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- U.S.People
School Staffer Gets Jail for Sexually Abusing Boy, Telling Him He 'Deserved Special Things'
Courtney Roznowski was arrested in August after Child Protective Services received a tip
- PoliticsGlamour
AOC Slams Donald Trump for Writing Off $70,000 In Hairstyling Bills
The congresswoman was eviscerated by Republicans for spending $250 on a cut-and-color last year. The hypocrisy did not escape her.
- PoliticsThe Week
Why Trump voters just don't care about his taxes
The revelation, per Sunday's New York Times report, that President Trump paid little to no federal income tax in recent years will redirect the conversation at Tuesday night's general election debate. But will it redirect any meaningful number of votes?I suspect not, not even among the president's most reluctant supporters.In broad strokes, there are two reasons to vote for Trump in 2020: liking who he is or liking what (you think) he'll do. This is an artificial separation of two rationales that often overlap, but let's call them the personality voter and the transactional voter.The personality voter likes how crude and cunning Trump is. She proudly brands herself "a deplorable" in reference to Hillary Clinton's infamous 2016 remark. She thinks it's funny when Trump riles his enemies, who, not coincidentally, are her enemies, too. This strain of Trump support tends to have a strong populist flavor, where supporting Trump gives "a collective middle finger" to political and cultural elites this voter despises and whom she believes despise her in turn.For the personality voter, Trump's ability to avoid paying income taxes is untroubling. It's far from the first violation of establishment norms she has vicariously enjoyed through her candidate. If anything, she agrees, as he said at a 2016 debate with Clinton, that successful tax avoidance "makes [him] smart." The populist hypocrisy Trump's critics see here won't register.Personality isn't necessarily relevant for the transactional voter, our second type. In some cases, Trump's personality helps him deliver on his side of the transaction. If the thing a voter wants from Trump is to own the libs, for example, his personality is an asset. But if the thing desired involves a policy or program, Trump's personality might be immaterial or actually detrimental. Many purely transactional voters would willingly — maybe far more willingly — vote for any candidate who would do what they want Trump to do. Their vote isn't for Trump qua Trump but for Trump qua the candidate they think is most likely to provide what they want."I voted for the Supreme Court. I didn't want to vote for Trump," an archetypal transactional Trump voter named Jim George told The Washington Post in 2017. "With Trump, you just hold your nose."A transactional Trump voter in 2020 is already holding his nose too firmly to catch a whiff of these tax returns. If he's decided everything Trump has said and done over the past four years does not tip the scales against whatever good he believes will come from re-electing the president, the tax story won't do it, either. It definitely won't turn him into a Joe Biden voter, and I'm skeptical that it could even keep him home, because Trump's personal life is irrelevant to his provision of whatever benefit(s) is anticipated.The transactional voter is already under contract. He's had ample time to inspect Trump, and he didn't find anything that made him want to back out of the deal.There is one scenario in which that arrangement might fall through, and that's if Trump's personal financial circumstances rendered him unable to hold up his end of the imagined bargain. But how would that happen? Or rather, how would the transactional voter become convinced it had happened were he satisfied with Trump's performance to date?The Times reported Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt for which he is personally liable coming due over the next four years, possibly including around $100 million owed to the IRS should the agency decide a large tax rebate was improperly obtained. These are staggering numbers for us little people to contemplate, but if he holds onto the presidency, Trump is expected simply to obtain extensions on his loans and use his office however he can to mitigate his personal financial catastrophe. It would be an enormous debacle, very possibly leading to another impeachment or special counsel investigation and distracting the president from whatever his part of the transaction is supposed to be.Well, so what? Trump's first four years have had an enormous debacle every week, and an impeachment and special counsel investigation, too. Trump accomplished relatively little of his policy promises, certainly none of the headlines. The wall is not built; the swamp is not drained; not a single one of the "endless wars" is ended; the American steel industry did not come roaring back to life. Trump's most significant fulfilled promise — nominating conservative justices to the Supreme Court — was the one over which he arguably had the least influence: He could not know whether or when there would be a vacancy, and he was undoubtedly responsible for few, if any, of the names on his shortlist.If this level of distraction and failure is acceptable to the transactional voter, a second-term Trump fighting foreclosure and the IRS is too.More stories from theweek.com Gabrielle Union reaches settlement with NBC after America's Got Talent allegations 'Sully' Sullenberger savages Trump's 'lethal lies and incompetence' in new Lincoln Project ad Let's be real: Biden is cruising to victory
- U.S.Autoblog
Dashcam shows Florida man shooting through his own windshield at another car
It's the Wild West out there, nowhere more so than in the Sunshine State, where Central Florida's WESH 2 news reports that a man fired several shots through his own windshield after he says the driver of another car pointed a gun at him. Dashcam footage captured the incident, which took place on Florida's Highway 417 in Orange County. The driver, Marco Mazzetta, posted the footage to YouTube (naturally), and it shows him squeezing off several shots at a Nissan 370Z, all while traveling at 93 mph. According to Mazzetta, the Nissan was being driven aggressively and it bumped Mazzetta's truck when he tapped the brakes.
- WorldKCRA - Sacramento Videos
Video Missing boater found 1,500 feet underwater in Lake Tahoe, officials say
The body of a boater who had been missing since mid-August was recovered more than 1,500 feet underwater in Lake Tahoe after a search that lasted over a month, officials said Monday. The City of South Lake Tahoe said it began a missing person investigation with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office on Aug. 10 after a boat 29-year-old Ryan Normolye rented washed ashore in Glenbrook, Nevada without him in it.
- PoliticsHuffPost
Carl Bernstein: Trump Has Created 'First Grifter Presidency' In America's History
The famed Watergate reporter said the tax report is "the smoking gun about who Donald Trump really is."
- WorldThe Telegraph
Auschwitz director offers to serve time in place of 13-year-old Nigerian sentenced to 10 years for blasphemy
The director of the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland has offered to serve time for a Nigerian child who was convicted of blasphemy and ordered to spend ten years in prison by a Sharia court . In an open letter, Piotr Cywinski asked Nigeria’s President to intervene and pardon 13-year-old Omar Farouq for the conviction. “As the director of the Auschwitz memorial, which commemorates the victims and preserves the remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camps, where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity,” he wrote. Omar Farouq was arrested earlier this year by religious police in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city, after he had a ‘blasphemous’ conversation with an older man. His conviction by a religious court has provoked condemnation by the United Nations and global human rights groups. Mr Cywinski told The Telegraph that he felt he had to act when he heard about Omar. “When I heard about this story last week, I remembered that [Nigeria’s] President Buhari visited Auschwitz in 2018. So I thought that maybe a voice coming from this difficult place would have some effect on him... I have kids that age. "There are some times we have to stop our own silence and try to do something. It’s not enough to just like something on Facebook or retweet it.” Mr Cywinski added that since he sent the letter last week, no one from the government had responded yet. Kola Alapinni, Omar’s lawyer, told The Telegraph that the adolescent has been held in a prison for adults and not been allowed to see any legal representation. If Omar had been older, Mr Alapinni says, he would have been sentenced to death. At a federal level, Nigeria is a secular state. But 12 of the country’s northern Muslim-dominated states have a Sharia system running in parallel to the secular courts. These courts can only try Muslims and regularly serve out medieval-style punishments. Mr Alapinni, a graduate of the University of Essex and a secularist campaigner, says he will keep fighting Omar’s corner. “Section 10 of the constitution says Nigeria is a secular state. We are not Iran; we are no Saudi Arabia; we are not the Vatican. We are a multi-religious state with freedom of thought, expression and religion enshrined in the constitution,” he says. “This should not be happening.”
