A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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The Biden administration could try to close loopholes that make the U.S. estate and gift tax easy to avoid.
Rich Americans are rushing to make large transactions before the end of the month, trying to get ahead of any moves next year by President-elect Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to raise taxes or close loopholes.
Some advisers say they’re busier than ever in the last weeks of 2020, especially with helping clients transfer wealth to the next generation tax-free while they still can. Appraisers, who are crucial for valuing assets used in these estate planning strategies, have been inundated.
Requests for property appraisals have quadrupled at New York firm Miller Samuel Inc., President Jonathan Miller said. By late November, he had to start turning away clients.
“We physically can’t handle all the year-end deadlines at this point,” Miller said. “We started doing this after the Thanksgiving holiday and it’s been extremely frustrating.”
The year-end frenzy is a surprise to many advisers, because Republicans did better than many expected in congressional races. The results suggested Biden may have a difficult time fulfilling campaign promises to raise trillions of dollars in new revenue from the wealthy.
‘Very difficult’
Two run-off elections in Georgia on Jan. 5 still give Democrats a chance to win 50 seats in the Senate, affording them control of the chamber with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes.
Even if Democrats win both races in Georgia, “it’s still going to be very difficult for the president-elect to really get significant tax reform done with a split Senate,” said Benjamin Berger, a partner at RSM U.S. and co-leader of the accounting firm’s national family-office practice.
Nonetheless, tax changes are still possible in 2021, and the Biden administration could also try to close the many loopholes that make the U.S. estate and gift tax easy to avoid. “I can see a situation where Treasury issues regulations that make it more difficult to do effective estate planning,” Berger said.
The 2017 Republican tax law signed by President Donald Trump doubled the amount the wealthy could pass to heirs without paying the estate and gift tax, to $11.58 million for individuals and $23.16 million for couples this year. That and other provisions of the law expire in 2026, giving the rich another reason to make moves sooner rather than later.
More at https://www.crainsnewyork.com/finance/rich-americans-who-fear-higher-t
axes-hurrying-move-money
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Dumbest Moments of the Trump Presidency
For five years, we kept a Google Doc of the most deeply idiotic episodes of this monumentally stupid era. Now it’s time to share our work with the world.
The Donald Trump presidency ended, in a way, on Nov. 7. It was the day that Trump tweeted his campaign would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, only to follow up with a clarifying tweet that he meant “Four Seasons Landscaping,” a business located on the outskirts of the city near an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Yes, the campaign later claimed there was a reason why they booked this particular venue. So, yes, we don’t know for sure that the campaign actually meant to hold its event at the Four Seasons Hotel, only to book the completely unrelated landscaping company by mistake. But we know.
When the story of this era is told many years from now, students and history enthusiasts may not grasp—and what even now is hard to comprehend—is just how stupid it was to live through. The president told the nation to inject bleach during a pandemic; his team altered the projected path of a hurricane on an official document, with a Sharpie, to help the president save face after an erroneous tweet. There were the dishwashers that had to be run 10 times. The blank pages that the White House pretended were important documents. A long, long time ago, Trump declared himself a “very stable genius.” By now, that phrase feels almost normal. But seriously: What?
For almost five years, we have been collecting such stories with quick notes to our future selves—notes that, when we looked through them last month after Trump lost his reelection bid, read less as presidential history than the diary of a lunatic. We had to go back and make sense of them all, matching our mad scribbles to events that actually happened in the real world. And now we bring them to you.
Critics sometimes alleged that the president’s bad tweets and Borscht Belt schtick were calculated distractions from his controversial policies and criminal personal conduct. We do not think that was the case with the following moments. They are the most absurd of the period’s tragicomic phenomena, the smallest dumb experiences of a big, dumb time to be alive. They are the most baffling pronouncements, grievances, and excuses of a president who never, ever did the homework—the deepest cuts of America’s mush-brain years. We share them here not so you may remember them, but so that you might—finally—feel free to forget just a little bit about the past four years.
Dec. 14, 2015: Amid questions about what CNN described as Trump’s “self-avowed lack of an exercise routine and his indulging diet,” his campaign releases a statement from a doctor that purports to establish his physical bona fides. Despite Trump’s previous promise to release “a full medical report,” Dr. Harold Bornstein simply attests in a short letter that Trump’s lab work is “astonishingly excellent,” that his “physical strength” is “extraordinary,” and that Bornstein believes, “unequivocally,” that the candidate would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein, who looks like his picture goes next to the entry for “quack doctor” in the Big Book of Sitcom Character Tropes, later tells CNN that Trump dictated the letter.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20201223114755/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2020/12/donald-trump-stupid-moments-dumb-comments.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump was the greatest president in my lifetime.
Now we get to wind the clock back to 2004 and relive GWB all over again for a while.
Trump might be back.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.
T 
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.
T
Learn to English, dummy.
And fix your fucking signature.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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Quote:Same illness.
Originally posted by THG:
That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.
T
grandiose fantasies and behavior, such as a preoccupation with thoughts of personal success, power, and attractiveness or sex appeal
little or no empathy for other people’s emotions or feelings
a significant need for attention, admiration, and recognition
an inflated sense of self-importance, such as a tendency to exaggerate personal talent or achievements
a belief in personal specialness and superiority
a sense of entitlement
a tendency to take advantage of others or exploit people for personal gain
arrogant or conceited behavior and attitudes
a tendency to envy others and believe others envy them
https://www.healthline.com/health/malignant-narcissism#traits
Ding!
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Alarmists expected all sorts of bad things to come from the Trump presidency, but no one quite expected this: The Democratic Party has sprouted a left wing too extensive and organized for that wretched party’s leaders and donors to marginalize. Even after the Occupy movements of 2011 and the Sanders campaign in 2016, this was unexpected. It is also, by far, the best thing that has happened in American politics in decades.
It probably would not have happened but for Trump. Who would have expected that? Who could have imagined that his unmitigated vileness and his incompetence would have had that unintended effect?
It did, though. And so, calls for social policies comparable to those achieved in advanced social democracies a half century ago have become almost mainstream.
It is essentially an up-dated version of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. Calling it “socialism” can therefore be misleading and even counter-productive in a political culture in which capitalists and capitalist ideologues have expended a great deal of effort and treasure over the past century and a half with a view to assuring that the very word would bear negative connotations.
But northern European social democrats and Sanders-style democratic socialists are cut from the same cloth, and, in a political universe that is rapidly becoming more global (and therefore less provincial) than it was in the twentieth century, there is little to lose and much to gain by pointing this out.
More at https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/23/calling-trump-to-account-with-
sticks-and-stones-and-words-as-well/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:Same illness.
Originally posted by THG:
That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.
T
grandiose fantasies and behavior, such as a preoccupation with thoughts of personal success, power, and attractiveness or sex appeal
little or no empathy for other people’s emotions or feelings
a significant need for attention, admiration, and recognition
an inflated sense of self-importance, such as a tendency to exaggerate personal talent or achievements
a belief in personal specialness and superiority
a sense of entitlement
a tendency to take advantage of others or exploit people for personal gain
arrogant or conceited behavior and attitudes
a tendency to envy others and believe others envy them
https://www.healthline.com/health/malignant-narcissism#traits
Ding!
Don't be a hater Marcos.
One day you too will own your own trash cans that you can burn to the ground without breaking the law.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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Quote:Your inability to use facts to support your emotion-based fantasy is telling. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya. You're a mess.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Don't be a hater Marcos.
One day you too will own your own trash cans that you can burn to the ground without breaking the law.
So glad I'm not a narcissist like you.
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