…the full documentary may not be on general release as yet…but…the trailers are…a little on the nose?

Gaetz also spoke with Stone about redacted parts of the Mueller report that DOJ showed House Judiciary members in a secure room under a confidentiality agreement: “There was a lot on you in the full redact that came out in the skinny redact.”https://t.co/GcePQC3vcg

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) July 30, 2022

At an event at a Trump property that October, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) predicted that Stone would be found guilty at his trial in Washington the following month but would not “do a day” in prison. Gaetz was apparently unaware they were being recorded by documentary filmmakers following Stone, whom special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had charged with obstruction of a congressional investigation.
[…]
Gaetz at one point told Stone he was working on getting him a pardon but was hesitant to say more backstage at the event, in which speakers were being filmed for online broadcast. “Since there are many, many recording devices around right now, I do not feel in a position to speak freely about the work I’ve already done on that subject,” Gaetz said.

…&…I-am-not-a-lawyer & all that sort of thing…but…I do appreciate irony…& unless I’m missing something that right there would sound a whole hell of a lot like sort of statement that would handily dissolve any claim to an expectation of privacy…so the forehead with a venmo account there trying to claim that kind of thing ought to be inadmissible on the grounds he didn’t consent to be recorded…which you’d usually need to in florida…apparently…well…that seems like it wouldn’t go his way

The lawmaker also told Stone during their conversation that Stone was mentioned “a lot” in redacted portions of Mueller’s report, appearing to refer to portions that the Justice Department had shown to select members of Congress confidentially in a secure room. “They’re going to do you, because you’re not going to have a defense,” Gaetz told Stone.
[…]
The recording gives a rare unguarded view of Trump confidants candidly discussing legal peril away from public eyes. Mueller’s report said it was possible that Trump had both lied to investigators about his contacts with Stone and was aware Stone might provide damaging testimony against him if he chose to cooperate with prosecutors.

Gaetz is a member of the House Judiciary Committee. At the time of the conversation, the committee was investigating whether Trump might have obstructed justice by floating possible pardons to Stone and other allies who were swept up in Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
[…]
Stone was convicted on seven felony counts that November and sentenced to 40 months in prison. But Trump, who publicly praised Stone for not “flipping” on him, commuted his prison sentence before it began and eventually pardoned him.

…because…that’s how they expect this to work, after all

[…] A former White House aide recently told the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 that several Republican members of Congress, including Gaetz, had sought preemptive pardons. Trump last month said he might pardon supporters for the Jan. 6 attack if he reclaims the presidency, prompting criticism, including from some Republican lawmakers.

…provided they play their cards right

“He’s not easy to deal with,” said Stone. “It’s complicated. And one of the problems is those who try to deal with him don’t understand the extent to which he resents any implication that he is handled or managed or directed. You can’t just say, ‘Here are your talking points, read these.’ That will never work.”

…& to some extent what cards they can lay their hands on

Stone had asked Jackson to order prosecutors to show him a full, unredacted version of Mueller’s report. On Aug. 1, 2019, Jackson granted Stone access to some redacted sections relating to him in Vol. 1 of the report, which focused on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Jackson said in her ruling that most of the redacted material in Vol. 2 — which covered Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice — related to Stone, but she declined to let him see it.

The material was covered by a protective order that barred Stone from sharing it with anyone other than his lawyers and from using it “for any purpose” other than his legal defense, Jackson wrote.
[…]
Separately, the Justice Department had also shown varying amounts of the redacted material to congressional leaders, members of the Judiciary and Intelligence committees in the House and Senate and a limited number of aides. From mid-June, members of the Judiciary committees, such as Gaetz, were allowed to view some redacted sections in Vol. 2 of Mueller’s report.

Committee members and some aides could review the material in a “secure space” and were “permitted to discuss the report only among themselves,” the Stone prosecutors told Jackson in a court filing. As they negotiated access to the material, committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) wrote then-Attorney General William P. Barr that the committee had agreed that “they cannot discuss what they have seen with anyone else.”

…what is it they say about how when people tell you who they are, you should believe them?

The pair went on to discuss a photograph of them posing with Joel Greenberg, then the tax collector of Seminole County, Fla. Stone said the photograph had “come back to bite us in the a–.” He did not elaborate. The Orlando Sentinel had reported the previous week that Greenberg had given publicly funded contracts to friends and associates.

“Bite us in the a–?” Gaetz said. “I’m incredibly proud of that.”

…said the sitting congressman to the convicted felon…something, something…before a fall

Greenberg was arrested the following summer and later agreed to plead guilty to six charges, including trafficking a 17-year-old girl for sex, and to cooperate with federal investigators on further inquiries. Those inquiries included the possibility that Gaetz had paid Greenberg to procure underage girls, The Post and others have reported. A Gaetz spokesman said the congressman never paid for sex and never had sex with a minor.

…if pretty much every element of the thing weren’t fundamentally distasteful…it might almost be tempting to call it a good news story

During the October 2019 conversation, talk returned to Stone’s case and to his early morning arrest by the FBI at his Florida home that January. Stone and his supporters had publicly claimed to be outraged that, as a man in his 60s charged with nonviolent crimes, he was roused by heavily armed officers in a dawn raid. Because footage of Stone’s arrest was recorded by a CNN crew waiting outside, Stone alleged that investigators improperly alerted the media before his indictment was unsealed.

“My suspect for who tipped the media off on that is you. You were my first suspect,” Gaetz told Stone backstage at AMPFest.

“Come on, Roger, it was you,” added Johnson.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” said Stone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/07/30/roger-stone-matt-gaetz-pardon-mueller/

…just your basic a-b-c…always be criming…which is presumably why the grifting caucus has something else they’re mad about…turns out that when you send incessant unsolicited emails looking to extract money from credulous fools on an industrial scale…well…they’re hard to distinguish from what we generally refer to as spam

Amid a chorus of complaints, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) offered an analogy. The 88-year-old suggested that Google’s sending emails to spam was equivalent to the post office refusing to deliver the mail, according to three people in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from a closed-door meeting.
[…]
The criticism marked the apex of a pressure campaign waged against Google by the GOP as the party continues to send unrelenting appeals for cash even amid signs its tactics are faltering. The party’s online fundraising has fallen off in recent months, declining by about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year, compared with the first, according to federal filings from WinRed, the main donation-processing portal for the Republicans. Online fundraising by Democrats increased by more than 21 percent, according to filings from the Democrats’ main portal, ActBlue.

It’s unclear what impact Google’s spam filters have had on the GOP’s fundraising, if any. Nevertheless, Republicans have waged a pressure campaign that has included public Twitter offensives and private discussions with Google chief executive Sundar Pichai. GOP lawmakers have introduced draft legislation in both chambers of Congress.

The effort’s impact became apparent this month when Google asked the Federal Election Commission to green-light a pilot program that would exempt campaign emails from spam detection. That change could reshape the experience of Gmail users. The amount of political fundraising conducted over email and text has exploded in recent years, adding to the deluge of promotional messages swamping Americans every day. The program could further intensify the inundation.

The GOP’s full-court press drew on the party’s longtime protest that Silicon Valley is biased against conservatives — a claim disputed by the companies. It is a politically sensitive time for Google, as the company works to defeat antitrust legislation that executives say could compromise user safety and undermine Google’s most popular products.

…looks like a duck…sounds like a duck…could you maybe just not call it a duck then…oh…I dunno…maybe we won’t pass those pesky bits of legislation you’re not fans of…whaddya say?

In recent election cycles, the Republican fundraising apparatus, led by Gary Coby, a strategist for former president Donald Trump, has ratcheted up email solicitations for small-dollar contributions. Trump’s PAC often sends out more than a dozen pitches a day. Many are misleading, with promises of a “700%” match but with fine print showing that donations may not specifically benefit the advertised cause, such as a “Protect Our Elections Fund.”

Trump’s advisers, meanwhile, have received complaints about his constant fundraising solicitations, and some people fear that it will turn off voters, two Trump advisers said. But the former president is pleased with his fundraising, these advisers say, and Coby has told others that his strategy is working.

…given that his strategy is to siphon the maximum extractable amount of cash he doesn’t have to account for & squirrel it away where he can spend it on keeping his ass out of jail…I guess you could say it is working, at that

Brett Schenker, an email deliverability specialist who has consulted for Democratic campaigns, echoed that explanation — and said it made him “embarrassed for Google over how they’ve reacted.”

“It’s very suspicious that there’s major antitrust legislation that would potentially impact Google’s search algorithms that they want killed while this is going on,” he said. “So they’re acquiescing instead of standing up to Republicans and defending their very effective spam filters.”
[…]
With July’s fundraising deadline looming, Republicans are escalating their tactics, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post. The Republican National Committee’s chief digital officer emailed Google representatives this week complaining that the party keeps hearing the same “debunked” explanation for the GOP’s poor performance in Gmail inboxes — “that there is a threshold of user spam complaints that we teeter on, and then somehow crossover at the same time each month.”

…cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug, it seems

In May, Senate Republicans invited Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, to explain the company’s spam detection systems and answer questions. The lunch meeting, which was first reported by Politico, grew tense, according to people who were there.

The most forceful rebuke, attendees said, came from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes. The reason, it was later determined, was that a vendor had not enabled an authentication tool that keeps messages from being marked as spam, according to people briefed on the discussions. Rubio campaign manager Mark Morgan said the problem also required Google to perform a reset on its end. Google’s Castañeda said such resets are standard practice once senders adhere to best practices.

…I don’t know about you…but if you already make use of mechanisms for flagging your indistinguishable-from-scam-emails as officially-not-spam…or at least do when you don’t forget or turn out to be inept with the nuances of technology…making out you need to use the full weight of federal government to back you up on that designation right when you have some possible leverage in your legislative back pocket…well…it’s a look, I guess

Many lawmakers relayed personal anecdotes that revealed limited understanding of how Gmail works, although some of their points touched on areas of ongoing study by Google. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked why she wasn’t getting emails from a pro-Israel group after signing up for its newsletter.
[…]
“This is not what happens on Gmail. They choose to actively block GOP emails even if the voter has not taken these actions,” [Coby][from the Senate GOP’s campaign arm] added. “Google is lying if they tell you they only block emails when a voter marks as spam or unsubscribes.” (Google does not say that, in fact outlining a range of factors that go into spam filtering, such as suspicious links and phrases, in addition to user behavior.)

…or…to put it another way

“Not content with their ability to bilk their supporters out of $250 million with a fraudulent ‘election defense fund,’ Republicans have successfully lobbied Google to remove one of the few anti-abuse protections that remain,” said Daniel Wessel, a Democratic National Committee spokesman, referring to findings from the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2o21, attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump and his allies used misleading claims about voter fraud to raise enormous sums in the weeks after the 2020 election.

Also in June, Thune introduced a bill with the backing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022. It would bar email providers from marking messages as spam without the direction of users. Similar legislation was introduced in the House.

The legislation, said Anne P. Mitchell, the chief executive of Get to the Inbox, an email certification service, is “clearly grandstanding to push Google to do exactly what they’re now doing.”

“Rather than dealing with the possibility of the law passing and tying itself in knots defending its ability to apply spam filtering, Google has gone to the FEC,” she said. “The result of this will be to cram political spam down people’s throats.”

…the implication being that the current state of affairs will not in fact resemble people having that stuff crammed down their throats already by comparison to the extent that will be the case thereafter

The sweeping ramifications that could result from Google’s request are reflected in the interest it has generated, prompting about 2,500 public comments, mostly from individuals. They overwhelmingly ask the regulator to advise against the proposed Google program allowing candidate and other committees registered with the FEC to evade ordinary spam detection.
[…]
The public has until early August to weigh in, at which point the six commissioners, divided evenly by party, will consider a draft opinion and determine if there are at least four votes for an answer to Google.

There is some discomfort within the FEC about the genesis of the request and the appearance that it resulted from political and governmental pressure, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing matter. They nonetheless said this context is unlikely to figure in the commission’s decision-making, which boils down to whether such a pilot program represents a prohibited in-kind political contribution or an acceptable move in line with Google’s ordinary business practices.
[…]
“I think it is relevant to the FEC that Google’s getting political pressure to do this,” [David] Mason [a former Republican commissioner who is now the general counsel and chief compliance officer at the data-management company Aristotle] said. “It puts commissioners in a position where anything they do or fail to do is going to be interpreted as politically charged.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/29/republican-fundraising-google-spam/

…&…I know…it’s a sunday…& it’s rude to tax folks’ minds on a day of rest…but…minds are mysterious things

The French philosopher René Descartes, whose views on animals were highly influential, argued that these creatures acted purely by reflex — they had no intellectual capabilities. But there has been a Copernican revolution since then: We now know that sophisticated minds are all around us in the animal queendom — not just in close relatives of humans such as chimps and apes, but also in “aliens from inner space” such as the octopus.

And now we are learning just how smart insects can be. As I show in my new book, “The Mind of a Bee,” the latest research indicates that even tiny-brained bees are profoundly intelligent creatures that can memorize not only flowers but also human faces, solve problems by thinking rather than by trial and error, and learn to use tools by observing skilled bees. They even appear to experience basic emotions, or at least something like optimism and pessimism. The possibility of sentience in these animals raises important ethical questions for their ecological conservation, as well as their treatment in the crop pollination industry and in research laboratories.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/29/bee-cognition-insect-intelligence-research/

…it’s the little things, you know?

The structures [the stuff that thoughts are made of] known as brain organoids or sometimes “mini-brains”, [in this case, in the lab of Madeline Lancaster at the University of Cambridge] hold immense promise for helping us understand the brain. They have already produced fresh insights into how this most mysterious organ functions, how it differs in people with autism and how it goes awry in conditions such as dementia and motor neurone disease. They have even been made to grow primitive eyes.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25533962-300-what-lab-grown-mini-brains-are-revealing-about-this-mysterious-organ/

…if you can make it past the paywall on either of those last two there’s plenty to keep you busy for a while…& it’s honestly pretty fascinating stuff…so I regret to admit that I strongly suspect a particular swathe of commentary will eventually hove into view suggesting that if an organism as small as a bee can be spoken of as having a mind &/or it’s possible to measure activity in a tiny fraction of the grey matter lodged between most ears that it has some god-forsaken implications that would likely be to the post-roe debate much as napalm is to gasoline…though…I guess I’d argue that if that does prove to be the case it’s going to be useful to have read up enough on either tack to know how & why that argument would be predicated on needing to willfully misconstrue pretty much everything about what either article is talking about…but…you know…not all consequences are intended

Nations seeking to help Ukraine are aiming at the wrong target. They have focused on reducing Russia’s energy exports instead of reducing Russia’s earnings from energy exports. Russia is exporting less oil but, in a perverse twist, it is earning more money, according to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, based in Finland. The sanctions have raised prices, more than offsetting the decline in exports. In May 2022, Russia earned 883 million euros per day from oil exports, up from 633 million euros per day in May 2021.

The situation is about to take a turn for the worse. New sanctions that the European Union and Britain have agreed to impose on Russia by year’s end are likely to drive oil prices even higher. Some analysts warn that the price for a barrel of oil could exceed $200, well above the spike in the early weeks of the war, when oil prices topped out around $124. That could easily push Western economies into a recession.

…might be time for a good, old-fashioned cabal

The Biden administration has a plan that could avert this crisis. It would establish a buyer’s cartel — an agreement among Russia’s customers to put a price ceiling on Russian oil. That ceiling would be significantly lower than the current market price, sharply reducing the role of Western consumers in funding the Russian military. But the price would still allow Russia to make some profit, so that it has an incentive to export its oil to members of the cartel. Some of the key participants in the plan, including the United States, have banned the importation of Russian oil, but other nations that America hopes to enlist, notably India, continue to import large volumes of Russian oil.

It is an audacious and untested idea. It also appears to be the best available option. If it works, it could deprive Russia of revenue without devastating the economies of nations that are trying to support Ukraine.

Constructing a cartel is not easy. The United States has already secured the agreement in principle of the other members of the Group of 7, a coordinating body for the major democratic economic powers. American officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, are working with their counterparts to hammer out the details. The buyers’ cartel would be strengthened if other big buyers of Russian oil, notably India and China, could be persuaded to participate. That seems unlikely. But U.S. officials argue the cartel could still increase pressure on Russia by allowing nations that are not participating to extract larger discounts, too.

Maintaining a cartel is also hard. Because the participants can benefit by cheating on the price ceiling, policing a price-fixing agreement is notoriously difficult. But in this case, there may be a plausible enforcement mechanism. A key piece of the new sanctions by the European Union and Britain is a ban on insuring tankers that carry Russian oil. Shippers need insurance to navigate canals and to enter harbors. European companies dominate the market; in April and May, 68 percent of Russian oil exports traveled on tankers insured by European businesses. That measure could be modified to ban insurance for tankers with oil purchased at a price above the cartel’s ceiling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/opinion/russia-oil-sanctions-biden.html

…it’s pretty much traditional in some places

In a twist of fate, Congress is suddenly poised to pass the most ambitious climate bill in United States history, largely written by a senator from a coal state who became a millionaire from his family coal business and who has taken more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any of his colleagues have.
[…]
The measure requires the federal government to auction off more public lands and waters for oil drilling. It expands tax credits for carbon capture technology that could allow coal or gas-burning power plants to keep operating with lower emissions. Mr. Manchin also secured a promise from Democratic leaders to vote on a separate measure to speed up the process of issuing permits for energy infrastructure, potentially smoothing the way for projects like a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia.
[…]
“Those are his pet projects,” James Van Nostrand, a law professor at West Virginia University, said. “I think he’s going to say, ‘I used my strategic position to bring back benefits for West Virginia.’ And he’ll probably do pretty well in the next election.”

Mr. Manchin has consistently said he is open to tackling climate change, despite representing a deeply conservative state where 69 percent of voters backed Donald J. Trump in 2020. But he has also insisted that the country cannot afford to turn its back on fossil fuels altogether.
[…]
Some climate activists called the fossil fuel provisions a “poison pill” that would lock in oil and gas emissions. The bill would require the Interior Department to hold lease sales for oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and the Cook Inlet in Alaska. It also requires the department to continue to hold auctions for fossil fuel leases if it plans to approve new wind or solar projects on federal lands.

Those provisions would make it impossible for President Biden to uphold his campaign promise to end new federal oil and gas leasing. Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Action, an advocacy group, said in a statement that the deal “won’t solve the climate crisis, and may make it worse.”
[…]
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said his group’s internal modeling showed that the emissions cuts from the legislation would be as much as 10 times greater than the effects from the support it extends to fossil fuels. He called the fossil fuel provisions “pain points” but said overall the deal was “significantly positive.”
[…]
Asked for comment, Mr. Manchin’s spokeswoman, Sam Runyon, pointed to those provisions as well as another $5 billion in the package that would allow existing coal-fired power plants to improve their efficiency and adopt environmental controls like scrubbers, which remove pollutants from smokestacks. Those measures to help the coal industry, she noted, come on top of $8.5 billion for carbon capture and storage that Mr. Manchin secured as part of a bipartisan infrastructure bill last year.
[…]
Many Democrats wanted a clean energy standard that would pay electric utilities to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with renewable power and that would penalize those that didn’t. But Mr. Manchin opposed the measure, so it was scrapped. He vetoed a plan to provide bigger tax credits for consumers who bought union-made electric vehicles, a measure that was opposed by Toyota Motor, which operates a nonunion plant in West Virginia. And he ensured that the tax credits for electric vehicles could not be used by the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Manchin scaled back but did not eliminate a fee imposed on oil and gas operators for leaks of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from wells, pipelines and other infrastructure. He rejected an early plan by Democrats to permanently ban oil drilling in the Atlantic and the Pacific and he ensured that longstanding tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, which many Democrats wanted to repeal, went untouched.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/climate/manchin-climate-deal.html

…& I know the low-hanging fruit on this stuff is generally the NYT…or at any rate a particular slice of it…but I think NBC deserves at least an honorable mention in the convoluted take stakes for this little gem

The central failure of Biden’s presidency to date was not directly engaging with the West Virginia Democrat from the start. Instead, Biden spent the first year of his presidency vainly pushing for a massive Build Back Better program despite its certain opposition from Manchin. The breakthrough that was finally achieved on Wednesday came as Biden and Congress sit mired in low approval ratings, perhaps fatally so come Election Day.

…see…it wasn’t a question of manchin arguing from a position of bad-faith predicated leverage…only a fool & a communist would think that…no…what ol’ joe should have done about his namesake was aim lower & capitulate pre-emptively

Biden and Democratic allies in Congress might very well have reached a similar agreement with Manchin long ago absent the political Sturm und Drang. Biden could have made a beeline for the veteran West Virginia officeholder after taking office, asked him what it would take to win the vote of this most reluctant member of the Democratic caucus — and then give it to him.

…it’s not that it’s a point with no foundation…but…the blithe certainty with which it’s presented is a little jarring if you ask me…even if it does eventually get around to qualifying it a little

Which isn’t to say Manchin would have been a straight-shooting negotiating partner. After all, Manchin spent months in negotiations in 2021 before signaling in December that he would oppose the Build Back Better Act, citing concerns over growing inflation and the national debt. It’s entirely possible the senator would have proved intransigent even with more of the agenda tailored to his liking — perhaps because it was important to his political base in deep-red West Virginia to show he was standing up to progressives and not in lockstep with Biden.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/new-senate-deal-exposes-bidens-gravest-political-bungle

…if we’re supposed to look at this stuff realistically…well…then there might be some other components that bear consideration

A Russian operative backed by the Kremlin meddled in United States politics for seven years and recently tried to undermine American support for Ukraine by recruiting local activists to spread pro-Moscow propaganda, the Justice Department announced Friday.

Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, who worked with the Russian Federal Security Service and at least three unnamed “Russian officials,” was charged with conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government from December 2014 through March of this year, the agency said.

“As court documents show, Ionov allegedly orchestrated a brazen influence campaign, turning U.S. political groups and U.S. citizens into instruments of the Russian government,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. The 24-page indictment against Ionov was unsealed in Tampa, Florida.
[…]
Ionov, founder of a nongovernmental organization called Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, had already been on the DOJ’s radar. In 2018, it was revealed his organization had been raising money to aid convicted Russian operative Maria Butina, who was deported to Moscow in 2019, an event mentioned in the indictment.
[…]
[The DoJ] did not identify the U.S.-based groups. But shortly after the Ionov indictment was announced, the FBI in Tampa confirmed to local media it had raided headquarters of the Uhuru Movement in St. Petersburg, Florida, in connection with the alleged conspiracy.

“The Uhuru Movement is a worldwide organization, under the leadership of African People’s Socialist Party, uniting African people as one people for liberation, social justice, self-reliance and economic development,” the group said on its website.
[…]
In May 2015, Ionov sent the “leader” of the Uhuru Movement in St. Petersburg on “an all-expense paid trip to Russia” and for the next seven years “exercised direction and control over senior members,” the DOJ said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russian-operative-used-us-activist-groups-spread-propaganda-feds-say

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/russian-national-charged-conspiring-have-us-citizens-act-illegal-agents-russian-government

…particularly where knee-jerk reactions are concerned

Blindsided veterans erupted in anger and indignation Thursday after Senate Republicans suddenly tanked a widely supported bipartisan measure that would have expanded medical coverage for millions of combatants exposed to toxic burn pits during their service.

Supporters of the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act — or PACT Act — overwhelmingly expected the House-passed bill to sail through to the president’s desk for signature.
[…]
“We really expected yesterday to be a procedural vote that would go with easy passage,” said Jeremy Butler, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit veterans’ organization. “That was the absolute expectation.”

The PACT Act would have expanded VA health care eligibility to more than 3.5 million post-9/11 combat veterans who were exposed to toxins while serving in the military.

The Senate passed the original legislation 84-14 in June. It underwent minor changes when it moved to the House, where it passed 342-88. When the bill returned to the Senate, the bill had not changed much but the view — and vote — of 25 senators did.
[…]
“They’re manufacturing reasons to vote against legislation that they literally voted for just last month,” Butler added. “And so it’s really a new level of low.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/blindsided-veterans-erupt-fury-senate-republicans-suddenly-tank-pact

…& that’s got to be pretty low…when the baseline seems to be at least 6ft under these days

Ivana Trump was buried next to the first hole of an exclusive New Jersey golf club owned by her ex-husband, Donald Trump. https://t.co/sBjNAipKUk

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 30, 2022

Trump’s cemetery — with people selected by a kind of membership committee — would handle just one to two burials per year, officials said. Cemetery plots in New Jersey cost, at most, a few thousand dollars each. The money, such as it was, would go to the nonprofit company.

But maybe the point wasn’t to make money. Could this whole thing have been a scheme to reduce the Trump Organization’s real estate taxes? After all, nonprofit cemeteries pay no taxes on their land.
[…]
But, in this case, the savings would hardly be worth the trouble. That’s because Trump had already found a way to lower his taxes on that wooded, largely unused parcel. He had persuaded the township to declare it a farm, because some trees on the site are turned into mulch. Because of pro-farmer tax policies, Trump’s company pays just $16.31 per year in taxes on the parcel, which he bought for $461,000.

“It’s always been my suspicion that there’s something we don’t know” about the explanation behind the seemingly inexplicable cemetery plan, said Bedminster land-use board member Nick Strakhov. So why were they doing it?

“I did not ask,” Strakhov said. “It’s an obvious question.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-mystery-of-donald-trump-and-the-new-jersey-cemetery/2017/03/10/story.html

…& that…as they say…appears to be the bottom line

As a tax researcher, I was skeptical of rumors Trump buried his ex-wife in that sad little plot of dirt on his Bedminster, NJ golf course just for tax breaks.

So I checked the NJ tax code & folks…it's a trifecta of tax avoidance. Property, income & sales tax, all eliminated. pic.twitter.com/VDZBlDyuhQ

— Brooke Harrington (@EBHarrington) July 31, 2022

For those interested, @propublica published a Trump Family Trust document which shows they have sought to designate a property in Hackettstown, NJ (20 miles from Bedminster) as a non-profit cemetery company.

Insights, @jentaub, @eisingerj, @MaryLTrump? https://t.co/7t4kIdVtJh

— Brooke Harrington (@EBHarrington) July 31, 2022

…for today at least…hope you enjoy your day of rest

[& I’ll try not to be too long with the tunes]