EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 2680
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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
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Shingi11
290 Posts
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22638 Posts
On September 28 2020 05:57 Shingi11 wrote: Hope/cause mail in ballots to get screwed up, contest results. Try and get Republican states to overwrite the voting process and appoint their own electors because the results are in dispute (I kinda doubt they are willing to do this). I wonder how trump game plan changes if he is not winning on election night as it look like that is how it going to be at this moment. Biden has been holding a steady and strong lead for months now but we all know how crazy the home stretch can get. Getting the courts that he has stacked to overturn election results can only work if he is winning on election night right? Does he still just argue that he is the winner even if he is behind. Has he impaled enough lackeys on the courts that they will go for that. Hope all this is enough to win the electoral vote, if not get on a plane heading for Russia Jan 18th. | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On September 28 2020 00:11 WombaT wrote: Such as? My post earlier was rather brief, pajoondies more well articulated my particular position on diversity training. It being counter-productive makes sense to me as the tendency of any privileged group towards any kind of move to making environments more neutral tends to be rather negative. Aside from that phenomena, I don’t see how tacking a few training programs can particularly counteract decades of experience and attitudes imposed by wider culture, so it not being effective doesn’t exactly surprise me. Had you been a malicious individual intent on sowing division, I have the expectation that you would respond the same. The diversity training didn't work. The people saying it's counter-productive are just reacting to a loss of actual privilege. All the while large group of people (let's say white people) are taunt to identify as their race and start to grow in resentment towards whoever's making them say they're complicit in racism and are racist themselves. That's one of the troubles with nice-sounding programs and reacting simply based on their names. Of course, any program that actually worsens the problem it's going in to solve will say: they lack time and resources, the hurdles they're attempting to overcome are just too large, the people complaining are deficient due to privilege or disposition. I am not surprised in the least to your reaction, WombaT. I hear it all the time when conservatives critique one liberal sacred cow or another. I think much of today's politics misidentifies good intentions, and fails to appreciate (and I mean *really* fails to appreciate) how much harm and regression is done with the good intentions of the participants. I'm not really trying to single out WombaT for a trend I find to be generally the case. | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On September 28 2020 05:57 Shingi11 wrote: I wonder how trump game plan changes if he is not winning on election night as it look like that is how it going to be at this moment. Biden has been holding a steady and strong lead for months now but we all know how crazy the home stretch can get. Getting the courts that he has stacked to overturn election results can only work if he is winning on election night right? Does he still just argue that he is the winner even if he is behind. Has he impaled enough lackeys on the courts that they will go for that. If his advisors are smart, they'll be telling him he'll be an icon for decades in the future conceding once the votes are in and smiling at the three judicial nominees he got on the Supreme Court. Do yourself a favor and ask a conservative today if they'd trade a single-term Trump presidency for 3 originalist supreme court justices. | ||
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StalkerTL
212 Posts
NYT actually got hold of his tax returns just now. They’re all predictably awful and hold a lot of bad implications for him if he loses in November and doesn’t have the shield of a Republican senate. | ||
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pmh
1416 Posts
These elections are not something to look forward to. What course of action would prevent polarization to increase even more up to the point where society will virtually break down? Either side winning with a clear margin would help but that doesnt seem likely at this point. The support for blm and the protests has decreased but if trump wins in a controversial way (either suspected fraud or by the court) then i doubt even many moderate democrats in the middle will simply accept it. The protests will become much larger then they have been thus far and then what,send in the military? Thats not feasonable if there is millions of people protestesting. Biden winning and trump not accepting defeat because he suspects fraud, but then not able to turn it around in court also doesnt seem like a particular attractive outcome at this point. I honestly wonder if there is any way in which this can end well. Right now it looks like complete chaos will break out after the elections. It could still end relativly well i guess but its difficult to see how. What danglars said is true,i guess the republican establishment is more then satisfied with what they have gained from trump thus far. But there might still be things to gain from a 2nd term,mostly when it comes to foreign policy. | ||
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CorsairHero
Canada9491 Posts
On September 28 2020 06:35 StalkerTL wrote: The problem is that Trump’s reason to hold onto the presidency for as long as possible is to avoid legal strife. It’s his single shield against all of the garbage that is going to come his way come after the presidency. NYT actually got hold of his tax returns just now. They’re all predictably awful and hold a lot of bad implications for him if he loses in November and doesn’t have the shield of a Republican senate. In 2016 he paid $750 in tax, in 2017 he paid 750 in tax. Pathetic. Goes to show what a literal loser he is. | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom10006 Posts
On September 28 2020 06:47 CorsairHero wrote: In 2016 he paid $750 in tax, in 2017 he paid 750 in tax. Pathetic. Goes to show what a literal loser he is. A true dedicated public servant. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22638 Posts
On September 28 2020 06:30 Danglars wrote: Right now Trump's main focus is avoiding the avalanche of legal issues he faces the moment he loses his Presidential immunity and the DoJ stops acting as his personal lawyers.If his advisors are smart, they'll be telling him he'll be an icon for decades in the future conceding once the votes are in and smiling at the three judicial nominees he got on the Supreme Court. Do yourself a favor and ask a conservative today if they'd trade a single-term Trump presidency for 3 originalist supreme court justices. He isn't in this to be an icon for conservatives when he needs to worry about his own immediate future. If Biden is ahead far enough on election night that there is no hope he might concede. But it ends the same way imo, with him on a plane leaving the country before his term is over. | ||
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StalkerTL
212 Posts
Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects. In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income: In Azerbaijan, Mr. Trump collected $5 million on a hotel deal and reported $1.1 million in consulting fees, while in Dubai it was $3 million with a $630,000 fee, and so on. Mysterious big payments in business deals can raise red flags, particularly in places where bribes or kickbacks to middlemen are routine. But there is no evidence that Mr. Trump, who mostly licenses his name to other people’s projects and is not involved in securing government approvals, has engaged in such practices. Rather, there appears to be a closer-to-home explanation for at least some of the fees: Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business. The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii. | ||
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
On September 28 2020 05:57 Shingi11 wrote: I wonder how trump game plan changes if he is not winning on election night as it look like that is how it going to be at this moment. Biden has been holding a steady and strong lead for months now but we all know how crazy the home stretch can get. Getting the courts that he has stacked to overturn election results can only work if he is winning on election night right? Does he still just argue that he is the winner even if he is behind. Has he impaled enough lackeys on the courts that they will go for that. He doesn't have a plan if he isn't winning, or at least almost tied on election night. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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HelpMeGetBetter
United States766 Posts
On September 28 2020 07:32 JimmiC wrote: My prediction if the polls continue like they are a lot of Republicans will become never Trumpers again. I don't see many going down with the ship and them doing what they think they need to do to protect their seat and the senate. I'm not sure a bunch will continue to support him when it becomes clear he is not going to win. I can see Trump dropping out of the race a week before the election. Can't lose the election if you are not in it right? | ||
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PhoenixVoid
Canada32755 Posts
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Lmui
Canada6223 Posts
The $750 in taxes a year is jaw dropping. Either you believe he's a successful businessman in which case, why the fuck is he paying $750 a year in taxes, or else he's nothing like what he claims to be, a product of wasting billions of dollars inherited from his dad. In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses. ... And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due. ... At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. At his Doral golf resort near Miami, the roofing materials manufacturer GAF spent at least $1.5 million in 2018 even as its industry was lobbying the Trump administration to roll back “egregious” federal regulations. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians. ... Mr. Trump has an established track record of stiffing his lenders. But the tax returns reveal that he has failed to pay back far more money than previously known: a total of $287 million since 2010. | ||
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StalkerTL
212 Posts
This is hilariously open tax fraud that is only jammed up by the intentionally underfunded IRS and the senate who apparently thinks that someone with tax returns as horrible as this is totally A-OK. Crime is totally OK in America’s idea of the rule of law if you’re politically important, is it surprising that people are responding to the world’s injustice with ever increasing amounts of violence? | ||
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22638 Posts
On September 28 2020 07:45 PhoenixVoid wrote: yea no.Hmm, I guess this is our late September Surprise, or an October Surprise come early. Of all the large numbers in that report, I think the one that will resonate the most with on the fence voters is $750. You're not going to change people's minds with his hundreds of millions in debt or the millions he lost or all his schemes to avoid taxes, but if you pay more as a low or middle class taxpayer in income tax than the self-professed billionaire, I think it strikes quite a lot of people as unjust. Remember, America has no poor people, they are temporary embarrassed millionaires. And people still on the fence after everything Trump has done, I don't see how his taxes convince them. | ||
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Shingi11
290 Posts
Federal income taxes paid in 2017 (jointly with spouse): Joe Biden - $3,742,974 Kamala Harris - $516,469 Bernie Sanders - $343,882 Elizabeth Warren - $268,484 Donald Trump - $750 Right before the debates too. Just giving biden more fuel for the fire. LIke gorsameth said i dont see this really moving anyone with all the crap trump has done but you have to take a death by a thousand cuts type of strategy. Something is going to break and thankfully the trump administration the gift that keeps on giving | ||
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StalkerTL
212 Posts
In theory Trump is running down the clock while down by two touchdowns. | ||
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