News bits 'n chunk: How millionaires do things; How DJT does things; USSC epiphanies commence

The WaPo reports about the fun things millionaires do, or don’t do:

Thousands of millionaires haven’t filed tax returns 

for years, IRS says

About 125,000 notices will be sent to high-income earners, including 25,000 people with income more than $1 million, the tax agency said

Thousands of high-income earners have not filed tax returns for several years, but the cash-strapped Internal Revenue Service did nothing to get them to pay what they owe.

That changes now, the tax agency announced Thursday. The IRS will send notices to thousands of people who made more than $400,000 and did not file returns in at least one year from 2017 to 2022, the first step to collecting any tax owed.  

Few of the 125,000 missing returns will lead to criminal tax evasion cases. Eventually, the IRS said, it will send letters to non-filers at all income levels.

One can expect members of the TTKP in congress to rise up in screaming, sanctimonious moral outrage at this tyrannical horror the IRS has unleashed on poor, innocent, patriotic millionaire tax cheats. But, as usual, the law will be lenient with the rick and powerful. There will be no criminal charges for cheating the US government out of taxes owed, while us idiot honest taxpayers keep paying honestly. If there is any moral outrage here, honest taxpayers are entitled to feel it. My guess, the IRS will never collect. Once the TTKP gets back in power, that will be the end of it. 

On the other hand, those lower income tax cheats are probably gonna get whacked. In my opinion, they all should get whacked.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

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Politico reports about a threat DJT made to lobbyists if they do not vote (for him):

Donald Trump’s campaign wants Republican lobbyists in D.C. to know: If they don’t vote in this Sunday’s primary, they won’t get access should the former president end up back in the White House. “If you don’t bother voting, don’t bother calling,” said one Trump campaign official, who was granted anonymity to speak about campaign strategy.

The ultimatum constitutes a blunt threat toward the influence-peddling community, one that is highly unusual for a presidential campaign but fits the more publicly hardball model that Trump has often applied to governance.

Under D.C. law, campaigns are unable to know which candidates individual voters cast ballots for. But campaigns can access voter rolls from the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections to see who voted in the primary and who didn’t.

If he gets back in power, DJT will conduct all of his everything he does the same way. The rule is simple: support me or I will crush you. That smells exactly like kleptocratic dictatorship to me.

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Real understanding and fear of the TTKP USSC is finally starting

to sink in, but is it it too little and/or too late?

Those are the questions du jour. A Politico opinion comments:

Why Is Trump Getting Special Treatment From the Supreme Court?

The justices are handling Trump’s case far differently than most criminal defendants

To understand how truly remarkable it is that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider former President Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, it is necessary to have some sense of how the court treats other criminal defendants.

In that light, the court’s extraordinary and improper solicitude for Trump, the person who selected three sitting justices, is all too readily apparent. And the upshot is Trump may now succeed in delaying his federal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election until after voters go to the polls in November.

In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment — even if the outcome would be cruel, needlessly painful or simply unjustified. The effect of this new hostility to delay is most sharply felt in the death penalty context. But a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.

Justice Neil Gorsuch set the tone for this approach in 2019, when he complained that legal challenges to the death penalty were often used to stall or even derail execution. Courts, said Gorsuch, should “police carefully against attempts” to use constitutional challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay.” In particular, he warned, “last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”  

Outside the capital punishment cases, the Supreme Court has added more and more constraints upon prisoners’ ability to challenge constitutional errors. Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas in particular have urged that the longstanding right to challenge state court convictions in federal court be effectively gutted. The effect of their proposal would be to streamline even further the criminal justice process — shutting down almost all efforts to raise objections before they had even started.

All this makes the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Trump’s appeal for absolute immunity from all criminal charges even more unusual, and troubling.

Yeah, notice the elites vs rabble difference? TDJ gets kid gloves. Regular people get iron fisted. But arrogant radical authoritarians like Gorsuch have no qualms about a two-tiered justice system. He and the rest of the corrupt authoritarian TTKP crowd simply deny it even exists. They blithely go on their merry way destroying democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to make way for the real agenda, a lot more wealth and power for the elites and an iron fist in the face for the rabble.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

In addition to Politico going woke about the TTKP USSC, The Nation seems to have woke up too:

The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped

The court is fundamentally antidemocratic—and the only way to limit the damage it can do is to reduce its power, budget, and lack of accountability

When Republican politicians try to take away abortion rights, they often lose. They lose special elections and ballot initiatives and maybe even presidential elections as punishment for their Christofascist overreach. But when the Supreme Court takes away these rights, nothing happens.

When elected officials take bribes or engage in corruption, they often lose; they get primaried or kicked off committees and sometimes face charges. But when Supreme Court justices engage in public corruption or take bribes, nothing happens.

When Donald Trump commits crimes… he generally gets away with it; still, people do, at least, try to hold him accountable, and he sometimes gets charged or impeached or made to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. But when the Supreme Court helps Trump get away with his crimes, or at least helps him delay his reckoning until after the election—as it did earlier this week when it agreed to hear his claims for immunity from federal prosecution—nothing happens.

The Supreme Court must be made to pay a price—a political, institutional, professional price—for its ongoing political thuggery lightly disguised as jurisprudence. Its members will never stop acting like the only nine Americans who matter until we stop them from doing that. And the only way to stop them is to limit their power, their budgets, and their unearned belief in their own supremacy.

These people—and I’m including both the conservatives and the liberals here—act like they’re untouchable because that is how everybody else treats them.

The court’s greatest institutional accomplice is the media, which largely insists on covering the nine law shamans as they wish to be covered, instead of as the unelected, unaccountable poison that enfeebles the rest of American democracy. Just the other day, The Washington Post ran an entire column on whether it’s “fair” to point out which party appointed the judges and justices who rule us. The column was inspired by a judge—who wished to remain anonymous, because these people are rank cowards—who was annoyed at being referred to as a Reagan-appointed judge, and complained to one of their media friends.

The Supreme Court moans and complains about its press coverage all the time, with justices like Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett complaining with increasing intensity in recent years. It is insane to me that these people think they are entitled both to rule with supremacy and to receive favorable press, especially considering that the vast majority of the time the press does exactly what they want. The Supreme Court justices answer no questions they don’t want to be asked, sit for no interviews unless they are promoting a book, and do no public events other than ones where entire topics are predetermined as off-limits.  

Count me in the camp of American feminist activist Jane Addams, who said, “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” The votes of nine people matter less to me than the votes of 330 million. If everybody were allowed to vote, if everybody’s votes counted equally, if the county weren’t gerrymandered into an antidemocratic pretzel, the people and not the court would be the final arbiter of our problems.  

I came to this conclusion relatively late in life. You see, I am a liberal. Conservatives are more authoritarian-curious by nature, but I’ve found that liberals are the most eager to treat the antidemocratic Supreme Court as if it wears a laurel crown. That’s because liberals believe that some of our most cherished ideals about human rights and human dignity can be achieved only through a powerful high court with unquestionable authority. That’s the mistake I have been guilty of in the past.

Well, that is refreshing! The author, Elie Mystal, figured it out, more or less (Authoritarian-curious? How about authoritarian?). 

But I am conflicted, does she deserve a gold star and an Attaboy! for finally seeing what has been obvious for years, or does she deserve a Well duh! What took you so long, you maroon? The well duh award feels more appropriate than a gold starred attaboy.

Q: As a whole, is whatever level of wokeness about the authoritarian TTKP threat the MSM has achieved too little and/or too late, or, is it too early to draw firm conclusions?

Post script: Even if it is too little and too late, that will not stop me from opposing the tyranny and kleptocracy the TTKP and DJT stand for. I will oppose until they come and forcibly shut me up, or I drop dead or go silent from natural causes. There is no room for fatalism. Stiff upper lip and all that. As long as there is freedom to oppose, I damn well am going to oppose.

Did the MSM earn it?