Donald Trump Leaks Excerpts from his 2005 Tax Returns

This morning it was announced on the Stephanie Miller show that Donald Trump’s 2005 Federal Income taxes had been leaked to the public.  But now they are saying that it was a deliberate Trump leak.  Apparently it’s only a few pages and there is absolutely nothing surprising in there despite all of the hype I hear that Rachael Maddaw gave the topic on her show, talking her audience to death.  “If you get unsolicited evidence in the mail then it’s not eves dropped”.   But if it’s only the first two pages there could still be all sorts of stuff in that tax return of 2005 we don’t know.  Trump made a little over 150 million dollars that year and paid 24% of that income in taxes.  That’s more than Romney paid, which was around fourteen percent if I recall.  He paid 38 million in taxes.  But I don’t see why you get to cherry pick a three decade carrier and pick perhaps a year where there is no funny business, at least from the pages that were released.  2005 was still a dozen years ago.  What’s he doing right now?

Tomorrow, March 16^th is the day that the Muslim travel ban is scheduled to go into place now for the second attempt.  However at the last minute the courts in Washington, Hawaii, California and Maryland are moving to put a halt to the travel ban.   There arises a question as to what is a credible story and what is not.  Shawn Hannity says there is no evidence of a Russian connection to the Trump campaign.  All of the people on our side of the political fence insist there is a ton of evidence there is campaign collusion with Russia, if we would only look at it, but nobody wants to look at it.  On the other hand Shawn says that President Obama bugged the Trump Tower during last year’s campaign.  In Shawn’s mind this is a credible story. 

Shawn Hannity is not any happier with the American Health Care plan than people on our side of the fence are.  Shawn doesn’t see anything good in the bill either and believes that it will fail.  And when it fails it will embarrass the Republican Party as well as the Trump administration.   The correct figures are that 24 million people will get thrown off health care in ten years.  But right now the figure is fourteen million and it will go up to eighteen million in a couple of years.  I know Trump has attacked the Congressional Budget Office saying their figures aren’t correct.  Nobody has attacked the CBO till now.  People on both sides have trusted this entity for years, and I see no reason to begin mistrusting them now.  Apparently the CBO came into existence after the Nixon administration, because nobody could trust Nixon.

Kisselev is the name of the Russian embassador who is feeding Donald Trump all of these names he is stocking his administration with.  He appointed another high figure from Goldman Sachs just today.   The thing is you get a little nugget of information here or there but nobody puts all the pieces together into one of these police crime time-lines.  We need reporters like Woodward and Bernstein today.  But we don’t have that.  According to Hannity these reporters all just tweet one another to flatter each other and build each other up.  I share Shawn’s frustration that there is nobody weaving a tapestry of facts, strands and slows of evidence kind of like Theodore White did with his four books on “The Making of the President”.  In his books all of the campaigns has this air of inevitability about it the way White tells the story.   

I listened to rhapsody in black.  There were a lot of fly-by-night songs.  The hits were “Church Bells May Ring” and “Slipping and a Sliding” by Little Richard, “Bullweevle” by Fats Domino “The Magic Touch” by the Platters and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”.  They also played “Down in Mexico” by the Coasters.  Then he had some kind of guest and I turned it off.