Referring to a hyped non story (“Trump paid $0 in taxes, I have his tax return showing he paid tens of $millions”) http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/26/facebook-russia-trump-sanders-stein-243172 The ads show a complicated effort that didn’t necessarily hew to promoting Trump and bashing Clinton. Instead, they show a desire to create divisions while sometimes praising Trump, Sanders and Stein. A number of the ads seemed to question Clinton’s authenticity and tout some of the liberal criticisms of her candidacy. There is no indication Stein, Sanders or Trump was aware of the advertisements, which were described to POLITICO by people with knowledge of them. Facebook declined to comment on the specifics of the advertisements but noted a previous statement: “The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election or voting for a particular candidate. Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”
The CNN talking points have been that these ads were so strategically placed and targeted that they had to have had help from the Trump campaign. Nothing burger. Fake news. Literally. It’s not even that newsworthy. $100K worth of ads isn’t a big ad buy. 3 days’ worth if you’re trying to get noticed. It’s also not newsworthy because WE broadcast propaganda via VOA and through the ad council and so on. It’s nothing new.
First reaction is that this is just such a reach, that no one would believe it...then the current atmosphere in politics comes too mind and I realize that there does not have to be truth or reason for some to get lathered up.
Those all work, if the goal is to elect Trump. Discouraging Clinton voters, encouraging Trump voters, peeling off Sanders and Stein voters - all of those help. The 'complicated effort' part is actually important. Exactly. It's like they understood American politics very well. Now, maybe that got that understanding by surfing the web. It's entirely possible. Or possibly Americans helped them. But whatever the truth turns out to be, I'm confident that you'll declare it a nothingburger. That's the one constant. barfo
And Trump won't benefit at all from his tax proposal. And the easter bunny brings gifts to all the good little boys and girls when they lose a tooth. barfo
You haven’t read the proposal. It does eliminate the AMT, which is 25%, but it also eliminates most deductions, so he’s going to pay the top tax rate of at least 25%. 14M not-so-rich would be removed from the tax roll altogether. The biggest possibility for him would be the death tax. He’s going to get his primary and secondary home mortgage deductions. Whoopie! https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/tax-plan-impact-mystery-middle-class-not-trump-n805331 It appears to get rid of most deductions, explicitly keeping only those on mortgage interest and charitable donations, while raising the standard deduction most filers take to $12,000 for single filers (up from $6,350) and $24,000 for married couples (up from $12,700).
Trump won’t be able to write off property taxes and likely depreciation. The proposal calls for an unspecified higher tax bracket to assure the tax burden isn’t shifted from the rich. I’m not sure if I like it or not, but let’s try to figure it out without your talking points. @JFizzleRaider might be able to provide more clarity. It really looks to me like he’s going to pay more taxes, yearly.
Trump Could Save More Than$1 Billion Under His New Tax Plan https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...mp-tax-benefit.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
So, the media has been peddling this narrative about Facebook ads that’s turned out to be a massive embarrassment for the gate keepers of the (small t) truth. Trump’s tax plan talk is a distraction from this most recent egg on the media’s collective faces. There’s what they say, and there’s the (big t) Truth. Rarely do the two meet. You’d think you’d wise up and not trust these liars, about the tax plan or anything else. Fool me once... fool me twice and I’m barfo.
And another Maddow moment. It's sad to see the depths to which the 4th estate has fallen. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28...ry-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/ Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet? So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin – one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its election systems targeted by Russian hackers: The spokesman for Homeland Security then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there was still evidence that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: “Wisconsin’s chief elections administrator, Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted.” Then the story collapsed completely last night. The Secretary of State for another one of the named states, California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the claimed report: Sometimes stories end up debunked. There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were an isolated incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader meaning.
But this is no isolated incident. Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence. The examples of such debacles when it comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. I wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time in June when 3 CNN journalists “resigned” over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network was forced to retract:
