News bits: Tax gap update; Mary Trump speaks again; War update; Lighter news - The Goat Rodeo

The Hill reports about something (on of my fave topics) that I've been screaming and howling about for years, the annual festival of gigantic theft for tax cheaters that congress requires by law:

IRS ‘tax gap’ widens to $688 billion in 2021: report

The gap between taxes owed and paid to the government is wider than originally estimated, according to a new report released Thursday by the Internal Revenue Service.

The projected gross “tax gap,” the difference between the total taxes owed to the IRS and how much is collected on time, jumped to $688 billion for tax year 2021, the agency projects. That’s about $138 billion higher than revised projections for the three-year period ending in 2019.  

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed by Democrats last August, included an additional $80 billion in funding for the IRS to beef up its enforcement efforts.

Republicans have opposed the new IRS funding, and they made a bill that would reverse most of that funding their first legislative priority when the party retook the House in January.  

Republicans love tax cheating by rich people and big corporations because (i) most of the cheaters are rich, like many or most Congressional Republicans, and (ii) the authoritarian radical right GOP hates, hates, hates government and taxes.

Based on detailed analyses from tax years 2001 and 2006, my estimate of the current tax gap (tax cheating) is at least about $800 billion, not $688 billion. 

But something has changed at the IRS. The prior tax gap estimates I can recall were at about ~$480 billion, which I believed was to low to be credible. Someone has pressured the IRS to be more honest about this. Radical right Republicans hate release of info like this, so the pressure for transparency and honesty cannot be coming from them. 

Anecdote: Years ago when it was obvious that IRS tax gap estimates were too low, I wrote to the IRS information office that answers taxpayer questions. I was told that they did not answer taxpayer questions. I took that to mean the IRS was telling me I was an idiot taxpayer and I should shut up, pay my taxes and go pound sand. By then, the radical right had cowed the IRS into silence because the radical right hates the IRS and wants it to go away.

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The New Republic writes about Mary's latest commentary regarding her poisonous uncle:

The stakes of the 2024 election could not be clearer, says Mary Trump: It’s “​​a choice between democracy and fascism.”

They identify not with Donald’s strength … but they identify with his weakness,” Trump said, arguing that his supporters know to some extent that he’s a fraud. In fact, they like that about him. “They identify with the fact that he gets away with everything.”

“To me, one of the biggest scams was this myth that Donald was this successful businessman … that he was a champion of the working man,” she said. “By the way, that’s not something he ever says. Somebody else made that up about him.”

Trump said that Donald’s portrayal in the media as a working-class hero is founded on a misunderstanding—he grew up privileged in Manhattan, after all—and that he then exploited it. “He just then flew his stupid private jet from rally to rally, and I guess that was enough to convince people that he really cared about them,” she said.

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War update

Impending humanitarian crisis alert: Israel says 1.1M residents must leave north Gaza Strip but the U.N. says that’s impossible

Airburst burning white phosphorous rains down

Israel is using white phosphorous bombs - the material ignites on contact with air and leaves horrible burns sort of like napalm (Israel denies it is using this weapon). WaPo writes: 

Human Rights Watch confirmed in a statement released Thursday that white phosphorus was used over the Gaza City port on Wednesday, after interviewing two witnesses who noted the stifling smell of white phosphorus. The organization also analyzed video of the event and identified airburst 155mm white phosphorus artillery projectiles were used in the strike. They condemned the use of the chemical, which can severely burn people and set fire to civilian structures, in such a densely populated area.  

 WaPo: With exits to Israel and Egypt shut, the retaliatory military operations have effectively turned the narrow 25-mile long Gaza Strip into a kill box.

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A WaPo opinion by Dana Milbank comments: 

House Republicans collapse into anarchy

War in Israel. War in Ukraine. The federal government shutting down in 35 days. These are uncertain times.

But there is one eternal truth, one unwavering constant to steady us when all else is in flux: Every time the House Republican majority tries to govern, it’s guaranteed to turn into a goat rodeo.

Milbank writes a long, long opinion that recites the amazing lunacy of what the radical right GOP has degenerated into in the House. He explains his goat rodeo reference like this: Rep. Harriet Hageman (Wyo.), the Trump-backed slayer of Liz Cheney, walked into the caucus meeting wearing a big smile and carrying a lasso. Was she planning to rope some goats? She didn’t say.  

Carrying a lasso? What a lunatic. OMG, we're all gonna die. Run away!!

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DJT: “The same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers.”

PolitiFact: 

UN officials condemn Israel for war crimes leading to "humanitarian disaster"

Palestinians inspect the rubble of the West mosque destroyed after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike at Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, early Monday, Oct. 9, 2023. Israel’s military battled to drive Hamas fighters out of southern towns and seal its borders Monday, as it pounded the Gaza Strip from the (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

A group of United Nations humanitarian experts denounced attacks on civilians in the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza early Thursday, saying Israel is now committing “war crimes” through “collective punishment” by blockading aid from the territory.

The war has killed at least 2,500 people on both sides. Concerns for civilians in Gaza have mounted in recent days as the territory runs out of power and medical supplies due to a complete blockade by Israel.

“We strongly condemn the horrific crimes committed by Hamas, the deliberate and widespread killing and hostage-taking of innocent civilians, including older persons and children. These actions constitute heinous violations of international law and international crimes, for which there must be urgent accountability,” the U.N. group said.

“We also strongly condemn Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children,” it added. “They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for.”

“This amounts to collective punishment,” the experts continued. “There is no justification for violence that indiscriminately targets innocent civilians, whether by Hamas or Israeli forces. This is absolutely prohibited under international law and amounts to a war crime.”

The U.N. said Thursday that more than 650,000 people in Gaza are running out of water due to the blockades. Medical supplies are also dwindling in the area's hospitals, which are at times without power. The Israeli energy minister said early Thursday the country will not allow aid into Gaza, despite calls from organizations, including the U.N.

“Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home,” Israel Katz said on X, formerly Twitter. “Humanitarian for humanitarian. And no one will preach us morals.”

The Red Cross warned Thursday those hospitals could soon turn into “morgues” without immediate aid.

“As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, putting newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk,” Fabrizio Carboni, International Committee of the Red Cross regional director for the Near and Middle East wrote in a statement. “Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues.” 

The Israeli military has committed to completely eliminating Hamas through a campaign of extensive airstrikes and an expected ground invasion. 

The U.N. experts specifically called out Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over comments calling Gazans “human animals” on Monday.

“Besides this appalling language that dehumanises the Palestinian people, especially those who have been unlawfully ‘imprisoned’ in Gaza for 16 years, we condemn the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines,” the group continued. “Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity.”

It is also difficult for Gazans to leave the territory because the only border with Egypt was closed again Thursday due to Israeli airstrikes in the area. The crossing was previously closed on Monday due to strikes. 

The Egyptian government has also urged Israel to stop the strikes so aid can enter Gaza.

The U.N. group called on both sides of the conflict to immediately negotiate a ceasefire, in addition to corridors for humanitarian aid and a release of the captured on both sides of the conflict.

 

 -Fr. The Hill 10/12/23: https://thehill.com/policy/international/4251899-un-civilians-israel-gaza-war-crimes/

 

 

Legal analysis: How the USSC is both powerful and political

Quick summary 

The USSC has key tools that give it enormous power that is on a par with congress plus the White House. Those tools are:

• It decides which cases to hear or reject

• It decides which legal questions the parties pose to answer or ignore 

• It writes its own legal question(s), even if none of the parties posed it

One legal scholar said the Supreme Court is moving away from “deciding cases” and toward “answering discrete policy questions.” Those three tools allow it to do that.
Credit...

By focusing on the power to dictate the legal question to be answered, the USSC has basically the same power that congress and the president have. Once a court decides a legal question, e.g., is Roe v. Wade constitutional, the decision has the same power as a law that congress and a president can make. 

One can see how a radicalized, authoritarian USSC, like the one we have today, can greatly change the law, government, commerce and eventually society itself. The USSC could, and is now in the process of, convert the constitution from a document that reflects secular democracy to one that reflects radical Christian Sharia law.  

The legal analysis

A fascinating but critically important legal analysis discussed by the NYT about how the USSC can be political reveals the vast power of the USSC to do what legislatures + presidents do:

By choosing among and sometimes writing the questions the court agrees to answer, recent studies say, the justices have distorted the judicial process

We say that the Supreme Court decides cases, but that is not correct. It picks isolated questions to answer, often choosing among ones proposed by the parties or writing ones of its own.

That practice adds a disturbing element of politics to the judicial process, said Benjamin B. Johnson, a law professor at the University of Florida and the author of three recent papers on the subject.

“They are no longer doing what a court does, which is deciding cases,” he said. “They’re now doing what a legislature does, which is answering discrete policy questions.”

Consider a few examples.

When the court agreed to hear one of this term’s most important cases, it rejected a modest question proposed by the plaintiffs and said it would only consider one that asked it to overrule an important precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

The same thing happened in the Dobbs case, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. When the court granted review, it picked only the broadest of the three proposed questions, one that led it to overrule Roe v. Wade.

“Even though the court had alternative pathways to resolve the case without inviting a firestorm of controversy,” Professor Johnson wrote in the Alabama Law Review, “the justices intentionally eliminated those alternatives from their review.”

In the recent case of a Christian web designer who challenged a Colorado law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, the court accepted only part of one of her two proposed questions. The court said it would not consider whether the law was at odds with her right to free exercise of her religion and would treat the case solely a free-speech challenge.

And when the court agreed to hear two big cases on the First Amendment and social media last month, it did not adopt the questions proposed by any of the parties. It looked instead to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Biden administration, choosing two of its four questions.

This sort of cherry-picking and revision, Professor Johnson said, is on the rise. “What was once a relatively rare occurrence now makes up between a tenth and a quarter of the docket,” he said.

Data compiled by Professor Johnson from the two decades ending in 2020 seems to back that up. When the court added or subtracted questions, he found, the case was more likely to attract friend-of-the-court briefs and to result in 5-to-4 splits.

A century ago, in 1925, Chief Justice William Howard Taft persuaded Congress to cut back on the kinds of cases the Supreme Court had to hear, allowing the court to choose for itself which ones it would decide. That itself was an extraordinary move. Giving the justices almost total discretion over their docket helped to transform and empower it.

But the 1925 law did not authorize the justices to take the further step of picking the questions they would answer. “This is clear both from the statutory language and the justices’ own testimony in favor of the bill,” Professor Johnson wrote. Indeed, Chief Justice Taft had assured lawmakers that in federal cases the “power of review extends to the whole case and every question presented in it.”

Still, in later decisions and then in the court’s own rules, the justices said they would consider only discrete questions.

That was so, Professor Johnson wrote, “even though Congress mandated — and the justices promised — review of the entire case.”

It is one thing to allow the Supreme Court to decide which cases to hear and another to let it choose to answer the questions proposed in the petition seeking review. But it is a third thing for the justices to choose among those questions. And it is yet another thing for them to write their own questions.

But the court has drafted its own questions in any number of landmark cases, including ones on the right to counsel, the 2000 presidential election, campaign finance, same-sex marriage, class actions, recess appointments and immigration.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has had little patience with lower courts that try something similar.

Three years ago, for instance, the justices chastised a federal appeals court for revising the questions before it, saying that it ran afoul of “the principle of party presentation.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting an earlier decision, explained that “we rely on the parties to frame the issues for decision and assign to courts the role of neutral arbiter of matters the parties present.”

This is why I keep pointing to the grave danger this USSC poses to democracy, civil liberties that God hates and the rules of law that kleptocratic plutocrats hate. The danger is lethal and intentional, and thus it cannot be overstated.

News bits: Dark free speech update; Forcing a bit of climate transparency; Etc.

Deutsche Welle writes about the degradation of Musk's Xitter into a crackpot authoritarian hellscape in Germany:

German anti-racism body leaves X over 'rise in hate speech'

A German agency that tackles discrimination and racism says it is quitting the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. It cited a rise in hate speech since owner Elon Musk took over last year

Mozilla, the company that owns Firefox, acquired Fakespot in May. Fakespot, a startup that helps users identify fake news through a website and a browser extension, has been used to spot fake reviews on Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Walmart, and eBay using an A-to-F scale.

Fakespot's Review Checker is scheduled to be released on Firefox version 120 for desktop and Android on November 21, 2023, according to MS Power User.

This is terrible news for folks who plan to use AI technologies, particularly generative AI tools like ChatGPT, to flood product reviews. Fakespot could make that task much more difficult by using its own AI to spot the fake product reviews.

Fakespot founder Saoud Khalifah told Axios at the time of the acquisition that reviews are important for the online shopping experience because "you can’t touch the product," he said. "You really need the reviews."

I was wondering if and when AI would start to be used to fight lies, deceit, slanders and crackpottery. It's about freaking time. Maybe it's about freaking time for me to stop using rotted Chrome and move back to Firefox.

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The Conversation writes: 

Exxon, Apple and other corporate giants will have to disclose all their emissions 

under California’s new climate laws – that will have a global impact

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two new rules into law on Oct. 7, 2023. Under the new Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, U.S.- companies with annual revenues of US$1 billion or more will have to report both their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2026 and 2027. The California Chamber of Commerce opposed the regulation, arguing it would increase companies’ costs. But more than a dozen major corporations endorsed the rule, including Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce and Patagonia.

The second law, the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act, requires companies generating $500 million or more to report their financial risks related to climate change and their plans for risk mitigation. 

While California isn’t the first place to mandate climate disclosures, it is the fifth-largest economy in the world. So, the state’s new laws are poised to have substantial influence worldwide. Subsidiaries of companies that didn’t have to report their emissions before will now be subject to disclosure requirements. California is in effect exercising its immense market leverage to establish climate disclosures as standard practice in the U.S. and beyond.

That's what pro-public interest governance can look like. If the kleptocratic, authoritarian radical right, plutocratic, theocratic (KARRPT) Republican Party gets its way, its KARRPT USSC will hold laws like this to be unconstitutional. That day is probably coming.

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6 GOP lawmakers want to expel scandal-plagued Rep. George Santos. Hm, Santos is the essence of corrupt radical right GOP authoritarianism. They should be expelling themselves.

Routine radical right hypocrisy: President Biden’s reelection campaign bashed presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) for touting drug prices caps for seniors after voting against the Inflation Reduction Act. In a video first shared with The Hill, the campaign mashed up clips of Scott celebrating capping costs for seniors and saying that the Inflation Reduction Act, which Scott voted against, should be eliminated.

Brazen, insulting legal weaseling: Trump tells court he had no duty to 'support' the Constitution as president -- Former President Donald Trump is arguing to a judge in Colorado that he was not required to "support" the Constitution as president, reported Brandi Buchman from Law & Crime. .... Trump's attorneys argue: "The Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to 'preserve, protect and defend' the Constitution — not to 'support' the Constitution," said the filing by Trump's attorneys. "Because the framers chose to define the group of people subject to Section Three by an oath to 'support' the Constitution of the United States, and not by an oath to 'preserve, protect and defend' the Constitution, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment never intended for it to apply to the President."