RUTHFULLY YOURS

This deranged rant has been brought to you by the human scream.

Dean then launched into a critique of the media saying, “I would like the media of this country to apologize.” He went on to suggest that his cocaine tweet was really a bid to teach the media a lesson. “I’m not unwilling to apologize for using innuendo. Donald Trump has used innuendo from the day he got into this campaign and you, media, have not called him on it.” Asked why he would want to “go low” like Trump Dean replied, “Stephanie, I did that on purpose so I could say just exactly what I said.”

So Howard Dean lied and accused Trump of using cocaine. Then he claimed that the media didn’t call out Trump for using innuendo. This occurred in some imaginary world because the media has been doing exactly that. Then Dean claimed that his lie had been an effort to expose this burning issue.

It was all a brilliant plan to critique the media. And it would have worked too if Howard Dean weren’t a deranged leftist with slightly fewer brain cells than Gary Johnson.

But the media is guilty of jumping up and down with outrage over things Trump says, but not when Hillary or Howard Dean say the same sorts of things.

An alternative title for this article could also be: Negan and Hillary: Partners in Tyranny and Terror.

An intriguing and I think apt parallel exists between Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, overall career, goals, and character, and the goals and character of Negan. And the parallels are so simpatico, they seem to feed on and off of each other. They are mutually symptomatic of the state of the culture. The parallel even extends to Hillary’s supporters in the electorate and to the MSM, and to Negan’s loyal gang of marauding “Survivors.” It all should be explicated. I make no apologies for drawing readers’ attention to the parallel.

The cartoon Negan and the TV Negan

Who or what is “Negan”? He is the new archvillain of The Walking Dead (TWD) a villain who, unlike other villains in the series, does not try to rationalize his evil. He is thoroughly evil, and knows it, boasts of it, and revels in it. He is the “king” of the Survivors, who obey him and do his bidding. There is no saying “No” to him. Negan is perfectly portrayed by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, formerly of “Grey’s Anatomy” and is a veteran dozens of films and TV shows. I have watched none of his other films or TV series. So I can’t gauge or assess his true character, or even his acting abilities from other shows. But he is overwhelmingly convincing as Negan, so convincingly evil that you want to smack him and wrest the baseball bat from him and give him a taste of his own medicine. The trailer here should give readers unfamiliar with the series a taste of Negan.

Negan is a vile, evil character who debuted in April at the end of Season Six of The Walking Dead. Negan is a brutal tyrant who lords over an enclave of plague survivors and likes to smash victims’ heads with a baseball bat sheathed in barbed wire. He has a policy of extortion that requires other, productive enclaves to give him half of what they have in exchange for his not raiding, raping, enslaving, and killing their inhabitants and trashing their communities.

As one of their spokesmen said to others in an earlier teaser scene: “Everything you have now belongs to Negan.” gang are also dedicated nihilists.

Negan could be taken as a metaphor for the Obama administration, for Hillary’s dreamed of administration, or for Islamic jihadists. All three entities are looters, plunderers, and destroyers.

Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, Hillary Clinton is desperately trying to lure young voters into her artisanal fair trade GMO-free gingerbread house. And they just aren’t interested.

In a desperate effort to get out the youth vote, Hillary Clinton dragged her former nemesis, 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, to New Hampshire to campaign for her. When your best bet for winning over the kids was born during WW2, you have a major problem. But whatever millennial pixie dust the senile Socialist had been wearing before had worn off. “Is anyone here ready to transform America?” he croaked.

Not with Hillary. Not even the most naive college freshman believes in Hillary as an agent of change.

“Bernie’s campaign energized so many young people,” Hillary Clinton insisted. But adding Bernie to her campaign of the living dead didn’t energize it. It slowed it down even more.

Hillary Clinton has the backing of less than half of young voters. And the news only gets worse for the Evita of Arkansas.

Only 47% of adults 18 to 34 are certain that they will vote this year. That’s down from 74% in 2008. Only 17% of voters under 30 are enthusiastic about voting this year. And, just to make things worse, Gary Johnson is pulling in 14 percent of younger voters. In Virginia, Hillary gets only 34% of the under 34 crowd. That’s not just an entertaining coincidence. It’s also an entertaining catastrophe.

That’s why the “Aleppo Moment” is suddenly getting so much media coverage. Johnson is attracting too many of the voters whom Hillary needs. And so the media is targeting the latest threat to Her Highness.

It’s also why Obama and Bernie are both warning about the perils of voting third party. But neither of them seem to be able to shift their following over to Hillary. And the celebrities aren’t doing any better.

Trying to make Hillary seem cool by surrounding her with celebrities only highlights her blandness. That’s what went wrong at the DNC. But surrounding her with Obama and Bernie, the candidates that younger voters chose over her, just reminds them of why they rejected her.

Hillary’s Achilles heel is an older electorate. An older electorate is least likely to be influenced by celebrity tweets and pop culture peer pressure. It is most likely to consist of adults with life experience who have actually worked for a living and understand that everything has to be paid for.

The Clintons donated used underwear to charity, wrote it off on taxes

Here is the report from The New York Times:

In previous returns, when Mr. Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas and his wife was a partner in a Little Rock law firm, the Clintons had gone so far as to deduct $2 for underwear donated to charities. The deduction was ridiculed by comedians and pundits, and the White House did not itemize the Clintons’ $17,000 in charitable contributions on the 1993 return.

It’s that time of year again, Mr. President.

Time to celebrate the lingering Yuletide spirit and the bright promise of the year to come. Time to savor the companionship of friends and family.

Time to donate your underpants to a charitable organization so you can later claim a deduction on your 1993 tax return.

If the recent past is any guide, Bill Clinton and his wife, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been spending the past few months gathering up unwanted belongings — from old shoes to shower curtains to jogging shorts to, yes, apparently used underwear — carefully enumerating each item alongside dollar amounts on handwritten lists, and giving the lot to such worthy causes as the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries.

The Clintons’ tax returns over the past decade — which “obviously were prepared with an eye toward being released,” according to White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers — are rife with detailed supporting documents that may someday prove a rich boon to historians and psychohistorians studying the forces that shaped the Clinton presidency.

As political figures are wont to do, particularly those with White House aspirations, the Clintons have over the past few years thoughtfully disclosed their tax returns, providing citizens with a fascinating window on a heretofore unexamined aspect of their lives.

Several experts were consulted about Clinton’s tax-deductible donations, especially of underwear. Paul Offenbacher, a longtime Washington-area tax accountant, said it is highly unusual to take an itemized deduction on donated underwear; indeed, he had never heard of such a thing. Adelphi University psychology professor George D. Goldman, a New York-based psychoanalyst who studies the unconscious symbolic meanings in human behavior, said the donations are, at the very least, fodder for intriguing speculation.

“Obviously I can’t tell you what Clinton’s individual symbols mean; all I can do is give you my own analysis — which is that he’s airing his dirty wash or maybe trying to take his dirty wash and make it cleaner,” Goldman said. “I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I voted for him, but there’s something, let’s say, grandiose, both too personal and a bit inappropriately intimate, to give your underwear away for someone else to wear, and then to think that your underwear is worth giving this sort of a valuation to.”

But another clinician, psychologist John Marr, pooh-poohed as fanciful such theorizing about a guy who donates underwear, itemizes the donation, and then discloses it to the public.

“Whether you’re a Freudian, a Jungian or a behaviorist, you always have to look for the simplest explanation first,” said Marr, who practices in Fayetteville, Ark., where, coincidentally, he has played poker with Clinton. “If you donate, you have to itemize what you donate.”

“We don’t get too much underwear here; I don’t think people want that too much,” said Joe Cheslow, a senior resident at the Union Rescue Mission, a haven for homeless people in Little Rock, Ark., that has been a frequent beneficiary of the Clintons’ tax-deductible largess. The mission thrift shop has been known to sell used underwear, displayed in bins, at 95 cents a pair.

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/573730

Well this is a little awkward. With the leaked 1995 Trump tax returns ‘scandal’ focused on the billionaire’s yuuge “net operating loss” and how it might have ‘legally’ enabled him to pay no taxes for years, we now discover none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton utilized a $700,000 “loss” to avoid paying some taxes in 2015.

The Clinton Campaign was quick to jump on the leaked Trump tax filing with Robby Mook tweeting…

And Hillary following up, adding Trump “apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades—while tens of millions of working families paid theirs.”

However, a look back at Hillary Clinton’s tax returns from 2015 (here), proudly displayed by the campaign proving she has nothing to hide – shows something awkward on page 17…

While not on the scale of Trump’s business “operating loss”, Hillary Clinton – like many ‘wealthy’ individuals is taking advantage of a legal scheme to use historical losses to avoid paying current taxes.

As Bloomberg notes, this federal tax break is among the wealthy’s most used avoidance schemes…

Those 1.1 million folks in the 1 percent, as measured by the TPC, have annual income that averages a little less than $700,000. The top one-tenth of that group, some 110,000 households, average about $3.6 million, according to Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the TPC.2

The middle of the pack, some 33 million people, have pretax income ranging from $45,000 to $80,000. The lowest one-fifth of taxpayers, a universe of about 47 million Americans, have income up to about $24,000.

Among the biggest of these givebacks, courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service (well, really Congress), are capital gains and dividends—these are the biggest way the wealthiest benefit.

In the words of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, “this bombshell report reveals [Hillary Clinton’s] past business failures… and may show just how long [Hillary Clinton] may have avoided paying taxes.”

Who would have believed it? Donald Trump has driven his political opponents to embrace the cause of tax reform so the wealthy have fewer loopholes to exploit. That seems to be the inescapable logic of the media and Clinton campaign’s reaction to the weekend story that Mr. Trump may have used large income losses to reduce his tax payments.

The New York Times reported Saturday that it had received an anonymous gift in the mail of three pages from three of Mr. Trump’s state tax returns from 1995. The real-estate and casino magnate, who was having well-known business problems at the time, reported a loss of $916 million on those New Jersey, New York and Connecticut returns.

The Times concludes from these losses and after consulting those it called “tax experts” that the resulting tax deduction “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” Cue the synthetic shock and outrage.

Note that word “legally.” No one, not even the Clinton campaign, is claiming Mr. Trump broke any tax laws 20 years ago. Had he done so you can bet the IRS would have noticed, since the tax agency doesn’t routinely ignore tax losses that large.

The details from three pages are scant and don’t reveal the specific tax deductions that Mr. Trump might have exploited in 1995 or other years. But even average taxpayers who declare self-employment income know that business losses are deductible, often across several years. This reflects that the cycle of business investment and sales isn’t confined to a calendar tax year.

The real-estate business is also notorious for complex accounting and depreciation practices that can reduce tax liability. Developers borrow heavily, and the interest on that debt is deductible. Mr. Trump didn’t write the tax laws he was exploiting, though President Bill Clinton did have a hand in writing them since he pushed a major tax bill through Congress in 1993 with a Democratic Congress. Maybe Hillary Clinton should blame her husband and party for tolerating such rules. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Republican contender is vulgar, brash, opinionated and unafraid of exposing those attributes to the public gaze, hence all the ‘gotcha’ questions he fielded during the first debate. His opponent, by contrast, was asked to explain nothing about Benghazi, deleted emails, a predatory husband….
Trump is a never-ending story. Who in their right mind would ever tune in to see and hear Hillary? Trump on the other hand is interesting. That is one reason why I think he will win. But being interesting has its drawbacks. You have to talk as do ordinary people. And sometimes ordinary people say things they shouldn’t. Those of you who have ever been drunk know too well what I mean. But even short of inebriation we all fall foul of high standards of civility at times.

Take this erstwhile fat Latino chick (oops! Sorry), Miss Universe 1996, Alicia Machado from Venezuela, who is attacking Trump allegedly because he made certain derogatory remarks about her weight twenty years’ ago. I have no idea whether, in fact, he referred to her as Miss Piggy as she claims and, if he did, to whom and how loudly. He may not have said this at all. The lady in question seems to have had a chequered past and might be making it up. But would you be irritated if you were running a beauty pageant and the winner with a calendar of subsequent appearances to fulfil proceeded to get fat?

OK, if you are a man, you might be struggling with the sheer sexism of considering a woman’s weight. And, moreover, you know what dangerous territory it is. So, switch topic and subject. Suppose you are a flamboyant boxing promoter who sets up a tournament to find the next new contender. A winner emerges and the schedule of fights towards the big pay-off is set in motion. Subsequently your prize-fighter spends most days not in the gym but on his couch eating chips and drinking beer. Oh dear, you might say, you are being a naughty boy.

Steve Kates wrote an excellent piece on the great debate and I don’t want to go over his ground. I don’t know who won. I don’t even know how to tell who won. We all see what we want to see.

There are some people apparently who are undecided and can be persuaded to shift one way or the other at the drop of a hat. A drop of a hat might be Trump sniffing or Hillary shimmying while grinning. I found both annoying. However, while Trump was clearly unconscious of the effect he was having on his microphone during the early part of the debate, Hillary’s display looked as though it had been choreographed beforehand. Let me admit to being hopelessly biased and finding Hillary’s grinning demeanour insufferable rather than merely annoying.

One thing stood out. Under the guidance of the moderator, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, the debate was largely a staged event to shield Hillary and get Trump. When Holt brought up the so-called birther issue and premised a question with his own debatable fact that Trump had changed his mind about the Iraq war, they were illustrative of two things. First, this was largely to be a policy free zone; and, second, omission of inconvenient subject matter being a well-practiced technique of the left, it was to be a Hillary-scandal free zone. There was to be no Holt-initiated talk of Benghazi, or of Libya, or of the Russian reset, or of emails, or of the Clinton Foundation, or of what she said to Wall Street bankers, or of dodging imaginary bullets in Bosnia.