Friday Reads

It’s the Labor Day weekend which usually puts people in the mood for autumn!

In New Orleans, tis the season of Southern Decadence!  I imagine the Kim Davis costumes will be everywhere!  I’ve already seen a tremendous number of her face photoshopped onto an orange jumpsuit with various members of the cast of Orange is the New Black. My guess is there will be plenty of that in the flesh on Bourbon Street this weekend.  She’s in jail but her staff is putting out marriage licenses for all couples while she stews in her martyr soup.

When the Rowan County Courthouse opened for business Friday, deputy clerk Brian Mason was waiting at the front counter, behind a sign reading: “Marriage License Deputy.”

James Yates and William Smith Jr. entered the media-filled courthouse shortly after 8 a.m. and began the process of applying for a marriage license. Again.

They had been rejected five times previously, as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to any couples since the Supreme Court declared in June that gay couples had a constitutional right to wed.

On Thursday, Davis was sent to jail by U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning, who also ordered five of the six deputy clerks in the county to begin issuing marriage licenses to all couples. The deputies agreed, under oath.

By 8:15 Friday morning, Yates and Smith — together since 2006 — had finally obtained the elusive $35 license.

Mason, the deputy clerk, congratulated the couple and shook their hands.

Three GLBT couples have now gotten their licenses. It must have been hell as a work place since most of the clerks indicated to the judge they had no problem issuing licenses but were stopped by the self-righteous Davis.  Her husband (who is both #2 and #4 of her marriages) is a piece of work too.

The husband of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis said early Friday that Kim remains in good spirits and is prepared to remain in jail for months.

Joe Davis appeared outside the Rowan County Courthouse, calling U.S. District Judge David Bunning a bully for jailing his wife on Thursday for contempt of court.

“She won’t resign I promise you,” he said. “Until something gives, she’ll be there.”

Joe Davis said he went out to eat with the five deputy clerks who agreed in court Thursday to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He said he anticipates that they will keep their word and has no hard feelings against them despite Kim’s adamant refusal to authorize the forms.

At least two couples plan to return to the Rowan County Courthouse on Friday to request licenses from the five deputy clerks who say they will comply with the court to avoid jail.

The husband referred to the Bush-appointed Judge as a “butt”.

Joe also had some important words for Judge Bunning, who presided over his wife’s contempt case.

“Bunning cannot bully me, my wife or my son,” Joe Davis said on Friday of the judge, via Louisville television station WDRB. “I taught my son how to stand up for what’s right and what he believes in at any cost. Bunning doesn’t know how to pick on somebody that can handle him. The only thing he knows how to do is to pick up on the weak people.”

As for Judge Bunning, he told the New York Times: “The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order. If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”

A tell all book about Donald Trump may expose some information that will put the Huckster of Bad Deals in a very bad light.

David Cay Johnston is an author, lecturer, and investigative reporter who has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting who has presided over the board of the non-profit organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. His areas of expertise include tax law, accounting, economics, business and finance. He is also an outspoken Progressive whose thoughts and ideas echo those of Bernie Sanders. Since 1988, Johnston has been watching Trump closely. Recently, he came up with a list of questions that would reveal much about the GOP’s “Golden Boy” – assuming Trump would provide frank and forthcoming answers, as he claims to do.

For example, how many of our readers knew that Trump was successfully sued by the Attorney General of New York for running an “illegal educational institution”? Students at “Trump University” paid a whopping $35,000 for “Elite” mentorships – but never even saw their mentor. And here’s a juicy little fact that fans of The Godfather and The Sopranos should appreciate: the contracting firm that constructed Trump Tower was owned by a pair of gentlemen who went by the monikers of “Fat Tony” Salerno and “Big Paul” Castellano.

When it comes to charity, Trump doesn’t even donate to his own foundation. Instead, he donates other people’s money – specifically, those who do business with him.

Can you say, “kickbacks”?

It only gets better: Trump was found guilty in federal court of cheating immigrant workers hired to demolish a multi-story building. He paid them less than $5 per hour under the table. He didn’t even furnish them with hard hats.  Oh, and all that talk from Trump about how he’s a “self-made billionaire”? It turns out that he had a bit of help from the taxpayers of New York. The mayor of NYC at the time, Abe Beame, happened to be good buddies with Donny-boy’s Daddy, Fred Trump. That little connection got Donald a tax abatement on a mid-town Manhattan property (right next door to Grand Central Station) in 1976. That was the old Commodore Hotel, which today is the Grand Hyatt New York. As of 2016, that little deal that his daddy made for him will have cost taxpayers $400 million.

So much for being a “self-made” billionaire.

One of the Donald’s biggest troupes is how he’s made so much money.  Actually, he would be far wealthier had he just put his inheritance into S&P Index Fund.  I really wish the media would ask him about this little tidbit.

“It takes brains to make millions,” according to the slogan of Donald Trump’s board game. “It takes Trump to make billions.” It appears that’s truer than Trump himself might like to admit. A new analysis suggests that Trump would’ve been a billionaire even if he’d never had a career in real estate, and had instead thrown his father’s inheritance into a index fund that tracked the market. His wealth, in other words, isn’t because of his brains. It’s because he’s a Trump.

In an outstanding piece for National Journal, reporter S.V. Dáte notes that in 1974, the real estate empire of Trump’s father, Fred, was worth about $200 million. Trump is one of five siblings, making his stake at that time worth about $40 million. If someone were to invest $40 million in a S&P 500 index in August 1974, reinvest all dividends, not cash out and have to pay capital gains, and pay nothing in investment fees, he’d wind up with about $3.4 billion come August 2015, according to Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s handy S&P calculator. If one factors in dividend taxes and a fee of 0.15 percent — which is triple Vanguard’s actual fee for an exchange-traded S&P 500 fund — the total only falls to $2.3 billion.

It’s hard to nail down Trump’s precise net worth, but Bloomberg currently puts it at $2.9 billion, while Forbes puts it at $4 billion. So he’s worth about as much as he would’ve been if he had taken $40 million from his dad and thrown it into an index fund.

It takes a massive ego and a whole ton of hubris to suggest he’s actually “made” money given that it’s less than the opportunity cost of doing an investment that any one could easily access with a small balance and some stick-to -itness.
Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat from California who is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and who serves on the Select Committee on Benghazi, is calling on Congress to disband the Benghazi committee. 

Since its formation, the Select Committee on Benghazi has been aimless and slow moving, not knowing what it was looking for or where. It has acted in a deeply partisan way, frequently failing to consult or even to inform Democratic members before taking action, and selectively leaking information to the press. After 16 months and more than $4 million, the committee has gained no additional insight into the attacks in Benghazi. It has nothing new to tell the families of those killed or the American people.

But it does have emails. Lots of emails. Some of them are from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But none of her emails tell us anything of consequence regarding the events of Sept. 11, 2012. They don’t substantiate the bogus theory that the State Department ordered the military to “stand down” or that there wasgun running, or that the secretary somehow interfered with the security provided at the diplomatic facility or annex.

Nor were any of the secretary’s emails marked classified at the time she received them. Some in the intelligence community believe that a subset of them should have been, a conclusion with which the State Department disagrees. That’s not an uncommon clash of views. As the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, I am deeply interested in making sure that all classified information is protected. And yet, as a member of the Select Committee charged with finding out the truth about the attacks, I am appalled at how much we have lost sight of the mission — if indeed that was ever the point.

Whatever their original purpose, the Select Committee’s leaders appear no longer to have any interest in Benghazi, except as the tragic events of that day may be used as a cudgel against the likely Democratic nominee for president.

The committee is solely concerned with damaging her candidacy, searching for something, anything, that can be insinuated against her. With all of the committee’s obsessive focus on Mrs. Clinton, you would think that she was a witness to the killings, instead of half a world away.

There is a refugee crisis around the world as the western world’s imperialist and colonial policies of the last century come home to roost.  I’ve been following the crisis in Syria and the number of refugees dying on their way to Europe.  Syrians are some of the greatest people I’ve ever met and it’s completely disheartening to see so many die because of our failed Middle East policies.  We already know how Texas and other places have met refugee women and children coming from South American to our country as a result of our failed drug war policies.  How is Europe handling its worst refugee crisis since World War 2?  This depends on the country and the degree to which right wing nationalism still rules the day. Nadia Khomami of the UK Guardian has listed all the signficiant developments at the link.

• David Cameron has bowed to overwhelming domestic and international pressure and announced that Britain will accept thousands more Syrian refugees. The prime minister said his government would “act with our head and our heart” in response to the crisis and refugees’ suffering. This afternoon, he also pledged an extra £100m in humanitarian aid, which would bring the UK’s total contribution to over £1 billion.

• The UN said that Britain had agreed to take 4,000 more Syrian refugees. “Those spaces are going to be critical to the lives and future of 4,000 people,” spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told AP. It later said it may have spoken out of turn and that it had not received confirmation of the number of additional refugees to be taken by the UK.

• The humanitarian agency ActionAid said Cameron’s pledge to resettle thousands more Syrians falls well short of what’s need. Its head of humanitarian Response Mike Noyes said: “The promise that the UK will only take 4000 refugees, if correct, is nowhere near enough. It is the equivalent of only six refugees per parliamentary constituency and represents only 0.1% of the total number of Syrian refugees.”

• Scotland’s first minister Nichola Sturgeon said Scotland should accept 1,000 refugee as a “first step”. She said: “When the world is looking for leadership, courage and a simple display of common humanity, we will be found standing eagerly at the front of the queue.”

• The UN high commissioner for refugees has called on the European Union to admit up to 200,000 refugees as part of a mass relocation programme that would be binding on EU states. António Guterres said the EU was facing a defining moment.

• The Syrian boy whose death galvanised public opinion and put pressure on European governments to tackle the continent’s refugee crisis has been buried in the town of Kobani alongside his mother and brother. Aylan Kurdi’s father, Abdullah, who survived the capsizing that killed his family, wept as the bodies were buried in the predominantly Kurdish Syrian border town.

That site is continually updated and is a good source of information.

So, that’s the three big things that I’ve beeen following. What’s on your blogging and reading list today?