General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 372

Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general

Donald Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty this year, an official at Trump's company said, after it was revealed that Trump's charitable foundation had violated tax laws by giving a political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida's attorney general.

The improper donation, a $25,000 gift from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, was made in 2013. At the time, Attorney General Pam Bondi was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. She decided not to pursue the case.

Oops.

 

So, literally pay to play? lol

 

Trump might actually BE old-man Eric Cartman, honestly. Which makes this seem very appropriate.

 

Yep. One candidate has been fined for a pay-to-play scheme involving their un-audited-completely-non-transparent-foundation.

The other is rated higher than the Red Cross by every single charity watch dog organization.

Weird how much I read about one of these more than the other other though.

 

The "pivot" and "softening" the media tried to convince us was happening seems to be going well.

 

This seems like something he'd say

 

Maybe he actually thinks that he only needs white people and/or there are a number of minorities who cannot disclose their desire for Trump in public, but will pull the lever for him in the voting booth. Quite honestly, with Breitbart at the helm, his decision to pivot farther right may have to do with just wanting to legitimize their views for the next election, where there will be somebody more palatable to public.

 

few months old but goddamn i love killer mike. so articulate, informed, and passionate.



can anyone comment on experiences with Citizens Trust? considering opening an account there...

 

Sigh. Yet another non-scandal at the Clinton Foundation

So Clinton gets the princely sum of $96,600 each year for staff, and tracks the work these staffers do in his capacity as ex-president. He bills the GSA for that work, and bills other organizations when the staff does work for them. This is bog standard stuff. Staff time is tracked, and then charged out. This is not just "not illegal," it's the way pretty much any similar kind of operation works. Even me. Mother Jones pays me an annual salary, but if I write an op-ed or something, I bill that time to whoever I wrote the op-ed for.

Go ahead and read the whole thing. There's really nothing even remotely blurry or scandalous or shady or anything else. It's just the standard way anyone operates who has multiple interests, multiple funding sources, and staffers who do work for multiple organizations. There's no hint that any of the charges were incorrect, or that any of the purchases were misallocated. As near as I can tell, it was all entirely above board, and the GSA was actively involved in scrutinizing everything.

Basically, the reason for headlines like this is because Bill Clinton decided after his presidency to set up a large and active foundation that raised a ton of money for exceptionally worthy causes around the world. If he had decided to just lounge around instead, none of this would ever have come up. It's a little hard to believe that he's getting so much grief for this.

Oh god the numbers itself make it even worse how Politico presented it.

 

I asked because I don't understand how welfare is related to basically a government pension program. I agree with many of your comments on welfare, and support the expansion of it, but that doesn't make me think ex-government workers shouldn't have a pension program as well, especially when they use that program to do a lot of good in the world. We should improve welfare in this country, full stop. For you, it seems that's where it completely stops, for me, I think we should also have programs in place to pay for the secret service and other, audited, expenses for former Presidents and other heads of state. I support the vet program as well, and that they get continued money after service. Both I consider separate to a support for welfare and the expansion of it.

Side bar, what are you referring to as "Clinton increased poverty exponentially"? From what I see the rate shrank during his presidency ...



My understanding is that what is referred to as "extreme" poverty increased, correct? Based on the paper by H. Luke Schaefer and Kathryn Edin?

 

can we file a class action suit against trump for lying?

 

Colin Powell’s foundation and Hillary Clinton’s are treated very differently by the media

Because Colin Powell did not have the reputation in the mid- to late ’90s of being a corrupt or shady character, his decision to launch a charity in 1997 was considered laudable. Nobody would deny that the purpose of the charity was, in part, to keep his name in the spotlight and keep his options open for future political office. Nor would anybody deny that this wasn’t exactly a case of Powell having super-relevant expertise. What he had to offer was basically celebrity and his good name. By supporting Powell’s charity, your company could participate in Powell’s halo.

But when the press thinks of you as a good guy, leveraging your good reputation in this way is considered a good thing to do. And since the charity was considered a good thing to do, keeping the charity going when Powell was in office as secretary of state was also considered a good thing to do. And since Powell was presumed to be innocent — and since Democrats did not make attacks on Powell part of their partisan strategy — his charity was never the subject of a lengthy investigation.

Which is lucky for him, because as Clinton could tell you, once you are the subject of a lengthy investigation, the press doesn’t like to report, “Well, we looked into it and we didn’t find anything interesting.”

Instead we get things like:

• An Associated Press investigation whose big reveal is that Clinton once tried to help out a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was in hot water with the ruling party of his home country.
• An LA Times story headlined “Billionaire’s Clinton Ties Face Scrutiny,” about a rich Lebanese-Nigerian man who appears to be genuinely somewhat shady, gave money to the Clinton Foundation, and received nothing in exchange.
• A Wall Street Journal story about how the crown prince of Bahrain scored a meeting with Hillary Clinton years after having donated to the Clinton Foundation. The story somehow forgets to mention that Rice, Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Warren Christopher had all also met with him during their tenures as secretary of state
• An ABC investigation that concluded a donor had used a foundation connection to get a better seating assignment at State Department function.
• Three of these stories, in other words, found no wrongdoing whatsoever but chose to insinuate that they had found wrongdoing in order to make the stories seem more interesting. The AP even teased its story with a flagrantly inaccurate tweet, which it now concedes was inaccurate but won’t take down or correct. The final investigation into the seat assignments at least came up with something, but it’s got to be just about the most trivial piece of donor special treatment you can think of.

Did one of Alma Powell’s donors ever ask for a better seat at a Powell-era function? Nobody knows, because nobody would think to ask.

 

Colin Kaepernick wore socks to practice with pictures of pigs wearing police hats, haha.

I think it's hilarious, but it's clearly not going to help his cause or shed the accusation that he's merely seeking attention.

 

Former models for Donald Trump's agency say they violated immigration rules and worked illegally

How is this barely a story this week?

 

"Tellingly, the deep poverty rate in 1996, when welfare reform passed, was 4.6 percent. Since the end of the late-'90s boom in 2001, the rate has never been that low again.

If you try to isolate the effects of welfare reform, it appears that if anything it probably increaseddeep poverty in the US. The most disturbing evidence in this regard comes courtesy of the University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer and Johns Hopkins's Kathryn Edin, who have documented an increase in the share of Americans living on $2 a day or less in cash income.

Using data from the Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP), they found that the share of households with less than $2 per day, per person, shot up from 1996 to 2011, from 1.7 percent of households with children to 4.3 percent. That's a 153 percent increase."

"If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed": the legacy of the 1996 welfare reform


To your other points, it isn't an either/or proposition to me. I don't consider the president an "ex-government worker". He clearly occupies a position within a ruling elite that endows him with incredible privilege and wealth. I stand in solidarity with government workers, both on a federal and state/city level. I support their wage increases, pension increases and security, etc. However, and I was to make this clear, the president is not a worker. He is, essentially a manager, so this elastic definition by which you are analyzing my posts is not applicable.

 

What's the over/under on Trump resigning or being impeached shortly after winning the election, if he does?

 

Modi is terrible:

150 million Indian workers will strike tomorrow against Modi’s anti-labor policies – Redspark

 

Warning: descriptive tweet storm

 

the socks are such a non issue being used to try and discredit his still extremely valid position. so, the usual when it comes to things like this.