If the New York Times story is true, someone broke the law to leak tax return information to the New York Times in order to undermine the President of the United States in the upcoming election. That someone broke the law to hurt Trump and help the Democrats. We should all be infuriated by that and by the fact that that the New York Times is willing to be involved in that. //

But I also wanted to point out how the top line fact they’re putting out of their story is actually refuted by their own story, that is the claim that Trump only paid $750 in 2016 and then again in 2017. The purpose of this is obviously to stir up anger against Trump for paying little in taxes.

As I said yesterday when the story dropped, I want someone who can actually read the law and apply it well. To me, that’s an asset. If you don’t like the law that allowed it, that Barack Obama signed, then take it up with the Congress and Obama. But why would anyone pay more to the government than they have to?

But as it turns out, if you read the New York Times’ own story, as they point out, Trump paid far more than $750 in each year, so this claim which is being spread everywhere is false, according to their own story.//

So what that means is he actually paid to the US Treasury $1 million in 2016 and $4.2 million in 2017 which was then rolled forward, not refunded when his ultimate tax liability was figured out. And he paid $750 in each year on top of that.

Attacking the Trump administration for what she called a “pattern” of racist behavior, California Democrat Harris said, “[Trump], on the issue of Charlottesville, where people were peacefully protesting the need for racial justice where a young woman was killed, and on the other side, there were neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches, shouting racial epithets, antisemitic slurs. And Donald Trump, when asked about it, said there were fine people on both sides.” //

“You know, I think this is one of the things that makes people dislike the media so much in this country,” Pence replied. “That you selectively edit, just like Sen. Harris did, comments that President Trump and I and others on our side of the aisle make. Sen. Harris conveniently omitted after the president made comments about people on either side of the debate over monuments, he condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, and has done so repeatedly.” //

“You had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said of the violent Antifa thugs, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis. “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. … You had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally — but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

Trump was clear, but it didn’t matter. The media spliced part of his quote to paint him as a racist and then blared it all over the headlines, saying Trump called white supremacists “very fine people.”

'When you don't try, you're creating an inhumane death, and you're creating an absolute certain death,' said Amanda Finnefrock, a mother whose twins were refused medical care after birth at 22 weeks and 5 days. //

While many corporate media outlets painted Trump’s Born Alive E.O. as another “appeal to religious voters,” or an “appeal to the right,” moms like Finnefrock see it not as a political stunt, but a “glimmer of hope.”

“We’ve been waiting so long, three years, for justice, or even an attempt at justice,” Finnefrock said. “We feel like for the first time in three years our sons’ death wasn’t in vain.”

@realDonaldTrump
is the ONLY candidate who deserves your vote this November.

Not convinced?

Here’s why: http://apple.co/2VCxGsh

RT!

The balcony was a moment that the left feared and for good reason. They should still fear it. It’s proof that we’re still America and that we’re in charge of our own destinies, not them.

Dave Ramsey looking at Donald Trump’s debt

[ Fred Sanford staggers in horror]

Comfortably Smug
@ComfortablySmug
Moment of silence for Libs realizing the vaccine for Coronavirus is President Trump's white blood cells

By Christopher F. Rufo
Oct. 4, 2020 4:06 pm ET

Trump is right. Training sessions for government employees amounted to political indoctrination.

Moderator Chris Wallace asked President Trump during last week’s debate why he “directed federal agencies to end racial-sensitivity training that addresses white privilege or critical race theory.” Mr. Trump answered: “I ended it because it’s racist.” Participants “were asked to do things that were absolutely insane,” he explained. “They were teaching people to hate our country.”

“Nobody’s doing that,” Joe Biden replied. He’s wrong.

My reporting on critical race theory in the federal government was the impetus for the president’s executive order, so I can say with confidence that these training sessions had nothing to do with developing “racial sensitivity.” As I document in detailed reports for City Journal and the New York Post, critical race theory training sessions in public agencies have pushed a deeply ideological agenda that includes reducing people to a racial essence, segregating them, and judging them by their group identity rather than individual character, behavior and merit.

The examples are instructive. At a series of events at the Treasury Department and federal financial agencies, diversity trainer Howard Rosstaught employees that America was “built on the backs of people who were enslaved” and that all white Americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy “by automatic response to the ways we’re taught.”

President Donald Trump isn’t able to get out to rallies and campaign events because he’s in Walter Reed Medical Center being treated for the Wuhan coronavirus.

So supporters have been bringing the rally to him outside the hospital, holding up flags, signs of support and praying for a speedy recovery for the president.

The president issued a video today thanking people for all the support he’s been getting. He had sounded pretty good on a video he put out yesterday, but this video today, he clearly had more energy.

Melania Trump, America’s beautiful mystery, is privately a trenchant political analyst with a keener power of observation than just about every sweaty, bespectacled nerd on CNN.

But it’s clear that the beneficial policies that Donald Trump has put in place are turning a lot of voters away from the Democrats, including black Americans.

We saw how that has flipped prominent, black support, like Georgia state representative Vernon Jones. We’ve also seen how civil rights activist Leo Terrell was influenced by the Democrats’ failure to adequately address the riots to walk away to support Donald Trump.

Now another prominent Democrat is professing support for Trump: Ohio state representative Bernadine Kennedy Kent, from the 25th District in Columbus, Ohio, a critical state for Trump to hold. She cited his law and order stance, economic prosperity, and support for HBCU among her reasons.

As a congressman, Paul Ryan shamelessly ran cover for Trump. But in an interview with Politico’s Tim Alberta, the former House Speaker made it clear what he thought of the president.

BY ERIC LUTZ

JULY 11, 2019

Ryan makes clear in Alberta’s book that he knew Trump to be an unqualified jackass. In one anecdote, the House Speaker receives an early-morning phone call from then-chief of staff Reince Priebus asking him to read a tweet the president had just fired off.

“Terrible!” Trump wrote. “Just found out that [Barack Obama] had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

The tweet, offered without proof or basis in reality, sent Ryan into “maniacal, punch-drunk laughter,” according to Alberta. This behind-the-scenes Ryan hardly squares with the public Ryan, who repeatedly came to the president’s defense and downplayed his maddening Twitter addiction. “I actually don't pay that much attention to it,” Ryan once said of the president’s incessant shitposting.

Ari Fleischer
@AriFleischer
I rewatched the start of the debate. The 1st Q went to Trump who gave an uninterrupted 2-min response. Then Biden gave an uninterrupted 2-min response. Then it went back to Trump, whose answer was interrupted 3 times by Biden. If you didn't like it, blame Biden for starting it.
1:08 PM · Sep 30, 2020

Ben Domenech
@bdomenech
In this interview Chris Wallace claimed the President was the first to interrupt. That is definitively false, just like his comments about Critical Race Theory and about Kenosha. //

Greg Price
@greg_price11
🧵 Thread of Chris Wallace's worst moments from last night's debate:

1) Refusing to push Joe Biden after he refuses to answer whether or not he will pack the court.

1:39 PM · Sep 30, 2020

Fact check from CNN's Jake Tapper about Joe Biden's lies about Charlottesville:

"Elsewhere in those remarks the President did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists. So he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people”

Summary:

There are good reasons for Durham delaying indictments: Mueller SCO criminality and direct Clinton ties to Spygate.
Durham is almost certainly pursuing conspiracy and RICO charges against the Spygate conspirators and their funders.
The political implications of deferring indictments until after 3 November could actually favor the President.
As a chaser, a lack of indictments does not preclude a guilty plea or two before 3 November. That’s entirely possible, too.

The end.

But it’s what the Times left out of their report that really gives the game away. While they breathlessly reported that Trump paid little income tax in 2016 and 2017, both years he has already admitted to losing money in, they conspicuously left out all the years before that in their write-up. //

In this case, it’s pretty obvious that Trump was making a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes in the decades that preceded his presidential run. This is especially true during the time he was doing The Apprentice. The reality is that he almost certainly paid tens of millions in taxes over many of the years from 2000-2015, for which the Times claims to have the returns.

This is where President Trump wins the support of this fairly traditional Catholic.

Martin Luther is reputed to have said he’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian. In that vein, I don’t need for Trump to approve of my religion or my faith practices, but I do need for him not to bring the force of the federal government to bear in order to stamp them out. Trump understands that things that are not terribly important to him are vital to others. I’d much rather have a president who could care less about my faith and leave me the hell alone than one who, like Biden, purports to share it and spends all of his waking hours undermining its practice and reducing what should be a central part of our lives to the Obama-esque “freedom of worship.” Making our reason for existence (see Matthew 22:35-40) into an arcane set of practices hauled out for a couple of hours during the week.

The left, on the other hand, has made secular politics its faith. As the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett progresses, the degree to which that has taken place will be undeniable. A little earlier today, a Joe Biden adviser said that eventually believing Christians and Jews and Muslims should be barred from holding government office because they are simply not sufficiently tolerant.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyMcLellan/status/1310747940596654080

Over the weekend, I made the same argument about how Black America should respond to Trump’s newly announced Platinum Plan. (READ: Some Critics of President Trump’s Platinum Plan to Revive Black America Are Asking All the Wrong Questions.) I really don’t care what Trump says or thinks. I care very much about what he does. Like with abortion, President Trump has done more in four years to safeguard the ability of people of faith to live their lives based on that faith that George Bush did in eight. If The Atlantic thinks that this shabby hit piece will convince anyone voting for Trump to either vote for Biden or stay home, they are sorely mistaken. We know what is at stake, and we will crawl over broken glass to cast our votes for President Trump on November 3.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/09/26/critics-trump-platinum-plan-black-america/

The New York Times says it was someone who had a legal right to the data. But that doesn’t mean they had a legal right to leak it. Money bet is obviously on Democrats trying to do a hit on Trump in the final days before the election. And there’s definitely got to be an investigation into this because there’s no question the leak was illegal/improper, even if the person who leaked it might have been legally allowed to have the information.

But while Democrats were trying to do a hit on Trump, it may turn out to have the opposite effect.

Trump has been saying that he wasn’t releasing his taxes because he was under audit. Indeed, according to the New York Times, Trump has, in fact, been under an audit for about ten years, proving he was telling the truth.

The reason why is actually rather funny and all because of Barack Obama.

Business losses can work like a tax-avoidance coupon: A dollar lost on one business reduces a dollar of taxable income from elsewhere. The types and amounts of income that can be used in a given year vary, depending on an owner’s tax status. But some losses can be saved for later use, or even used to request a refund on taxes paid in a prior year.

Until 2009, those coupons could be used to wipe away taxes going back only two years. But that November, the window was more than doubled by a little-noticed provision in a bill Mr. Obama signed as part of the Great Recession recovery effort. Now business owners could request full refunds of taxes paid in the prior four years, and 50 percent of those from the year before that.

So, if you have any issue with the way Trump got a refund and then didn’t have to pay more, blame Barack Obama; it was perfectly legal because of the law that he signed. So Democrats really can’t attack Trump for using a law they put in place that he was perfectly entitled to use. Bottom line? I want someone who actually has the business acumen to employ what he can within the law, that’s the guy I want in charge of the economy.

Another big item to put paid to Democratic collusion theories — the NY Times found no previously unknown ties to Russia in the records. Or anything apparently illegal. That was another thing which Democrats have been hoping to find and that just got blown apart big time.

Now, the President has disputed the accuracy of some of what the New York Times has said. No doubt he’s bothered that someone illegally leaked the information. But seriously, not only doesn’t it seem to be troubling, it looks on first blush like it puts paid to all the Democratic conspiracy theories against him.

So nice job, New York Times!

If this is the big pre-debate 'gotcha' that the Democrats and their allies in Big Media had in mind, it’s a bit of a flop. //

The New York Times published an article Sunday evening analyzing several years of tax returns filed by President Donald Trump. This illegal leak of the president’s tax returns revealed nothing we didn’t already know about the Trump business hydra: It is complicated, has a lot of expenses that generate tax deductions, and hires very smart tax advisers to make the whole thing work with as low a legal tax liability as possible. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Democrats also tried this line of attack against Trump in the 2016 debates.

Because most media will breeze over it, it’s important to pause and note the criminal illegality of this story. It is a federal crime for any federal, state, or local government employee to release a tax return without the consent of the taxpayer. Ditto for tax lawyers, CPAs, enrolled agents, and other tax professionals. Interestingly, it’s also illegal to print or publish tax returns or information from them. Section 7213 of the Internal Revenue Code prescribes that each violation here is a felony punishable by $5,000 and/or five years in federal prison, plus the cost of prosecution. Federal employees so convicted are to lose their jobs. //

Turning to the particulars of the tax return, there simply isn’t much here. There’s certainly no smoking gun, nothing that on its face is illegal in some way. The portrait that emerges is one of a very aggressive, wheeler-dealer businessman with a thousand fingers in a thousand pies. Trump allocates money in a wide array of business ventures, generating tax deductions that offset income from these and other enterprises.

Trump himself in the piece describes his approach as “truthful hyperbole,” which is one of those wonderful phrases like “trust but verify,” “non-denial denial,” and “unknown unknowns.” In this case, the phrase tells me, as someone who has had all sorts of tax clients over the years, that the president loves the game. He is always looking for his next business venture and wants to plow all his profits from other lines of work into the next chapter of his life. //

The bottom line is that the Trump business empire is basically a closed circuit — profits from business A are used to prop up business B and acquire business C. That creates a lot of deductions that offset the profit, which in turn means that in some years, very little tax is owed.

Does that make Trump a tax cheat? Not by itself, certainly. The IRS or other tax authorities are of course free to challenge the legality of this capital loss or that consulting expense, but that’s a matter of analyzing facts and circumstances case by case. There’s nothing wrong with taking these deductions in and of themselves. These types of news stories tend to cherry-pick particular tax years and tax deductions that fit the narrative and ignore high tax payment years that do not. //

Here is where the story really falls down. It does not inform the reader about the crucial distinction between tax evasion (illegally misrepresenting income and deductions to fraudulently lessen tax liability) and tax avoidance (legally using available deductions and other tax benefits to legitimately lessen tax liability). This difference is the axle upon which the entire story turns.

Unfortunately for the New York Times, all it has managed to uncover is a very aggressive taxpayer working with a very talented team of tax professionals pushing every legal tax avoidance strategy they can muster. God bless them for it. //

Businesses can and should deduct all ordinary and necessary expenses against business revenue to arrive at business profit — period, end of story. To deny this is to implicitly endorse a gross receipts tax on business income, something tax experts of all persuasions will tell you is the singularly most unfair way to tax businesses.

teapartyscientist

I am yawning. I couldn’t care less if Donald Trump exaggerates his wealth. I would have been surprised if he didnt. He just need to keep being a conservative president. Before he was elected these are the kind of things that I didn’t like about him. Now that I have seen him govern, these don’t bother me anymore.