March 26, 2024

Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Remember Joe wrote this in 2020.

https://x.com/joebiden/status/1311120831032909825?s=61&t=I_Od53CbnPTsbLcD0baXP

Biden, Promising Corporate Tax Increases, Has Cut Taxes Overall.

President Biden has called for $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and high earners. But his record so far is as a net tax cutter.

President Biden, amping up a populist pitch in his re-election campaign, has repeatedly said he would raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to make them pay their “fair share.”

Republicans say Mr. Biden has “an unquenchable thirst for taxing the American people.” His Republican opponent in the election, former President Donald J. Trump, said recently that Mr. Biden was “going to give you the greatest, biggest, ugliest tax hike in the history of our country.”

So it might come as a surprise that, in just over three years in office, Mr. Biden has cut taxes overall.

The math is straightforward. An analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank that studies fiscal issues, shows that the tax cuts Mr. Biden has signed for individuals and corporations are larger than the tax increases he has imposed on big corporations and their shareholders.

The analysis estimates that the tax changes Mr. Biden has ushered into law will amount to a net cut of about $600 billion over four years and slightly more than that over a full decade.

“It’s reasonable to conclude from those numbers that the Biden tax policy hasn’t been some kind of radical tax-raising program,” said Benjamin R. Page, a senior fellow at the center and author of the analysis.

The analysis strictly looks at changes to taxes over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency, including some direct benefits to people and businesses that flow through the tax code. It does not measure the effects of inflation or certain regulations, which Republicans sometimes label “tax hikes” since they can raise costs for companies and individuals.

It also does not measure the social or economic benefits of Mr. Biden’s spending policies, or of his regulatory efforts meant to help consumers, like cracking down on so-called junk fees and limiting the cost of insulin and other medication.

Instead, the analysis provides a comprehensive look at what Mr. Biden has done to the tax code, and how those policies add up.

It is clear by that measure that his record has not matched his own ambitions for taxing the rich and big companies — or Republicans’ attempts to caricature him as a tax-and-spend liberal.

That’s largely because Mr. Biden has struggled to pass his most ambitious tax-raising plans. “It’s what can be got through Congress and signed,” Mr. Page said. “They were subject to compromise.”

A White House spokesman, Michael Kikukawa, said in an email that Mr. Biden was “proud to have cut taxes for the middle class and working families while cracking down on wealthy tax cheats and making big corporations pay more of their fair share.”

The president’s enacted tax cuts include incentives for companies to manufacture and install solar panels, wind turbines and other technologies meant to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which are a centerpiece of the climate law he signed in 2022. That law also contained tax cuts for people who buy certain low-emission technologies, like electric vehicles and heat pumps.

Mr. Biden gave tax breaks to semiconductor factories as well, as part of a bipartisan advanced manufacturing bill he signed earlier that year.

The president also included temporary tax breaks for individuals and certain businesses in his 2021 economic stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan. The legislation expanded a tax credit for parents. It provided $1,400 direct checks for low- and middle-income Americans, which were technically advance payments on tax credits.

Mr. Biden has partly offset all of his tax cuts with a pair of major new levies. Corporations are now required to pay a tax when they buy back their own stock. Another tax requires large corporations to pay a minimum 15 percent federal income tax, even if they qualify for deductions that would have made them owe less.

The president has also directed tens of billions of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service to help crack down on high earners and corporations that evade paying the taxes they owe — an effort that will increase federal tax revenues but does not increase tax rates.

But the president has struggled to persuade Congress — including a sufficient number of Democrats, in the two years his party controlled the House and the Senate on his watch — to sign on to a fleet of other proposed tax increases.

Mr. Biden’s budget requests have been filled with ideas for taxing high earners and corporations. Those have failed to gain traction on Capitol Hill. His most recent budget includes about $5 trillion of tax increases spread over a decade, including longstanding Democratic plans like raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent.

Republicans assailed Mr. Biden for tax plans they say will cripple the economy. Representative Jodey C. Arrington, Republican of Texas and chairman of the Budget Committee, said in a hearing on Thursday that Mr. Biden believed “in more government and more spending and more taxing as the answers to the problems that our country faces.”

Mr. Biden has emphasized his tax proposals in recent weeks, including during his State of the Union address. The president has repeatedly said he would not raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year, while calling on millionaires and billionaires to pay more.

He has also vaunted his tax record, as he did this week in Las Vegas. “In 2020, 55 of the largest Fortune 500 companies made $40 billion in profits,” Mr. Biden said. “They paid zero in federal taxes. Not anymore.”

Mr. Biden was referring to the corporate minimum tax created by the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that also included the climate-related tax incentives. The Treasury Department has struggled to implement that tax, which companies faced for the first time last year.

The department does not yet have data on how many corporations will pay the tax for 2023, officials said this week. (New York Times).

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Kamala is always busy.

On Saturday, the Vice President planned to spend an hour to commemorate the murders 6 years ago in Parkland, FL.

She visited with the still grieving families for hours.

From Fred Guttenberg whose daughter Jaime was murdered at Parkland.

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So far, outcry has stopped Trump criminality enabler Ronna McDaniel from contaminating MSNBC.

The back story.

According to Mike Allen at Axios,

State of play: Friday's announcement said McDaniel, who left her RNC post on March 8 under pressure from Trump, "will contribute her expert insight and analysis on American politics and the 2024 election across all NBC News platforms."

• "It couldn't be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna's on the team," said Carrie Budoff Brown, NBC News SVP of Politics.

• McDaniel's hiring was supported unanimously by NBC News leaders, a source familiar with the conversations told me. (Axios)

There is no unity now except to oppose the hiring.

On Sunday, NBC Anchor Chuck Todd spoke up.

The current story.

Leadership at NBC raced to contain an escalating revolt on Monday as some of the country’s best-known television anchors took the extraordinary step of criticizing their network on its own airwaves for hiring Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, as a political analyst.

One day after Chuck Todd stunned executives by denouncing Ms. McDaniel’s appointment on “Meet the Press,” Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski opened their MSNBC show, “Morning Joe,” with a lengthy criticism of Ms. McDaniel, calling her “an anti-democracy election denier” and urging their bosses to reconsider her employment.

“We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire her,” Mr. Scarborough said. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but, if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.”

Hours later, the star MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace all but accused her employer of enabling authoritarianism by granting Ms. McDaniel a platform. She told her viewers that NBC News, “wittingly or unwittingly,” had signaled to “election deniers” that they could spread falsehoods “as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”

Her guest, David Jolly, a former Republican congressman, concurred with her remarks. “The viewers feel betrayed, and they’re asking to be heard,” he said of MSNBC’s audience.

NBC executives were bracing for yet more on-air criticism later on Monday, when the MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki are scheduled to appear.

The rebellion was not limited to marquee talent. Inside NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in Manhattan, some rank-and-file employees were starting discussions on how to further pressure network leadership over Ms. McDaniel, a person with knowledge of the talks said.

The firestorm over Ms. McDaniel, who recently stepped down from the Republican National Committee at the urging of former President Donald J. Trump, underscores the challenges facing news organizations as they try to integrate voices that are supportive of Mr. Trump into their election-year coverage, at a moment of intense partisanship and tribalism among voters and viewers.

NBC’s news division must also balance a wide-spanning audience: viewers of NBC News, the network’s traditional reporting arm, and fans of its cable cousin MSNBC, a 24-hour channel that emphasizes left-leaning opinion.

Network representatives declined to comment on Monday.

Ms. McDaniel got to know a pair of top NBC News executives — Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees NBC News political coverage, and Rebecca Blumenstein, the NBC News president — when the network hosted a Republican presidential primary debate last year. (Ms. Blumenstein is a former editor at The New York Times.) Ms. Brown announced Ms. McDaniel’s hiring on Friday, writing in a memo that “it couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.”

Leadership at NBC believed that Ms. McDaniel — who has both boosted and clashed with Mr. Trump, and hails from the Romney Republican dynasty — would offer a helpful perspective to viewers seeking to understand the views of conservative voters, three people with knowledge of the internal conversations said.

Rashida Jones, the MSNBC president, was briefed on the hiring, and Cesar Conde, the chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, signed off, the people said. Ms. McDaniel’s deal is worth about $300,000 a year, one of the people with knowledge of the conversations said.

Bringing on Washington operatives as commentators is a typical practice at major networks; ABC News, for instance, recently hired Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff. MSNBC hired Ms. Psaki, President Biden’s first White House press secretary, as an anchor in 2022.

But in Ms. McDaniel’s case, a chorus of Democrats and MSNBC viewers immediately cried foul on social media, citing her stewardship of the Republican Party during Mr. Trump’s presidency and her handling of his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

Anchors at MSNBC, some of whom have gone so far as to avoid broadcasting any live remarks by Mr. Trump on their programs, were alarmed that Ms. McDaniel would appear on their shows, three people with knowledge of their concerns said. Ms. Jones made a round of phone calls to reassure anchors that they did not need to book Ms. McDaniel.

Then, on Sunday, Ms. McDaniel appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The moderator, Kristen Welker, had booked the interview weeks earlier, but she was not aware that NBC was negotiating a paid position for Ms. McDaniel until shortly before the network’s announcement. Ms. Welker pressed Ms. McDaniel on whether she believed Mr. Biden had legitimately won the election.

“Fair and square, he won,” Ms. McDaniel replied, although she added, “I do think it’s fair to say there were problems in 2020.”

On a panel afterward, Mr. Todd told Ms. Welker, “Our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.” He added that NBC News journalists were “uncomfortable” working with Ms. McDaniel given the Republican National Committee’s treatment of them under her leadership.

Mr. Todd’s comments opened the floodgates. By Sunday evening, the chair of the Democratic National Committee had weighed in, accusing NBC of “allowing one of the key architects of that shameful period in our country the platform to whitewash her role.”

Ms. McDaniel, who has declined to comment on the NBC fracas, has long walked a fine line in regard to Mr. Trump’s election conspiracy theories.

In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. McDaniel repeated accusations about ballots and election machines in her home state, Michigan, that state officials disputed and later debunked. She participated in a call with Mr. Trump in which he placed pressure on Wayne County canvassing officials not to certify the election results, according to a recording reported by The Detroit News.

But Ms. McDaniel also kept the Republican National Committee away from Mr. Trump’s increasingly audacious lawsuits to overturn the election. She did not endorse his most outlandish theories — such as the hacking of voting machines by foreign powers — although she appeased him in other ways, talking about voting “irregularity” and creating an “election integrity” operation within the national committee.

Some Trump allies criticized her for not taking stronger action to question election processes. A person close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it seemed that Ms. McDaniel was “going through the motions” and never really believed the 2020 election was stolen.

On Monday’s “Morning Joe,” Ms. Brzezinski told viewers, “To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.” But she said Ms. McDaniel’s actions surrounding the 2020 election disqualified her from such a position.

“It goes without saying,” Ms. Brzezinski added, “that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor.” (New York Times)

MSNBC prime time host Rachel Maddow blasted her own network over its recent decision to hire former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator.

“If you care what I think about this, the fact that McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me that is inexplicable,” Maddow said on her show Monday. “You wouldn’t hire a wise guy … a made man, like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office. You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TA screener. And so, I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.” (The Hill).

My suspicion - Ronna will soon be gone from NBC, as will some of the NBC decision-makers.

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More Trump rants and threats over the weekend.

A man who believes his own cheating and lies.

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Trump’s Monday.

Judge Keeps April 15 as Start of Trump Hush-Money Criminal Trial.

Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to hide a potential sex scandal is scheduled to start on April 15 after a judge on Monday denied the former president’s attempts to delay it further.

For roughly an hour on Monday morning, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, slammed arguments from Mr. Trump’s lawyers that his case should be pushed back any further because of newly disclosed documents from a related federal investigation.

After a brief break, the judge returned to the courtroom, said that no harm had been done to the former president by the delayed disclosure of the documents and finalized the new trial date.

“Defendant has been given a reasonable amount of time,” the judge said, crisply, referring to Mr. Trump.

The ruling — almost exactly a year after the Manhattan district attorney’s office won an indictment of Mr. Trump — makes it all but certain the former president will go on trial next month. If he does, he will be the first former American president to face a trial on criminal charges, even as three other cases against him remain mired in appeals and delays.

After the hearing, Mr. Trump pledged to appeal the judge’s decision, attacking the district attorney’s case as “election interference.”

The trial stems from a hush-money payment that Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen made to the porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, accused Mr. Trump of orchestrating that payment to keep Ms. Daniels quiet about her account of having had sex with Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said that Mr. Trump then falsified documents to hide reimbursements to Mr. Cohen.

The trial had originally been set to begin Monday, but earlier this month Justice Merchan delayed it until April 15, citing the documents from federal prosecutors who previously investigated Mr. Cohen, who is expected to be the star witness in the Manhattan trial.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers, casting the disclosure as evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, asked Justice Merchan to delay the trial 90 days, or throw out the case altogether. Mr. Bragg argued against further delays, saying that the new materials are largely irrelevant or duplicative.

On Monday, the judge sided with the prosecutors. He suggested that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were dragging their feet and scolded them for what he said were unsubstantiated allegations made against the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

“You are literally accusing the Manhattan D.A.’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and trying to make me complicit in it,” the judge exclaimed.

His decision showed the limits of Mr. Trump’s battle-tested legal strategy of delay. Justice Merchan has overseen other proceedings that involve Mr. Trump’s associates — including the criminal trial of his business, the Trump Organization in 2022 — and has become familiar with the tactic.

Almost from the beginning of Monday’s hearing, the judge seemed skeptical of the arguments of one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche. He pressed him on the number of documents the defense considered to be relevant to the hush-money trial, saying, “I just want to get a sense of how much time you need.”

Appearing taken aback, Mr. Blanche consulted papers on the desk before him, and said that the answer was “tens of thousands.”

But Justice Merchan seemed dissatisfied. He said that Mr. Blanche was not answering his questions and that some of his statements were contradicted by the record. Eventually, the judge questioned Mr. Blanche’s résumé, asking him how long he had worked as a federal prosecutor.

Justice Merchan’s exchanges with the district attorney’s office were far less loaded. One of the prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, estimated that only about 300 documents were pertinent to the trial, and that “99 percent” were irrelevant, statements that the judge appeared to take seriously.

• The Manhattan case stems from Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels, who had hoped to sell her story of a one-night sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. That payment was made just before the 2016 election. After Mr. Trump became president, he reimbursed Mr. Cohen, and therein lay the crime, prosecutors say. Mr. Trump allowed his family business to falsify internal records, claiming that the reimbursement payments were legal expenses. The cover-up hid the scandal from voters, Mr. Bragg contends, casting it as an election-interference case. (New York Times).

Trump’s response after the Appeals Court stepped in and changed the amount of money he had to post. 19 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/live/GWpPxEGYQlg?si=XPOM_ztqoi7YleOS

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Over the weekend, Tammy Murphy, wife of the New Jersey Governor, dropped out of the Senate contest to replace Menendez.

Congressman Andy Kim is now the front-runner.

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Have 10 minutes? Want to feel great?

19 year old American figure skater Ilia Malinin is now world champion.

YouTube

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A reason for joy.

Yesterday was Gloria Steinem’s 90th birthday 🥳… we dropped by to say happy 90th. How much she means to us all and the world. The sculpture behind her was a gift from many of us. .. unveiled as well.

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