Talkin’ ‘Bout Tina
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ANNOUNCING THE 2023 SOCIAL JUSTICE KITTENS CALENDAR It’s 2023, and the Social Justice Kittens are back! It’s a dark time for the kittens, who find themselves speaking truth not only to the formless, all-powerful nightmare of white supremacy, but growing “white-adjacent” forces who foolishly lash out in ill-considered disagreement. No matter what mask it wears,…
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The whining and handwringing from the right over the release of Trump’s tax returns is making me crazy. Seriously? The man who refused to release his returns as every other presidents for the past half century hve done, had foreign business entanglements, refused to divest his companies and was clearly still involved in the businesses throughout his term is running for president again! He officially announced it! As Noah Bookbinder in the Atlantic writes: Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making. They’re out.
Not me When the 2020 presidential campaign was lurching into gear three years ago, former Vice President Joe Biden had led in the polls for months. Still, everyone kind of assumed he was a placeholder, a former office-holder with high name recognition whose campaign would nevertheless go the way of his two previous presidential bids, meaning nowhere. He was dull as dishwater compared to many of the others vying for the nomination, and nobody had ever really considered him presidential timber. As the campaign took off, other candidates were winning in the early states even as Biden still led in national polls. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg looked like the major contenders after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, states where Biden did poorly. Then he pulled off a sweeping victory in South Carolina and shortly thereafter the race was effectively over. He went on to win the rest of the primaries handily. America was reeling during the traumatic first year of the pandemic and there was a sense that Democrats were happy to have the race settled so they could concentrate on taking down Donald Trump, which was considered Job One by every faction of the Democratic coalition.
Too bad nobody paid attention New York is one of the few metro areas that still has a number of different big newspapers but even so it was a small local weekly that had the George Santos story long before the election. Nobody picked it up: Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate. The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later. The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters. “Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S.
2022 was another banner year A look back at the annual body count: From the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to the five people murdered at Club Q in Colorado Springs, countless lives have been impacted by mass shootings in the United States this year. There is no official FBI definition of a mass shooting, so definitions vary from group to group. This means that there is no official number of mass shootings that occurred in 2022. However, the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which there are four or more people shot or killed — not including the shooter — recorded 641 mass shootings in 2022 as of Dec. 28. The online archive reported 690 mass shootings in 2021, the highest year on record. This means that 2022, with at least 641 mass shootings, had the second highest number of mass shootings in a year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Some other lists put it at the highest year on record. Either way, it’s a disgrace.
What Russia says about ourselves One of the pleasures of writing for an old-school blog is not being assigned a boring end-of-year review or best-of piece. Plenty of those this week elsewhere. These two reports by BBC News Russia editor Steve Rosenberg are more relective. The first examines how Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed Russia. “Special Military Operation” Russia feels different from both communist Russia and independent Russia. “The economy and industry here have been virtually put on a war footing,” says Rosenberg, since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Not every Russian supports the war, Rosenburg finds, but “many Russians do buy into the Kremlin’s alternative reality, according to which in Ukraine Russia is fighting Nazis and NATO and fighting to defend Russia.” It is an eerie window into a culture other than our own in which the person beside you on the tram exists in a separate reality of alternative facts. It is a reminder, and not a comforting one, that in some ways MAGA Republicans, for all their chest-thumping claims to patriotism, are more Russian than American. Some might even agree.
What’s that we hear from Mar-a-Lago? It finally happened at 9 a.m. ET this morning (NBC News): A House committee made public six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and speculation about what might be contained in the filings. The House Ways and Means Committee had voted to make the thousands of pages of returns public in a party-line vote last week, but their release was delayed while staffers redacted sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers from the documents. Here they are. What is in there that Trump was so desperate for the world not to see? After all, he bragged in 2016 that paying no taxes made him smart. The smartest guy around. Why not showcase that brilliance? Tax pros will study Trump’s 500 or so business empire of trusts, limited liability corporations and partnerships.
They say this about a lot of people but she truly deserves it: Dolly Parton is a national treasure. Remember this? Last year, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drug maker Moderna to develop one of the first coronavirus vaccines to be authorized in the United States. The federal government eventually invested $1 billion in the creation and testing of the vaccine, but the leader of the research effort, Dr. Mark Denison, said that the singer’s donation had funded its critical early stages. On Tuesday, Ms. Parton, 75, received a Moderna shot at Vanderbilt Health in Tennessee. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she wrote on Twitter. A truly great American.