We began today with the investigative team of Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire writing for The New York Times about the questions and red flags raised by Number 45’s tax returns, newly released by the House Ways and Means Committee.
The new material, obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee after a yearslong legal battle, raised a multitude of questions about the methods Mr. Trump had employed while president to lower his income taxes, and about failures by the Internal Revenue Service to fully investigate those deductions.
The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan panel that is known for reviewing the impact of tax legislation and has a staff with deep tax law expertise, reviewed the Trump returns and found dozens of red flags that it believed required further investigation. [...]
The congressional report said the I.R.S. explored whether Mr. Trump correctly deducted the $21 million he had paid to settle a series of fraud claims against the now-defunct Trump University. It was not clear, the report said, whether Mr. Trump had received any insurance proceeds that offset some portion of the settlement. The outcome of that review was not known.
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent of The Washington Post write about a fundamental disagreement between Republicans and Democrats regarding the general nature of government oversight.
...Republicans seem to be openly declaring that they themselves will now use the release of tax returns as a political weapon, in revenge for this terrible affront to Trump’s privacy.
This highlights a genuine disagreement between the parties. Republicans are inclined to treat oversight as something that is inevitably political to its core, because they believe that government is bad or corrupt by default. In this telling, oversight was weaponized by Democrats, and Republicans will weaponize it in response.
Democrats, by contrast, operate from a different starting point. They are politicians, so the political benefits of oversight will of course tempt them, but they also tend to believe that oversight can and should be conducted in good faith, with a genuine public-interest rationale, and usually seek to meet that standard (while also behaving as politicians).
This episode is a case in point. House Democrats are seizing on the fruits of this oversight to try to improve the system: They are set to vote this week on a bill that would codify the requirement that the IRS audit the tax returns of presidents, and make that information available to the public.
Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare says that the executive summary of the Jan. 6 committee’s full and final report appears to not account for other federal agencies that failed to anticipate and adequately prepare for the violence that ensued on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.
Jan. 6 is a story about Trump and his supporters, but it is also a story about how the federal government dropped the ball on anticipating and preparing for violence. As NBC states in its reporting on the summary’s odd framing, many experts and former officials have termed this “the biggest intelligence failure since Sept. 11.” The FBI produced only one document in the run-up to Jan. 6 warning of potential violence—a bulletin not from FBI headquarters or the desk of the director, but from the bureau’s Norfolk, Virginia, field office. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that he was not aware of that report in advance of Jan. 6. According to the bureau’s top counterterrorism official, the FBI was also not aware of online conversations about potential violence in the days before the insurrection—a bizarre statement given that the plans for violence were plainly available to anyone with an internet connection.
And the failures were not confined to the FBI. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that several divisions within the department’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis identified the risk of violence in advance of Jan. 6, but that the department failed to distribute this information widely. The office “did not issue any intelligence products about these threats until January 8,” the inspector general wrote—two days after the riot. Likewise, a June 2021 report from the Senate Rules Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee describes in detail how officials at the Capitol Police found themselves utterly unprepared on Jan. 6. Again, some members of the Capitol Police identified the risk of violence ahead of time, but these assessments were not communicated widely either within the agency or outside it.
None of this is to take away from the actions of Capitol Police, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and other law enforcement officers at the Capitol during the insurrection. Many people engaged in acts of genuine heroism that day. The failures I’m describing here have to do with the government’s failures to prepare in advance—many of which can be laid at the leadership of agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, who failed to steer their employees toward focusing on the obvious threat in advance of the insurrection.
The result was that the government was caught unawares on Jan. 6—with catastrophic effects. But you wouldn’t know that from reading the committee’s executive summary.
Charles Blow of The New York Times thinks that the Teflon which seemed to appear around Number 45 may be gone.
Years, decades, of twisted propaganda had turned working-class white people into a victimized class. These white people saw themselves as the new Negro, in a turned-tables alternate reality. Society’s rules threatened to — or, had already begun to — work against them.
Trump, the trickster and rule-breaker, emerges as an amalgamation of their anxieties and rebellion. He was a politician, but to them, above politics. The Donald was approaching deity. His followers embraced a cultish zealotry.
But things have changed.
Trump’s announcement of a third run for the White House landed with a thud. High-profile Republicans have refused to sign on as early endorsers. Trump himself is cloistered at Mar-a-Lago, having not held a single public campaign event since his announcement. In fact, he has been reduced to the low and laughable position of personally hawking digital trading cards of himself. (Trump has always seen his die-hard supporters as customers to whom he could sell a product, whether a candidacy or a card.) [...]
So, what happened? In short, God bled. And once you see God bleed, you can no longer believe that someone is God.
Of course, for some religions and mythologies, strength is gained by the touch and/or taste of the god’s blood; after all, a lot of Trump’s most earnest supporters do believe that he was sent by God. But Trump is neither Xerxes nor Thanos, true enough.
David Smith of the Guardian evaluates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to a joint session of a “polarized” U.S. Congress.
It takes a lot to impress long-in-the-tooth politicians but the Time magazine person of the year’s combination of star quality and steel core was enough. As every member rose to their feet, applauding and hollering, even Zelenskiy was overwhelmed for a moment. “It’s too much for me,” he said.
He stood at the same spot that American presidents do when delivering the State of the Union address but cut a very different figure with short dark hair, a moustache and beard. The House waived a rule that requires men to wear a jacket and tie inside the chamber, allowing him to wear a sweater in his trademark wartime olive. He read his speech from pages placed on the lectern before him, tracing the words with his index finger as he spoke English in a raspy, accented voice. [...]
More than one historian compared the visit to Winston Churchill sailing to America soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill held a press conference with President Franklin Roosevelt and joined him in the ceremonial lighting of the National Christmas Tree. He also addressed Congress in the Senate chamber on 26 December 1941. At the end of his half-hour speech, the chief justice gave a “V” for victory sign and one reporter observed: “The effect was instantaneous, electric. The cheers swelled into a roar.”
Cheers turned to roars again for Zelenskiy when, in a nod to Churchill, he declared: “Ukraine holds its lines and will never surrender.”
Belén Fernández of AlJazeera writes about the problems of colorism and racism in Mexico and throughout Latin America.
Nowadays in Mexico, the citizen-consumer is bombarded with advertising images that blatantly illustrate the overlap of racism and classism in the social hierarchy. From beer and car companies to department stores and supermarket chains, the whiteness of ads has become a sort of sinister elephant in the room, urging poor Mexicans to spend their way out of socioeconomic misery into an impossibly whiter future.
As social anthropologist Juris Tipa notes in a 2020 peer-reviewed paper on “colourism” in Mexican advertising, the overwhelmingly dominant casting profile requested by firms for commercial advertisements is “international Latino” — which basically translates into someone with light skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, “reinforcing the imagery of a ‘Europeanised Latin Americanity’” at the expense of the average Mexican.[...]
Of course, the unbearable whiteness of advertising is hardly confined to Mexico. Travelling by bus years ago through Peru, I recall questioning the logic behind populating highway billboards with Scandinavian-type models in a country where the majority of humans are brown.
Finally today, Christoph Giesen of Der Spiegel chronicles China’s journey from the extremes of a zero-COVID policy that has utterly failed to contain the Omicron variant within its borders.
For almost three years, the Chinese leadership stubbornly pursued its zero-COVID strategy, with the state-controlled media gushing with praise for the "dynamic zero." Almost every day, news outlets in the country made a point of saying that it was only thanks to the wise leadership of state and party leader Xi Jinping that China had been able to defeat the treacherous virus. In the United States and Europe, Chinese media has been fond of pointing out, cases are rampant, and people are dying – but in China, all is well.
But the highly contagious Omicron variant of the virus also began spreading in China. And instead of adjusting its strategy to meet the challenge, by launching a new vaccination offensive and preparing the country for a cautious opening as has been done in places like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, Beijing opted for severity. In Shanghai, 26 million people were forced to spend several weeks isolated in their apartments in April and May. In almost all other Chinese metropolises, residents had to submit to a PCR test every two to three days in order to be permitted to take part in everyday life.
That, though, is a thing of the past. The country’s complete isolation is now being followed by an equally radical opening. The pressure from the street, which erupted in late November in the form protests against the government’s corona policies in more than 20 cities, apparently had an effect. And that in a country where the regime almost never bends in the face of protests. Nevertheless, Xi Jinping now finds himself in a dilemma: Winter has hardly even begun and the lockdowns and massive number of tests have already likely cost hundreds of millions of euros. But Xi didn’t slowly back away from that approach, he reversed course suddenly – with the result that the People's Republic is now staggering from one extreme to the next.
Have a good day, everyone and for those in the way of snow and sub-zero wind chills, stay safe and warm!