in part: “Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”

More detail here:

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.

“He has a vast benefit from his destruction” in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Mr. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Mr. Trump’s: “Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?”

The Times says the documents were mailed to one of its reporters. The envelope’s return address, according to the Times, claimed it was sent from Trump Tower. Each of the pages sent to the newspaper listed the names and social security numbers for Trump and his then-partner, Marla Maples. The Times then verified the documents with Jack Mitnick, who handled Trump’s tax returns at the time.

Trump has continually refused to release his tax returns, and the issue came up again during last Monday’s presidential debate. Trump regularly defends himself by saying that an IRS audit prevents him from releasing the records. (The IRS says Trump is free to make his documents public.)

Read the full report and see the original documents over at The New York Times.

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Bombshell New York Times Report Reveals Details From Donald Trump’s 1995 Tax Records

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

by JoleenRayner Posted on September 19, 2016

Mother Jones

Donald Trump used the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey to amp up his call for profiling of Muslims. “You know, our police are amazing—our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, referring to terrorists. But, he said, “they’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling, and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”

Only a few days after picking up the endorsement of the nation’s largest police union, Trump was, without evidence, making an incendiary accusation about some of his most important supporters—that police are knowingly letting terrorists walk free because they’re too politically correct. (In reality, the Elizabeth, New Jersey, police department that apprehended the alleged bomber was not familiar with the suspect, although the family’s chicken shop had received noise complaints.)

Just as notable is what Trump proposed instead. As an example of what more effective policing would look like, the Republican presidential nominee pointed to Israel. “You know, in Israel they profile,” he said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do.” If a person looks suspicious in Israel, “they will take that person in.” He added, “They’re trying to be politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse.”

There are many components to Israeli-style profiling, but a key aspect is racial profiling. Being of “Arab nationality” is enough to get you flagged by screeners, interrogated, and maybe strip-searched at an Israeli airport. The US State Department’s travel advisory page for Israel even includes a warning about the country’s racial profiling: “Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.” Case in point: Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, was detained and interrogated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2010, despite having just returned from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump, for his part, has previously made clear that he’s interested in profiling Muslims specifically. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he told Yahoo News in November when asked if he’d consider warrantless wiretapping of American Muslims. He added, “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” In that same interview, he declined to rule out creating a database of Muslims in the United States and suggested the government should conduct more surveillance of mosques. He proposed hiring ex-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose department’s “Demographics Unit” spied on select “ancestries of interest” and even infiltrated a Muslim Students Association rafting trip. (For its years of work, Kelly’s Demographics Unit produced a total of zero terrorism indictments and was ultimately shut down as a result of a lawsuit.) Trump even entertained the idea that the government could shut down mosques.

A few weeks later, Trump took his religious profiling several giant steps further, unveiling his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump has never clarified how such a ban would be enforced, but it would by definition entail wide-scale profiling by customs officials. That proposal is still posted on his website. Trump revisited the subject in June, after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said, invoking Israel as an example of a successful program. He has repeatedly cited racial profiling—or fear of being accused of racial profiling—in his discussion of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack, alleging that neighbors of the couple had seen bombs scattered across the floor but not done anything. This was, again, baseless; there is no evidence that anyone ever saw the bombs.

Trump’s positions on many issues have fluctuated wildly. But his solution to threats against Americans has been uncharacteristically consistent, if alarming to many observers: an expanded, unconstitutional police state targeting a religious minority.

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

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Tom’s Kitchen: Farmhouse-Style Roasted Potato and Egg Scramble

by JoleenRayner Posted on May 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the years I spent working on a small organic farm in North Carolina, we’d often spend the wee hours of the morning harvesting a variety of vegetables. One of my favorite crops to pick was potatoes, which required a kind of subterranean treasure hunt. One of us would plunge a pitchfork into the earth and upturn a potato plant, and another, on hands and knees, would quickly snatch the dirt-caked orbs dangling from the roots and place them in a bucket.

Occasionally, a potato would get “speared”—unintentionally stabbed by the fork—making it unmarketable. We’d separate them out, and march them into the kitchen for a post-harvest “second breakfast” of potatoes, just-laid eggs, and any other vegetables on hand. Early-morning harvests generated a fierce hunger, and nothing satisfied it quite like these just-dug treasures roasted in a hot oven—sweet, creamy, and sumptuous, justifying their name in French: pomme de terre, or apple of the earth.

Now when I go the the farmers market, I can never resist “new” potatoes, which are just potatoes that haven’t been stored long. Recently, at the stand of an excellent Austin farm called Green Gate, I spied some purple potatoes—which are not only rich in health-giving phytochemicals, but also deliver an extra dose of earthy flavor. I grabbed a couple handfuls, came home, and tried to recapture that farmhouse magic.

Note: You can omit the eggs and just use the below recipe as a guide for roasting potatoes.

Farmhouse-Style Roasted Potato and Egg Scramble
Serves two

Ingredients
About .75 pounds new potatoes, preferably blue or purple, chopped into bite-sized pieces
Olive oil
Sea salt
1-2 shallots, minced
3-4 eggs from pastured chickens
A few slices of decent cheese—I used Organic Valley “Grassmilk” raw cheddar
Some coarsely chopped herbs, for garnish. (I used cilantro, but parsley, chives, and even arugula would all work great.)

Adjust your oven’s top rack to between 6-8 inches below the broiler (you’ll be finishing the potatoes under the broiler). Turn the oven to 400 degrees F and insert a large cast-iron or other heavy-bottomed, over-proof skillet. Your going to want to cover it, so find an oven-proof cover that will work with the pan before proceeding.

Dab the chopped potatoes dry with a towel. When the oven comes to temperature, remove the skillet. Proceed with caution: It will be blisteringly hot. Add enough oil to cover the bottom, and drop in the potatoes along with a good pinch of salt. Using a spatula, toss the potatoes around in the pan until they are well-coated in oil. Cover the skillet and return it to the oven. The cover will help the potatoes cook faster by essentially steaming them in their own moisture.

While the potatoes are cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl, along with a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper, and whisk them together with a fork until the yolks and whites are just combined.

Check the potatoes every ten minutes or so by plunging a fork into one of the larger pieces. When the fork penetrates easily, it’s time to remove the skillet’s cover, turn off the oven’s bake function, and turn the broiler on to its highest setting. Place the skillet under the broiler and cooking, checking often, until they’re brown and crisp on one side. Flip them with a spatula, and brown/crisp them on the other. Remove the skillet, placing it on the stove top. Turn off the broiler and shut the oven door.

Add the chopped shallots to the pan along with a small glug of oil, tossing it all with a spatula. The pan will still be sizzling hot, and will cook the shallots. When the sizzling has calmed down, turn the heat to low and carefully pour the mixed eggs over the potatoes, covering the skillet bottom with the eggs. When the edges have set, flip the eggs with a spatula. Lay the cheese slices onto the eggs, and return the skillet to the still-hot oven until the cheese has just melted—a couple of minutes.

Serve with a green salad, toast, and white wine for dinner, or tortillas and coffee for breakfast.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Farmhouse-Style Roasted Potato and Egg Scramble

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Chris Christie Takes Blowhardism on the Road

by JoleenRayner Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Being a blowhard has worked well for Chris Christie at home, so it’s no surprise that he endorses blowhardism as a foreign policy too. In a speech on Sunday, he assured everyone that a Christie administration would….would…..well, something:

In Sunday’s speech, with rhetoric reminiscent of President Bush’s first speeches after 9/11, the governor made a moralistic case for clearly distinguishing between “good” allies and “evil” enemies.

….Though Christie offered few specifics, he particularly trashed Obama’s policies on Russia, Syria, and Iran. “We see Russian activism once again rearing its head in the world, we see an America that backed away from a commitment made by the president of the United States in Syria, we see a country, our country, permitting even a thought of a terrorist state like Iran having nuclear capability,” he said. “Here’s something that should not be up for debate, that once you draw that red line, you enforce it — because if you don’t, America’s credibility will be at stake and will be at risk all over the world.”

There should be a constitutional amendment or something banning speeches like this unless you’re willing to explain, in some detail, exactly what you would have done instead. Cut and run, like Christie’s hero Ronald Reagan did in Beirut? Lie your way into a disastrous war like his hero George Bush did? Or what? I’m really tired of hearing nonsense about how we should have “supported” one side or another in Egypt or Syria or Ukraine. Or how we should have sent heavy arms over, even though no one was trained to use them and in some cases we didn’t even have anyone reliable to send them too. Or that somehow just giving another “evil empire” speech would have sent the mullahs screaming into the night.

We didn’t win the Cold War because Reagan gave some speeches. We won because of low oil prices, a foolish war in Afghanistan, poor harvests, and the effective bankruptcy of the Soviet Union. We’re not going to win any of these other conflicts with bluster either. So let’s hear it. Is Christie planning a military strike against Iran? Troops on the ground in Syria? Cruise missile strikes against Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border? If Christie doesn’t have the guts to say this stuff outright, he should keep his bluster to himself. Without specifics, this is just laughable schoolyard bravado.

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Chris Christie Takes Blowhardism on the Road

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