DL Open Thread: Sunday, May 12, 2024

The Late, Great Hannibal Lecter.  More proof irony is dead:

Silence of the Lambs. Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,”  as this poor doctor walked by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter…”

He’s totally gone daddy gone.  ‘Jimmy Connors was the worst President’.  ‘Bruce Springsteen voted for him’.  The event was held in Wildwood, NJ, because the public officials who invited him are, like Trump, under indictment.  Pardons all around.

Incontinence and incoherence.  Perhaps our next President.

Can He Pardon Himself For Tax Liabilities?  Yes, looks like he took the same tax break twice, which is one too many:

Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.

The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.

But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.

Serious question: Has Trump ever done a single thing in his life because it was the right thing to do?

Loser Pollster Says Biden Doing It All Wrong.  Needs to move to the center, he says, to attract Haley voters.  Yes. Hillary’s pollster:

Unfortunately, Mr. Biden is not reaching out to moderate voters with policy ideas or a strong campaign message. He is not showing clear evidence of bringing in large numbers of swing voters in the battleground states at this point. Those swing voters look for fiscal restraint without tax increases, climate policies that still give people a choice of cars and fuels and immigration policies that are compassionate to those who are here but close the borders. The balanced budget remains one of the single strongest measures that swing and other voters want. Bill Clinton’s efforts to balance the budget set off the revolution that resulted in an eight-point win even with third party candidates in 1996 and catapulted his job approval ratings to above 70 percent. Instead of pivoting to the center when talking to 32 million people tuned in to his State of the Union address, Mr. Biden doubled down on his base strategy with hits like class warfare attacks on the rich and big corporations, big tax increases, student loan giveaways and further expansions of social programs despite a deficit of more than $1.1 trillion.

Jee-zus. Can’t the Times find someone who perhaps doesn’t summer in Chautauqua to provide something worth reading?

RIP: Roger Corman.  Notorious and beloved for his penny-pinching:

It became something of a joke in the film industry that Corman could negotiate a contract from a public phone, shoot the film in the phone box and pay for it with the coins in the change slot.

What do you want to talk about?