Search Results for 'Open letter to John'

Open Thread for Monday, October 3, 2016

Josh Marshall thinks there is more, much more on the horizon with Donald and his taxes (or lack thereof).

After thinking over the Times revelation, I wonder whether there’s a much, much bigger story here that the Times didn’t put together or more likely did see but couldn’t prove. In any case, here’s what I’m thinking.

We’ve known for years that the collapse of Trump’s debt ridden casino empire in Atlantic City almost destroyed him more than two decades ago. He was able to wriggle through by a number of angles and connivances. But one of the biggest was that he was able to convince his lenders that they’d be even worse off if he was cleaned out and removed from the picture entirely. Convincing them that he was in essence too big or too important to fail, they took major ‘haircuts’ (losses) that allowed him to survive. He got others to absorb the impact of the losses, repackaged other parts and put them through bankruptcy, etc.

The key question is how much of the Atlantic City losses did Trump absorb in real terms? How much of those losses were forgiven or written off formally? And perhaps most importantly, how much of those losses were squirreled away or ‘parked’ in places which effectively put them in a sort of limbo or suspended animation – neither truly absorbed nor forgiven?

Here’s where the Times revelation comes into play.

If you sustain real capital losses, you can apply those losses to cancel out future income/profits and reduce your tax liability. But if your losses are canceled out by debt forgiveness, the debt forgiveness is counted as income. That cancels out the losses that would provide you with the tax benefit. In other words, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

At the end of this campaign, more likely than not, Donald Trump will be arrested for tax evasion on hundreds of millions of dollars of income. And then he will be locked up.

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Sunday Open Thread [9.4.2016]

Kevin Drum:

Have you read the entire FBI report on their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices? No? Well, I have, because that’s the kind of professional I am. And I’m going to provide you with all the most interesting excerpts. […]

If you read the entire report, you’ll find bits and pieces that might show poor judgment on Hillary’s part. The initial decision to use one email device is the obvious one, something that Hillary has acknowledged repeatedly. Another—maybe—is her staff’s view of what was safe to send over unclassified email. But this is very fuzzy. It could be that her staff knew exactly what it was doing, and it’s the subsequent classification authorities who are wrong. This is something that it’s impossible to judge since none of us will ever see the emails in question.

That said, this report is pretty much an almost complete exoneration of Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t prohibited from using a personal device or a personal email account, and others at state did it routinely. She’s told the truth all along about why she did it. Colin Powell did indeed advise her about using personal email shortly after she took office, but she chose to follow the rules rather than skirt them, as Powell did. She didn’t take her BlackBerry into her office. She communicated with only a very select group of 13 people. She took no part in deciding which emails were personal before handing them over to State. She had nothing to do with erasing information on the PRN server. That was a screw-up on PRN’s end. She and her staff all believed at the time that they were careful not to conduct sensitive conversations over unclassified email systems. And there’s no evidence that her server was ever hacked.

There’s remarkably little here. If you nonetheless believe that it’s enough to disqualify Hillary from the presidency, that’s fine. I have no quarrel with you. But if the FBI is to be believed, it’s all pretty small beer.

Read the whole piece now. He goes through the report in thorough detail.

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Saturday Open Thread [8.27.16]

NBC News has tracked down Dr. Harold Bornstein, the doctor who signed the completely bizarre letter of health for Donald Trump. It turns out that Dr. Harold Bornstein does exist, and he is like a character out of the Sopranos or Breaking Bad, who treats patients in the back of a strip club. He wrote the letter in 5 minutes while a Trump limousine was waiting outside to pick it up.

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Thursday Open Thread [8.18.16]

Remember Reagan Democrats? They were conservative working class whites who abandoned the Democratic Party for Reagan. We may be now witnessing the creation of Hillary Republicans, in that we are seeing college educated moderate whites who for some reason have long identified as Republicans now abandoning the GOP for Hillary. Nancy LeTourneau:

First of all, Donald Trump’s presidential nomination didn’t simply spring up out of whole cloth. As I pointed out yesterday, it has it’s roots in the Republican’s Southern Strategy, combined with their recent use of racism and nativism to stir up their efforts to de-legitimize the presidency of Barack Obama. The Republican embrace of post-policy paved the way for the candidacy of Donald Trump. Will they continue that strategy after he loses? That remains to be seen. But they’ve stirred up his supporters – who aren’t likely to go away once this election is over. In other words, the great Republican divide will still be with us after November. How that will affect the party affiliation of white college-educated voters is something to keep an eye on.

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Tuesday Open Thread [8.16.16]

Nate Cohn: “The Upshot’s model gives Mrs. Clinton an 88 percent chance of winning. It’s about the same probability of hitting a field goal from the 20-yard line.”

“That’s a pretty good way to think about it. If Mrs. Clinton ultimately wins, we will probably look back and say she had more or less already won it by this point. If she loses, these next two months will be talked about for decades.”

“The game-winning field-goal analogy has one big weakness: She may win this by a lot more than a field goal.”

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