“Trump’s Not Running For Vice President”: Trump’s New Line; Tax Returns From Thee, Not From Me
About four years ago at this time, Mitt Romney ran into a bit of trouble. He insisted on keeping his tax returns hidden, which was a problem made more acute when the Republican asked potential running mates to turn over their returns from the previous 10 years.
Apparently, Team Romney believed a thorough examination of a national candidate’s record meant a close review of tax materials – even while Romney said American voters couldn’t make a comparable examination of his own record.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Candidates hoping to earn a spot as Donald Trump’s running mate are reportedly expected to submit their tax returns to the campaign, even though the presumptive GOP nominee has said he has no immediate plans to make his own taxes public.
NBC’s Katy Tur reported Wednesday that all vice presidential hopefuls would be required to submit their returns as a standard part of the vetting process.
When NBC’s Katy Tur asked a Trump campaign source about the apparent hypocrisy, the source responded, “Trump’s not running for vice president.”
That’s cute, I suppose, but it only reinforces the absurdity of the candidate’s posture. The idea that disclosure and transparency requirements should be tougher for a vice presidential candidate than a presidential candidate is tough to defend.
Making matters worse, with each passing day, new questions arise about Trump’s finances. USA Today reported this morning that a fresh analysis found Trump’s businesses “have been involved in at least 100 lawsuits and other disputes related to unpaid taxes or how much tax his businesses owe.”
Trump’s companies have been engaged in battles over taxes almost every year from the late 1980s until as recently as March, the analysis of court cases, property records, and other documents across the country shows. At least five Trump companies were issued warrants totaling more than $13,000 for late or unpaid taxes in New York state just since Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, according to state records.
This spring, as Trump flew to campaign rallies around the country aboard his trademark private jet, the state of New York filed a tax warrant to try to collect $8,578 in unpaid taxes from the Trump-owned company that owns the Boeing 757. The company has since paid that tax bill.
It makes it that much more difficult for the candidate and his team to suggest his tax documents are a meaningless distraction.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, released a new video yesterday, hoping to maintain interest in the story, and speculating about the kinds of things Trump may be hiding while keeping his tax returns under wraps.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 19, 2016
“Trump Wants To Play Nice With Kim Jong Un”: What Does Trump Have That North Korea Wants?
Donald Trump has reprised his willingness to engage with autocrats. According to an exclusive interview with Reuters yesterday, Trump said he would be willing to speak to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the latest in a line of positive comments about strongmen around the world.
“I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him,” said the likely Republican nominee. Trump said he would use his own strongman tactics against North Korea’s sole international supporter, China.
“I would put a lot of economic pressure on China because economically we have tremendous power over China. People don’t realize that,” he said of a nation of 1.3 billion people that makes up the world’s second largest economy to get North Korea to the table, given it is the Hermit Kingdom’s only major diplomatic and economic supporter. “And we have tremendous power over China. China can solve that problem with one meeting or one phone call.”
His hunch on how engaging with a country that has closed its borders to the world for over half a century appears incredibly naive. Asked how China could make a difference in North Korea’s stature, he said, “Because they have tremendous power over North Korea.”
He further tried to dispel questions about his knowledge of international affairs by reminding the interviewer that China, like North Korea, also had nuclear weapons.
But the bigger question, one left unasked by Reuters‘ reporters, remains. What does Trump have that North Korea wants? The country exists outside the capitalist global economy. Its leadership has maintained an iron grip over all public life, a grip that’s gotten even tighter since Kim Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011.
Sanctions have done little to dissuade it from continuing to pursue a nuclear program. Nor did the Sunshine Policies, a series of friendly actions enacted between 1998 and 2007 by South Korea which resulted in increased aid to the north, lead to changes in North Korea’s behavior.
“There are no positive changes to North Korea’s position that correspond to the support and cooperation offered by us,” said a report released by the South Korean government shortly after ending the program.
The Chinese government responded to the comments by also supporting dialogue between the U.S. and North Korea. “China supports direct talks and communication between the United States and North Korea. We believe this is beneficial,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei.
This is not the first time Trump has spoken positively of autocratic regimes. Last December, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.” Then in March, he drew the ire of many when he described the Tiananmen Square massacre as a “riot” that was “put down with strength.”
However, international politics requires more than the willingness to talk, especially when it comes to North Korea, a country whose leadership remains ideologically opposed to the U.S. and capitalism. North Korean propaganda depicts America as the literal embodiment of capitalist excess, and it’s uncertain if North Korean leadership would even be interested in speaking to Trump in the first place.
By: Saif Alnuweiri, The National Memo, May 19, 2016
“Sanders’ White Posses”: Bernie Sanders And Racism Lite
In a statement on the Nevada rampage by some of his supporters, Bernie Sanders said a remarkable thing. He said, “Our campaign has held giant rallies all across this country, including in high-crime areas, and there have been zero reports of violence.”
Who lives in “high-crime areas”? We all know the answer: dark people. But it wasn’t dark people hurling chairs and death threats at the Nevada Democratic Party convention. It was Sanders’ own white followers. (The YouTube videos make that clear.)
One reason there’s been no violence at Sanders’ rallies is that outsiders aren’t disrupting them. It is Sanders’ white posses that are invading the events of others, be it Democratic Party meetings or Donald Trump rallies.
Now, the Sanders statement did say, “I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.” But then he likened this outrage to shots being fired into his campaign office.
The problem with this attempt at symmetry is that we don’t know who fired into his campaign office. It is my hope that the perpetrator is caught and thrown in jail. But we know exactly who threw chairs. The FBI, meanwhile, should be hot on the tails of the creeps who made death threats against a Nevada Democratic Party official and her family. That’s a federal crime.
Sanders should have made his condemnation of violence short and sweet. In doing so, he could have emphasized that the vast majority of his supporters are good, nonviolent people.
But then he went on, stoking the self-pity that has permeated his campaign. This was not the time to go into his allegedly unfair treatment at the hands of Democratic officials as he’s been doing ad nauseam.
If Sanders’ tying of political violence to “high-crime areas” were his only racially tinged remark, one might give it a pass. But he has a history.
There was his infamous waving-of-the-hand dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s commanding Southern victories, which were powered by African-American voters.
“I think that having so many Southern states go first kind of distorts reality,” he said.
Whose reality, one might ask. Actually, the overwhelmingly white electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire (where Sanders won big) got to go first. He didn’t have a problem with that.
This is a veiled racism that cannot find cover in Sanders’ staunch pro-civil rights record. Real black people seem to make Sanders uncomfortable (as Larry David captured on his “Saturday Night Live” skits).
Sanders’ idea of a black surrogate has been the academic Cornel West. West has called Barack Obama “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface” and “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” among other nasty things. Ordinary African-Americans tend to revere Obama, so where did this crashing insensitivity come from?
It may have come from decades of being holed up in the white radical-left universe. In the 1960s, Sanders abandoned the “high-crime areas” of Brooklyn, his childhood home, and repaired to the whitest state in the nation. (Vermont had become a safe haven for liberals leaving — the word then was “fleeing” — the cities.)
Nuance alert: Sanders has done good work in attracting more white working-class voters to the Democratic side. His emphasis on economic issues is a welcome change from the party’s frequent obsession with identity politics. That is admirable.
Less admirable are the windy justifiable-rage explanations in what should have been a simple censure. And to then link expectations of violence to “high-crime areas” was pretty disgraceful. There should be no white-privilege carve-out for thuggery.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, May 19, 2016
Dear Bernie Bullies, I’m So Over You
In early August 1968, just weeks after Bobby Kennedy was killed, my father and I took a walk through the fields of my great-grandmother’s house and plotted my career.
We didn’t know that at the time. I was only 11. He was 31, a father of four who had already worked for more than a decade at the local power plant. Those few facts about him make me shake my head at how young he was, how overwhelmed he must have felt so much of the time.
My beloved grandma BeBout’s farmhouse was a half-hour and a world away from our home in small-town Ashtabula, Ohio. I was supposed to spend just two weeks with her, which is why Dad was there. Minutes after his arrival, our collective tears persuaded him to let me stay longer.
For the first time, it occurred to me that my father was capable of missing me. He wasn’t in a hurry to leave, and he asked whether I wanted to go for a walk. We trudged through the cornfield and kept going, Dad jingling the coins in his pants pocket with one hand as we strolled.
I had just finished reading a paperback about Bobby Kennedy’s life. It was one of those quick-press editions sold down the street at a newsstand owned by a woman we all called Aunt Louise even though she was no relation. She often let me sit in the back of the store to read paperbacks free. When the Kennedy book arrived — I think its cover was glossy white with a small black-and-white photo of Bobby at the top — she gave it to me as a gift because she knew how sad I was that he had died.
I don’t recall how I brought up the book to my dad, but I do remember being surprised at how he paid attention as I told him about what I’d read. At one point, I made my announcement. I remember the wording only because he never forgot it.
“I think I’ll go into politics, Dad,” I told him. “Maybe write books about it or something.”
My father didn’t laugh or make fun of me. He just nodded his head and assured me that after I went to college — a nonnegotiable in our family — I’d be able to do anything I want. Politics would be a fine profession, he said, as long as I remained a Democrat.
“Maybe one day,” he said, “you could even be president.”
I’m not sure he believed that, but he wanted me to, and I don’t have any doubt he’d vote for Hillary Clinton if he were alive today. Not because he was a feminist. Lord, no. His affection for strong women began and ended with his three daughters, but our persistence would have gotten him there.
I grew up in a time when a woman who owned her own newsstand was famous because she was so rare. Aunt Louise was unmarried, which the grown-ups tirelessly pointed out as the reason she could do such a thing. What else did she have to live for?
I share this story from my childhood to illustrate just how long I’ve been waiting for something I could imagine at such a young age. There are so many women like me. We were born in a time when most of the country believed that white women should be sequestered at home, but we dared to believe we would grow up to be evidence to the contrary. I emphasize the privilege of our race because so many women of color never had the option to stay home.
Plenty of good people support Bernie Sanders, but his bullies are out of control. I am so over them. I no longer care when they accuse me of voting my gender. How interesting that they think there’s something wrong with so many women who want, for the first time in history, to see themselves reflected in the most powerful person in the world.
I support Clinton for a long list of reasons. The Sanders bullies say that makes me part of the “establishment.” I wish my working-class parents had lived long enough to hear that. How they would have howled.
There was a time when I got worked up over those voices of superiority telling me who I am because I don’t want what they do. I couldn’t care less now. My roots are my legacy, and I don’t owe anyone an apology or explanation for who I am.
When I was 11 years old, my dad told me a little girl could grow up to be president.
Forty-eight years later, I believe him.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, May 19, 2016
“Mementos Of The Act”: George Zimmerman Takes A Victory Lap On A Dead Boy’s Grave
It was not enough just to kill Sam Hose. No, they had to make souvenirs out of him.
Hose was an African-American man lynched by a mob of some 2,000 white women and men in 1899 near the town of Newman, Ga. They did all the usual things. They stabbed him, castrated him, skinned his face, mutilated him, burned him alive.
Then they parceled out pieces of his body.
You could buy a small fragment of his bones for a quarter. A piece of his liver, “crisply cooked,” would set you back a dime. The great African-American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, reported that Hose’s knuckles were for sale in a grocer’s window in Atlanta.
No, it wasn’t enough just to kill Sam Hose. People needed mementos of the act.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough just to kill Trayvon Martin, either.
Granted, it is not a piece of the child’s body that was recently put up for auction online by the man who killed him. George Zimmerman is offering “only” the gun that did the deed. But there is a historical resonance here as sickening as it is unmistakable.
Once again, a black life is destroyed. Once again, “justice” gives the killer a pass. Once again, there is a barter in keepsakes of the killing.
Sam Hose was not unique. People claimed hundreds, thousands, of trophies from the murders of African Americans. They kept bones. They kept sexual organs. They kept photographs of themselves, posed with mutilated corpses. It happened with the killings of Thomas Shipp, Abram Smith, Rubin Stacy, Laura Nelson, Claude Neal and too many more to count.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to see it happen with Trayvon.
And someone will say, yes, but isn’t there a lively trade in all sorts of murder memorabilia? One website alone offers a signed postcard from Charles Manson, a letter from Jeffrey Dahmer, pictures of Ted Bundy. So how is this different?
Funny thing, though: All those men went to prison for what they did. Zimmerman did not. Initially, authorities couldn’t even bring themselves to arrest this self-deputized neighborhood watchman who stalked and shot an unarmed boy four years ago near Orlando.
Not that it mattered much when they did. Zimmerman went to court, but it was 17-year-old Trayvon who was on trial. A nation founded, rooted and deeply invested in the canard of native black criminality very much needed to believe Zimmerman’s improbable tale of self-defense, very much needed to find a way for the boy to be guilty of his own murder.
And so he was.
And the marketing of the gun that killed him by the man who pulled the trigger does not feel like simply another example of flagrantly bad taste. No, it feels like a victory lap on a dead boy’s grave. It feels like America once again caught in its own lies.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? No we don’t.
“…with liberty and justice for all”? No there is not.
One is left breathless, not just with anger, not only with frustration, not simply with a sense of betrayal but also with a grinding fatigue at the need to, once again, ride out an assault on the basic humanness of African-American people.
Like Sam Hose, Trayvon Martin was “thing-ified,” made into something not his singular and individual self, made into an all-purpose metaphor, the brooding black beast glaring through the night-darkened window of American conscience. And like Sam Hose his murder is now commodified, made into a trophy for display in someone’s den.
African-American life is thereby — again — debased, and the nation, shamed. So when this thing is sold it really won’t matter who writes the check.
We all will pay the price.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald, The National Memo, Msy 18, 2016
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