US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9660

On January 11 2018 11:56 LegalLord wrote:
So I’ve been thinking: what were the big world events of 2017 that didn’t directly involve Trump? The ones that come to mind are successful ICBM tests from NK and Germany having a bad time forming a new ruling coalition. Beyond that, though, the year seems to have mostly been remarkably uneventful by most standards. No events that really stick out as all that definitive or impactful.

On January 11 2018 14:37 bo1b wrote:

You've taken smug condescension to a brand new level, well done.

We need to be more sympathetic to that shit and recognize that the majority of conservatives are not Nazis, they just agree with Nazis.

On January 11 2018 18:39 iamthedave wrote:


Surely China's big speech has to count? Xi Jinping almost directly saying 'It's okay if the US drops the ball, we've got this' might well go down as the moment where global power shifted eastward.

Even after taking office, President Donald Trump has sold more than $35 million worth of real estate last year to secretive buyers.

Trump sold 41 luxury condo units in Las Vegas last year to people who used limited liability companies (LLCs), which allow them to hide their identities, a USA Today report found. The president can withdraw profits from these sales at any time using a trust that names him as the sole beneficiary but is managed by sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

Before Trump signed the GOP tax bill into law in December 2017, a last-minute tax break was added for real estate investors who use LLCs, partnerships and S corporations to make deals.

The number of buyers using LLCs to purchase property from Trump climbed even before the tax break was announced last year. A mere 4 percent of buyers used the secretive shell companies in the two years before Trump became the Republican nominee. A year later, the number dramatically increased to nearly 70 percent, according to USA Today.

A Chicago neurosurgeon, Ramis Ghaly, told the paper that he used an LLC to purchase a Trump condo in Las Vegas on the advice of his financial consultant. Ghaly said the advantages of owning the property outweighed his concerns about being associated with president's politics.

But with a majority of buyers choosing to remain anonymous, liberal watchdog groups, including the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, have raised questions about the transparency of Trump's foreign deals. The sale of Trump's Palm Beach mansion to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev in 2008 resurfaced last year amid speculation that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia during his 2016 presidential race.

Moreover, a Reuters report found that at least 63 people with "Russian passports or addresses" have purchased nearly $98.4 million worth of Trump's property in South Florida. In addition, Trump sold his personal Park Avenue penthouse in Manhattan to Chinese investor Angela Chen.

“If someone wants to do business with the Trump entities in the form of an LLC, we look behind the LLC to see who the owner of it is and where the funding is coming from,” Bobby Burchfield, the ethics adviser at the Trump Organization, told the newspaper. “If we can’t determine that, we won’t sign off on it.”

Before his inauguration, Trump announced that he would turn over his companies to his sons but would not divest his properties and assets.

“While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses,” Trump said in a series of tweets in November 2016. “Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations. The Presidency is a far more important task!”

The tax break for LLCs, S corporations, limited partnerships and other businesses allow owners to avoid paying business tax rates by allowing income to pass through to partners, who pay an individual tax rate on the money.

In December, New York real estate mogul Steve Witkoff told Newsweek that the tax bill benefits reaped by real estate investors will trickle down to the economy.

“I think you've got to create all those conditions that get the private sector to want to invest,” Witkoff said. “The president's game plan is more growth. Let's add several trillion more dollars of GDP, expand the tax net, lower the amount that you pay, but expand it. More tax revenue means we're going to pay down the deficit.”

On January 11 2018 18:39 iamthedave wrote:


Surely China's big speech has to count? Xi Jinping almost directly saying 'It's okay if the US drops the ball, we've got this' might well go down as the moment where global power shifted eastward.



Your interpretation of his post confuses me. What are you getting at? Unless I read it wrong he's essentially saying 'Modern Conservatives accidentally agree with Really Awful People on a regular basis, but are not Really Awful People themselves, and it's important to remember that.'

Is that condescending?

On December 06 2017 01:54 KwarK wrote:

Wegandi is our resident libertarian.

xDaunt is a white nationalist and Danglars is just a garden variety klan member.

On January 11 2018 19:31 bo1b wrote:
I find it uncomfortable how many people are willing to quote or develop a world view based on various t.v personalities as if they're experts on literally anything, and at the same time decry those who quote other such experts from the opposite end of the spectrum.

On January 11 2018 13:37 Danglars wrote:

(((How I naively thought people would react, if they even noticed the name)))

On January 11 2018 22:13 zlefin wrote:
bo1b -> i'm not really seeing the equivalence of the 2 cases you're trying to make. they seem rather different to me.

also, got a link to coverage of this f-52 thing? I don' tthink i've seen one in the last couple pages.

On January 11 2018 22:13 zlefin wrote:
bo1b -> i'm not really seeing the equivalence of the 2 cases you're trying to make. they seem rather different to me.

also, got a link to coverage of this f-52 thing? I don' tthink i've seen one in the last couple pages.

On January 11 2018 23:00 oBlade wrote:
It's not rational or political, it's psychological. Kwark obviously knows Trump would never have played Call of Duty (so it's lucky Norway bought 52 jets instead of a number corresponding to an imaginary plane that doesn't exist in Call of Duty or whatever), it just feels good to make fun of him that way because there's no other consolation.

My personal thought is after new atheism divested a lot of the younger generations from religion, and belief in a god, it didn't actually strip them of credulity or teach them critical thought and so now Republican presidents (or hopefully just Trump) fills the psychological place of the devil.

On January 11 2018 22:53 bo1b wrote:

The equivalence is that a lot of the people outraged with the shitty coverage of Obamas presidency by fox, which included the above videos and other fantastic top tier reporting, are now turning a blind eye to whats happening with the Trump presidency. See this latest gaffe, or the Trump feeding Japanese fish video etc. Stupid pointless shit with no real end goal but to be divisive, often championed by media figureheads and then parroted by people who do zero research of their own.

It's a cancer on society, and what rankles even more is that all the genuinely bad things coming out of the Trump administration are mixed with the above - why? There's so much to choose from.