Trump tax returns

Random thoughts on Donald Trump. The Congressional Democrats, and the mainstream media:

Who prior to 2017 could have imagined a scenario in which any politician, much less the President of the United States, would feel compelled or emboldened to declare on national that he was a “stable genius”?

Since some time in 2015 or 2016 Donald Trump has claimed that he couldn’t or wouldn’t release his federal income tax returns apparently for any year because he was in an ongoing status of being “under audit”. Never mind that there is apparently no law, no legal justification for this claim. Nowhere does anything assert that being under audit represents a valid justification for wrapping his data in a cloke of secrecy. A few tepid justifications have been offered by him and his lawyers and supporters claiming that the great unwashed public would simply not be equipped to understand his returns without jumping to erroneous conclusions. The questions raised by this situation are many. Is EVERY year involved in an unresolved audit? Has IRS not been able to wrap up any of the specific audits? If some specific years have had their audits concluded and closed out, why can’t the returns for those years and the audit findings be revealed? How does the fact that each year an audit is opened relate to prior years? Why doesn’t the media press the president on the public’s right to know what public officials’ finances looks like? How is concealing this in the best interests of the nation?

And this week Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has bought into the administration’s claim that Congress cannot compel release of this information absent a clear “legislative purpose” to Congress’s demand. I do predict this defense will eventually crumble before the third equal branch of the federal government, the Judiciary. But this three years+ of “running out the clock” is at a minimum frustrating. And the claim by Trump and his supporters that the entire question was rendered moot by the 2016 elections is insulting and one that the media and the Congressional Democrats should not let stand unchallenged.

Television Coverage of News Events

Recently on a Sunday morning a friend of a friend woke up, turned on the TV intending to get his daily fix of the “Kavanaugh saga”. But this friend was particular. He wanted to watch it through the lens of those who produce “Meet the Press” on NBC. Sadly he discovered that the morning's NBC shows had all been preempted by the Ryder Cup Finals. So he lamented to my friend or on social media his distress over being denied this week's “Meet the Depressed”.

I know how he felt. Three days earlier I had been denied my regular dose of “Price is Right” because CBS decided to preempt their entire day's programming with the Senate Judiciary Hearing concerning Justice Kavanaugh's suitability for confirmation. I had already decided to wait on the news bunnies' recap of the riviting testimony. So I tried to substitute “Price is Right” with a local news segment on ABC or FOX or even something on public television. No such luck. Every local channel, plus public TV, plus all the cable news channels, including BBC and C-Span had all decided that only they separately and individually could produce the true, “fair and unbalanced” peek into the Senate chambers I needed. So the same hearings were broadcast simultaneously on at least 5 local and 7 national cable channels.

Was this collusion to ensure that if I watched TV Thursday daytime that I would for sure watch Senators Grassley, et al at their “finest”? Did CBS not trust its “Price is Right” viewers to record the Senate proceedings on another channel and dutifully watch it after “Price” ended? I obviously don't understand the thought processes at work here. I understood all three channels covering the Kennedy funeral in 1963. I understood however many (7 or 8?) channels covering the events of 9/11/2001. But from my humble point of view things have gotten out of hand. We shouldn't have to settle for Home Shopping Network in order to find a TV show we want to watch that differs from the topic du jour.

But I triumphed. I clicked around until I landed on the Golf Channel's presentation of the opening round of the Ryder Cup competition.

It did make me chuckle on Sunday, however, to ponder how all the news junkies would have felt if the Ryder Cup Finals had been broadcast on ten or twelve channels simultaneously and deprived them of reactions from the White House.

National Public Radio

They've just not given this sufficient thought. Sometimes a communications shortcut that is arguably reasonable in one medium becomes much less so in others. Abbreviations and acronyms make sense in written communications, especially when the acronyms are clearly identified early in a news story or editorial. One shouldn't have to write out National Collegiate Athletic Association multiple times in an article when it can be identified as such initially and then referred to as NCAA following times. But what's true in print does not necessarily hold for use on the radio or TV.
But rather than lay additional groundwork, let me go straight to the specific example that prompted my screed. Today I was listening to National Public Radio (NPR). The reporter on the program commented on an email to the program complaining about this very issue. The listener declared she was annoyed when “they used acronyms and abbreviations without ever clarifying and identifying what some of the letters represented.” . The specific abbreviation that piqued her was BBC-OS. In this case she was not objecting to the BBC. Everybody hearing the program and everybody on NPR knows that BBC stands for the British Broadcasting Corporation or Company. The caller was pretty sure, though, that the “OS” was seldom or never explained. This gave the NPR person the opening to answer the question at some length. Seems “OS” is short for “Outside Sources”. As painfully explained, this meant virtually all sources since BBC doesn't internally create much news. But other than providing this definition, the NPR person never adequately responded to the complainer's complaint. Why couldn't they refer to this little news niche program as “Outside Sources” every time instead of the “OS” abbreviation? When speaking it, two syllables are required to say “O” and “S”. Only four syllables are expended in mouthing “Outside Sources”. The time savings orally fails to match the economy of abbreviating in writing.
It was mentioned in the excuses offered up by NPR that the habit of using abbreviations internally within all organizations, be they broadcasting corporations or government bureaucracies, at times represented merely “insider lingo”. They do allow those in the know to freeze out the unwashed.
I could wrap this up admitting that some acronyms can provide the same useful time savings orally that they do on the paper. This is especially true where the acronym does not dictate each letter being voiced if the acronym is also a recognizable word. It made sense for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties of the 70s and 80s to be referred to both in writing and on television as START treaties. But, having said that, I stand with the e-mailer that “inside baseball” abbreviations are often lazily used at the expense of clarity.

SO

Rather than write another blog on a current political topic or the latest media outrage I think I'll go to modern society and language.
                                                                     "So"

Recall, if you will, the time when one difference between the person on the street  and the one trained in public speaking was that the average person would often be caught beginning a sentence or thought or response to a question with some innocuous utterance such as “Uh” or “you know”. They might also continue to pepper their conversation with additional “uhs” and “you know”s, apparently believing that any sound was preferable to silence.

Though not totally eradicated, superfluous words are significantly reduced in most TV and radio interviews and conversations in recent years. The occasional athlete may still include a number of “you know”s and “uhs” in answers to painfully inane questions about how he felt sinking the winning shot or putt. But for the most part, one can listen to interviews without wincing as much.

There is a new trend, however, in public utterances. And this tends to hold both for politicians, scientists, and scholarly trained persons being interviewed concerning topics of their area of expertise.  The new trend is that after being asked a nice open-ended question designed to allow the respondent to wax eloquent the first word spoken in the answer well be, “So”. 

“How does the new MOAB bomb change the way we deal with ISIS”?

“So, it was designed and is intended to not only do effective damage such as reaching tunnel or underground targets but it also serves as a psychological weapon.”  [Hypothetical example]

What purpose does the introductory “So” serve in the answer?  It acknowledges the legitimacy of the question in the first place.  It seems to declare that what follows is indeed responsive to the question. 

“So” can exist in language as an adjective, adverb or conjunction. (Some dictionaries even include pronoun and noun uses.) The “so” I am addressing is the conjuction designed to introduce subsequent thought or information.

Listen to NPR or one of the TV news interview shows over the course of several programs and days and you’ll discover that “So” is so common an introduction to an answer that it is used more than half the time.  It has not yet become such a cliched use that it is distracting. Typically a responder will use it only at the beginning of an answer, not repeatedly throughout the explanation. This keeps it from becoming as annoying as “uh” and “you know” were for a number of years.

California shootings

The least I can do following the actions by the deranged young man in southern California this week is to repeat my screed once again.  And for those who are counting this is the fifth time I've done this. But I think I missed at least one additional opportunity in the last year or two.


"Multiple deaths similar to the Aurora movie house massacre are the price we pay as a society to underwrite the Second Amendment “rights” for “lawful gun owners.”" This is, sadly, the fourth and likely not the last time that I will use the above statement to begin a posting. I first used it following the Aurora CO moviehouse shooting and then following the Newtown CT school shooting and at least one other lesser but equally sad shooting incident. The only differences this time around are minor. The site of the shooting was a federal installation in Washington DC."

What continues to sadden and befuddle is the fact that by now even the kneejerk pundits and reporters no longer bother to raise the specter of suggesting that our insistence on worshipping the Second Amendment   has anything to do with this excessive string of similar events.  A few people on the tube dare to offer up the same tired rhetoric of whining that surely some lesson can be learned from this so that it will not continue.   But their solutions are always Monday morning quarterbacking type claims that local authorities "should have" identified the shooter as a threat and "done something" about him.

I agree that more resources could and should be devoted to addressing the needs and challenges of the emotionally and/or mentally challenged.  But we say that and then shrug our collective shoulders with the further thought, "What and spend our hard earned money on taxes to help others? Are you kidding?"

So, no.   This event will likely not produce any helpful change designed to prevent a recurrence. I wish it were not so.

AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

I must be missing something, maybe several somethings. Why do so many of my peers & friends detest and oppose the Affordable Care Act? Many people who are either Medicare eligible or federal retirees or both have, if they will admit it, benefited from aspects of “socialized medicine” for significant portions of their professional lives. Yet they now lambast the decisions taken by the country in 2009 and subsequently to extend the availabililty of medical care to large portions of the populace. Why? I do regretfully understand the position taken by some in the 20s – 30s age groups who prefer to roll the dice on their current state of good health and avoid the cost of insuring that it continues. That is and should be their “right”, perhaps. Except that the whole concept of insurance has always been that resources are produced by large portions of a population for concentrated use by isolated individuals when unplanned needs arose. And while a person may choose to go without automobile insurance coverages that address replacement or repair of their car if damaged, they cannot likewise decline liability coverages for dealing with what happens if their wreck damages someone else’s car and injures others. In this vein, I could agree with the libertarians that people should be free to pay or not pay for health insurance. If . . . and only if the hospitals and “the people” were free to decline to treat the uninsured. I also am totally missing the argument in the news the last few days that the ACA represents such a huge “tax”. Which specific taxes are set to rise?? And by how much? The “penalty” or “tax” for those who opt out of the “mandatory” coverage would affect a fairly small segment of the population. But what other taxes besides that will be exploding?

Punditry

It took today's jury verdict in the Casey Anthony case to roust me out of my summer doldrums (and create this Blog posting). The disclaimers have to be legion. Nobody rejoices when a precious child dies needlessly, regardless of who is responsible.
Justice in our judicial system sometimes produces results the public finds abhorrent. But it is still justice. Jurors are too often underestimated and too often pigeon-holed and unfairly characterized.
1. After it's all over, the "reasonable doubt" bar is a high one, but necessary for capital murder cases. What's surprising to me is that the prosecution believed they had cleared this bar even though they couldn't tell how the toddler was killed or when or where.
2. The media is raring to tear apart the jurors for their unexpected verdict. And they are foaming at the mouth over the seemingly wise initial decision by jurors to avoid the media lynching at this time.
3. Pundits "convicted" Casey almost solely on the basis of her immature, inappropriate behavior during the weeks and months following the Caylee's disappearance. She did not behave the way an innocent mother should.
4. When it was first announced this morning that a verdict had been reached, the media jumped to the wrong conclusion and began declaring that it had to mean guilty on the most severe charge and was speculating on capital punishment. Imagine their chagrine when the 3 most severe charges were all returned as "Not guilty".
5. The defense attorney in his statement to the press following the verdict provided a clear analysis of how capital punishment ends up distorting "justice" in some murder cases, like this one.