Across MAGAland, there is a new villain threatening Donald Trump, and there’s no rule that says the things they’re accusing him of have to be real.

Jack Posobiec, self-appointed internet provocateur and Trump fan, headed to Twitter on Monday to complain, declaring that Judge Juan Merchan was threatening to arrest Trump for missing a day of court to attend his son Barron Trump’s graduation.

Now, others are chiming in, calling Merchan “evil” and “disgusting” for not allowing a man to see his youngest child graduate.

The only problem is that Judge Merchan has issued no such order.

In fact, Merchan is giving a lot of leeway in scheduling, skipping days for Passover, asking jurors for days that they need to be away for religious holidays, and skipping Wednesdays altogether. As for May 17, when Trump says he needs the day off to attend a graduation, he said he won’t rule yet, but will wait to see if the proceedings are on schedule, accordingto Inner City Press.

That means that the defense could help accommodate the requested absence by simply not drawing things out as long as possible, but delay is a standard tactic in the Trump bag of tricks.

Trump’s fans are irate, however, over the order that they mistakenly think was handed down, though. Jason Miller, a senior advisor to Trump, turned to social media to moan, too. He tweeted, spreading the misleading propaganda:

“This is how disgusting the Biden Trial has become. Not even letting the President attend his son’s high school graduation. Nothing but a political attack.”

His post clearly reached a lot of angry fans, because he received a lot of responses musing about the optics of Trump being arrested at his son’s graduation, or about Trump skipping court and daring the judge to order his arrest.

While it is true that Trump was warned that his absence could lead to a warrant being issued, that caveat was part of the standard warnings that criminal defendants are given, and was not in direct connection to the graduation request.

Other Trump fans tweeted further musings, such as whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would protect his former presidential rival by preventing his arrest.

Another claimed that Trump had already been forced to miss being by Melania Trump’s side when her mother died, and that having to miss Barron’s graduation as well is just more evidence that accused felon is being prosecuted by “evil.”

(Trump elected to be in court after his mother-in-law died, and traveled to rallies both before and after his appearance; he was not even required to be present in that case. This time, it’s a criminal charge rather than civil proceedings, and criminal defendants are typically expected to show up.)

Trump himself has not made any direct response to the lack of ruling yet, nor to the false claims that a ruling was issued. Let’s see what he posts on TruthSocial tonight, however.

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post TEMPEST: What’s the OUTRAGE over the Barron Trump high school graduation? appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., running as an independent candidate for president, says that he was invited to be the  running mate for Donald Trump, as he slams the former president in a new statement.

Trump’s team has denied that this ever happened.

The truth could be anywhere between the two claims, but Kennedy is currently making the claim as part of an attack on both Trump and President Joe Biden, as he implies that he’s the candidate Trump is really worried about.

Kennedy has been defensive of Trump at times, but he’s also attacked Trump, claiming that the former and current president are actually a lot alike on issues such as the national debt. (In reality, while almost every president has increased the national debt, Trump did so by more than almost 4 times the percentage Biden has, according to Investopedia.)

On Monday morning, as Trump sat in court unable to respond, Kennedy lashed out. He tweeted:

“President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical. I’m soooo liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his VP. I respectfully declined the offer.”

Kennedy further declared that Biden “can’t win,” and said that Trump’s website shows who he’s afraid of.

Currently, Trump’s campaign site redirects to pleas for cash and complaints about being in court, and even after dodging around that, none of the main tabs shows any focus on Kennedy, so it’s not clear what the Independent candidate means, unless he meant to refer to TruthSocial, Trump’s media site.

If so, it’s true that Trump has mentioned him a few times lately, including the claim that he’s “far-left,” but he’s devoted a fraction of the attention to Kennedy that he has to the current president, who he accuses of masterminding all his legal troubles.

Back in January, Trump’s senior campaign advisor denied that the team had approached Kennedy, according to NewsNation.

Kennedy is not responding to questions about who, exactly, the “emissaries” were that approached him.

It was recently exposed that at least some of his own campaign staff hopes to employ him as a ‘spoiler’ who can pull votes away from Biden so that Trump has a better chance of success in 2024.

Kennedy’s full statement can be seen below.

President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical. I’m soooo liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his VP. I respectfully declined the offer.

I am against President Trump, and President Biden can’t win.

Judging by his new website, it looks like President Trump knows who…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 15, 2024

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post HELL MATCH: Did Trump really offer Robert Kennedy Jr. a VP slot? appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

If you are, like me, terminally online, you may have seen that the social media Discourse of the past 48 hours has been “is it ok to dislike children?” As far as I can tell, this stems from a tweet wherein a man posted his approval of a pub sign reading “Dog friendly / child free” and everyone lost their collective minds. Child-free pubs were characterized as examples of colonization and social decay, were accused of banning parents and women in particular, and were said to be discriminating against the most vulnerable class of humans. Many, many people were clear that, unlike the colonizing yuppies, they prefer children to dogs. And many other people were clear that they had no problem with children, but they definitely had a problem with entitled parents (many others did, in fact, just have a problem with children).

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And then: A whole second day of Discourse when someone else tweeted that “it’s fine and normal to dislike children.” Many, many people tweeted in response that it is neither fine nor normal to dislike children, especially given that children are the world’s most vulnerable group (that argument was repeated many, many times).

I personally like children quite a bit, even if I have spent most of my adult life actively trying not to have them. I do not always love parental decision making, such as playing any child’s device out loud in public, and I can very much understand why someone would not want to have children or even spend time around them. Kids: I think they are great, but they not for everybody! But I also think it’s generally unhelpful and petulant to complain about the simple presence of children either in public spaces or in places like airplanes where there’s really not a better option when you have to get from A to B. As for kids in bars, I will be honest, I think it depends on the bar and the kid. I generally don’t really care as long as I don’t have to listen to Miss Rachel out loud on the tablet, but I also don’t think it’s so entirely unreasonable for adults to desire some adults-only spaces. If your bar is child-free, that is fine, many people will enjoy that and others will decide it’s not for them. And if other adults are annoyed at children or go out of their way to avoid them, well, that’s ok too as long as they aren’t jerks about it.

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But as we go in for the one-thousandth round of “is it ok to dislike kids” or “should kids be in public spaces,” it seems worth pointing out that the surface discourse on loving or hating children actually has very little to do with the very real vulnerability children experience in the world — vulnerability that is innate, being that children are small humans who generally cannot fend for themselves, but also exaggerated by laws, customs, cultures, and acts of individual and social neglect that leave children far worse off than they should be.

In the US, it’s overwhelmingly the same people who style themselves as pro-child and pro-family who are the most politically hostile to the actual well-being of children. Conservatives have for decades emphasized their love of children and babies, while cutting funding for public education and children’s healthcare, doing nothing to stop the gun murders of children in schools, opposing paid leave for the people who birth and raise those children, stripping school lunches of any nutritional value, and sometimes putting deadly weapons in their own children’s hands and then taking family Christmas photos. These are not generally people who identify as “child-free.” They are overwhelmingly people who say they love kids. But they are people who are really, really bad for children.

On an individual level, it’s also generally not the “I don’t like to be around kids” people who are neglecting and abusing children — they’re just ignoring them, or perhaps complaining about them on the internet. Child abuse and neglect are nonpartisan behaviors, but it is notable that many conservative, religious parenting philosophies overtly promote and condone child abuse, including hitting your children to get them to submit. They often encourage and romanticize large families, pushing parents to have more children than they can actually care for financially and emotionally — a recipe for neglect. And many abusive parents have managed to cover up their crimes by pulling their children out of public school, a tactic the Republican Party has enabled by encouraging and then overwhelmingly refusing to regulate homeschooling (conservative states are also those where you generally still find corporal punishment in schools).

We also know that child abuse and neglect are tied to poverty and other stressors that American conservatives do very little to eliminate, and much to exacerbate.

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Most child-free people, as far as I can tell, do not hate children. Many adore children, they just don’t want to raise them; others don’t adore children and generally avoid them but don’t hate them either. And no doubt many people who really dislike children or are hostile to children in public spaces are also parents. But regardless of the reality, the childfree are generally the ones presumed to be hostile to children. So it’s interesting to look at the demographics of the child-free in America, where not having children is disproportionately common among highly-educated city-dwelling liberal women and gay men, and realize that the same people being tarred as child-haters are also the ones overwhelmingly voting and advocating for the policies which most benefit children and mothers. If that goes along with preferring a dog-friendly child-free local pub and allowing a look of annoyance to cross one’s face when one hears a screaming baby in a fancy restaurant, honestly, I’ll take it.

None of this is to say that “I dislike children” is a good way to move through the world. It can be incredibly socially septic for parents and mothers especially to feel as though their public presence with children is consistently met with hostility or resentment. And I do think this hits mothers harder than fathers, given all of the messages women get about being quiet and not inconveniencing other people, not to mention all of the messages about how insufferable and uncool mothers are. I have personally seen so many mothers I know twist themselves into pretzels to keep themselves in the world and socialize their children, but try to do it in some perfect and impossible way that annoys no one. Children are people in the world, and they are sometimes going to act like children, and that is not a parental failure. We’d all be a lot better off if we generally met each other with more grace and patience, and if we realized that living in a society alongside other people means living alongside other people’s foibles and annoying behaviors and inadequacies and developmental differences.

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But let’s also maintain a sense of proportion, and an understanding that what one says about children does not necessarily correlate with how one actually treats children — especially children as a group, not just your own personal adorable child. In fact, political and social identities premised on loving children have often been used to push incredibly damaging anti-child laws, policies, and norms. Insisting that childbearing is (or should be) a choice, and that people (women especially) are valuable for our humanity and not our reproductive capacity have been great victories for women and society, but also for children, who are today better treated, supported, and esteemed than at just about any other point in human history. It turns out that when having children is not required to be considered an adult of decent character and social standing, and when the social consensus moves toward an ideal of children being wanted rather than religiously, socially, or legally mandated, children wind up much better off. A whole society that hates kids is obviously not going to be a very good one. But some members of a diverse and free society concluding that they don’t want to have children, some because they legitimately do not like being around them? It turns out that by making parenthood less socially compulsory, those ostensible child-haters also made parenthood, and by extension childhood, better.

So be mad on the internet, it’s very satisfying. But reserve some of your ire for the people who are actually making children’s lives worse — and that’s overwhelmingly not the child-free, but the very vocally “pro-family.”

xx Jill

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Over the last half-century or so, the share of corporate stock that is owned by investors with taxable mutual funds or brokerage accounts has fallen dramatically. Steven M. Rosenthal and Livia Mucciolo tell the story in “Who’s Left to Tax? Grappling With a Dwindling Shareholder Tax Base” (Tax Notes, April 1, 2024).

Here’s their figure showing a breakdown of who owns stock in US publicly traded corporations. Back in the 1980s, 80% of this ownership was in the form of taxable accounts. But the share of US corporate stock held by foreign investors and retirement accounts has risen substantially, and nonprofits own a chunk of US corporate stocks as well. So in the last two decades, only 20-30% of US corporate stock is in taxable accounts.

Rosenthal and Mucciolo offer some additional discussion of how these groups are taxed. For example, dividends paid by US firms are taxable, even when paid to foreign investors, but these payments are governed by international treaties. They explain: “However, the rate is often reduced by tax treaties between the United States and the home country of the foreign investor: from 30 percent to 15 percent on portfolio investment dividends, for example, and 5 percent or even 0 percent on dividends from direct investments.” Foreign investors do not pay capital gains on stocks to the US government–instead, such gains are taxable in their home country. If US firms use the increasingly common practice of distributing funds to their investors by repurchasing their shares, then such payments are treated as capital gains, not dividends.

For retirement accounts, the common practice is that the money is not taxed when it goes into the account, and the returns are not taxed as they occur over time. Instead, retirement money is taxed as income to the taxpayer when it is received after retirement. Nonprofit, of course, are not subject to income taxes.

With these patterns in mind, proposals for taxing owners of corporate stock as a group–not just the minority who hold their investments in taxable brokerage and mutual fund accounts–are going to run into complexities. Dramatic changes in retirement accounts or international tax treaties are not a simple matter, in politics or economics. Jacking up taxes on the 20-30% of shareholders who are taxable would created incentives to push their share even lower. One can make an argument that a reason for an explicit tax on corporate income is that it has become so difficult to tax the gains to shareholders of those firms.

The authors describe the challenges without trying to spell out policy recommendations. They note: “The transformation over the past 60 years in the nature of U.S. stock ownership from overwhelmingly domestic taxable accounts to overwhelmingly foreign and tax-exempt investors has many important policy implications, including how we can most effectively tax corporate profits; who is affected by changes in corporate taxation; and the form of corporate payouts to shareholders. Policymakers must continue the process, only now beginning, of grappling with the dwindling shareholder tax base.”

The post Why So Many Shareholders of US Firms are Untaxed first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, held a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday and demonstrated exactly why voters should be concerned about his mental state, as signs of the increasing encroachment of dementia were disturbingly evident in his speech to the crowd.

As he usually does, the multiply-indicted former president made up exceedingly unlikely events out of thin air.

He claimed, for instance, that a group of immigrants had illegally arrived in the U.S. from the Congo via the southern border, insisting with no evidence whatsoever that they were sent from prisons, although he wouldn’t reveal what he thought their crimes were.

(It’s a claim he’s made before, and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has denounced it as a lie, according to CNN.)

In further xenophobic rants, he seemed to try to tell a story about an “illegal alien,” but struggled to pronounce the word “alien,” instead coming up with something like:

“An illegal adleeitathin, and you just look at this what’s happening, it’s it crazy? Really?”

Critics of Trump point to episodes like this as examples of the aphasia that is often a precursor to full-blown dementia.

That was followed up by musing about how much better things would be if suspected drug dealers were executed quickly. So much for due process and the rule of law.

On the other hand, Trump seemed to admit he doesn’t actually care about the transphobic attacks he makes about gendered sports. He said he’s “always embarrassed” when he talks about transgender women (he calls them “men”) being allowed to participate in “women’s what,” because, he asks, “Who the hell would care?”

His Pennsylvania audience was treated to some of Trump’s greatest hits as he dipped into his quiver of other tried and tested lies, including the false claim that District Attorney Alvin Bragg was appointed by financier George Soros, the bogeyman of many MAGA conspiracy theories.

He added the assertion that a vote for President Biden is a vote for the end of the rule of law — an ironic utterance coming from the man who mused about suspending the Constitution — and repeated his favorite fib that wind power isn’t feasible because it kills all the birds.

Trump repeated his lies about the 2020 election being “stolen,” pushed propaganda to set up the same claims about 2024, and reiterated his usual false claims about the gag orders in his court cases. Contrary to his claims, the New York gag order doesn’t prevent him from talking about the case, only from attempting to interfere by attacking witnesses and court staff, which he hasn’t stopped doing.

In other apparent moments of confusion, Trump seemed to struggle with remembering anything about the battle of Gettysburg (except that he’s pretty sure it was “vicious” and “interesting”), and seemed to speak in the present tense about General Robert E. Lee’s current feelings about the Civil War, perhaps attempting to reference Lee’s unwillingness to have Confederate monuments after they surrendered.

He seemed to confuse Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary run with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s in the current election cycle, grumbling about “what they did to Kennedy.” Or maybe he was he was rambling about the assassination of JFK for some unknown reason?

Trump also complained about the “United States Seal Company” being “sold to Japan.” Rather than the off-shoring of America’s valuable pinniped business, he seems to have been attempting to refer to the U.S. Steel Company, which is closing a deal for a merger with a Japanese company, though stockholders are not unhappy about the deal, according to CBS.

In another oddity — one that caught the attention of President Biden’s campaign — Trump griped about a “magastine” that he says he’s never read, but assumes is “left-wing” and “doesn’t like Trump.”

Describing Trump’s mentally challenged gaffes isn’t nearly as good as seeing them for yourselves. Take a look:

Trump claims immigrants are entering the country who don’t know where they come from, and that former inmates from the Congo showed up recently.

Trump is just out here making stuff up pic.twitter.com/1CQuIdpTm8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump indicates his attacks on trans women in sports are pure pandering.

Trump: I'm always embarrassed when I say and I will stop men from playing in women's what. Who the hell would care? pic.twitter.com/wvrKZx4nVk

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2024

Trump claims Soros appointed Bragg and Biden is ending the rule of law.

"A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to end the rule of law" — more projection from Trump pic.twitter.com/PrnxvY08xx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump rallies to save the birds.

Trump: Wind doesn’t work. It kills all your birds pic.twitter.com/RHIoOZmFSu

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2024

Trump lies about stolen elections.

"We're not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024!" — Trump is lying about the 2020 election being stolen, but it's worth noting that while he proclaims he won't let Dems steal another one, he has no plan to prevent it from happening. It's all vibes. pic.twitter.com/agYeIhLix6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump on his gag order.

Trump: On Monday in New York City. I will be forced to sit fully gagged. I'm not allowed to talk. Can you believe it? They want to take away my constitutional right to talk pic.twitter.com/KktFkkjUar

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2024

Trump glitches and calls for execution of suspected drug dealers.

Trump endorses the speedy execution of accused drug dealers pic.twitter.com/2ExeWOSVKA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump on Gettysburg, General Lee, and the U.S. as a failed nation.

"We're ready to be a failed nation" — Trump pic.twitter.com/Smxo84SIeZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump on Democrats and Kennedy.

"What they did to Kennedy was terrible" — Trump seems to confuse RFK Jr and Bernie Sanders pic.twitter.com/WrJs2QtiV1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump is worried about the “United States Seal Company.”

Trump: United States Seal Company… is being sold to Japan pic.twitter.com/8DkCQsciNJ

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2024

Biden’s campaign shares Trump’s “magastine” slip.

Trump, confused: This was a magastine that I’ve never read pic.twitter.com/slnq1BelKz

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 14, 2024

With his schedule for the weeks ahead tied up in his felony trial in Manhattan, Trump will have to cut back on his campaign rallies. It will be interesting to see, however, how the stress of his trial — as well as the three other major legal proceedings he faces — will affect his already rapidly deteriorating mental state.

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post CALL A DOCTOR! Trump’s mental confusion DOMINATES Pennsylvania rally appeared first on Occupy Democrats.