In a tremendously unpleasant surprise for owners of S-corporations and C-Corporations and their tax advisors, the IRS issued Notice 2021-49 on August 4th which states that the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), made available for businesses suffering from the COVID-19 crisis, will not be available with respect to wages paid to a majority owner, or such owner’s spouse, if the majority owner has a brother or sister (whether by whole or half-blood), ancestor, or lineal descendant.
In the event that the majority owner of a corporation has no brother or sister (whether by whole or half-blood), ancestor, or lineal descendant, then wages paid to a majority owner and such owner’s spouse will qualify for the Employee Retention Credit.
Yes, you read that right. If a majority owner of a corporation has any living family members then wages paid to the owner will not be eligible for the ERC credit; however, if the majority owner has no family then wages are eligible for the ERC credit.
This is brutally unfair and makes no sense whatsoever. Only orphans that have no children are able to get the credit, while it is people with large families who need the credit to support their families. This is anti-family, unamerican, and utterly without logic or justification.
Whoever does any of the following in a public or private place, including on a school bus, knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know that it will, or will tend to, alarm, anger or disturb others or provoke an assault or breach of the peace, is guilty of disorderly conduct, which is a misdemeanor:
(1) engages in brawling or fighting; or
(2) disturbs an assembly or meeting, not unlawful in its character; or
(3) engages in offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others.
A person does not violate this section if the person’s disorderly conduct was caused by an epileptic seizure.
I would think that the last sentence wouldn’t really be necessary, at least to the extent it’s aimed at capturing involuntary conduct: It’s a general principle of criminal law that involuntary conduct (e.g., sleepwalking and actions during a seizure) isn’t covered by the law, under the so-called actus reus doctrine. I suppose it might be good to make this extra clear, though perhaps there’s some risk that courts might infer that Minnesota statutes that lack such a provision implicitly reject the actus reus doctrine. But in any event, I’ve never seen something like this in a statute, so I thought I’d note it.
(It might be a crime to do something knowing that you’re at risk of involuntary conduct that causes injury—for instance, it may be reckless driving to drive when you know you’re subject to extremely frequent seizures, or for that matter when you know you’re very likely to fall asleep or otherwise lose consciousness—but that doesn’t seem to apply here.)
In the first of what will surely have to be an on-going series, let’s examine the proposition that President Joe Biden is that rarest of rare things, an honest politician.
Let’s start with his well-documented past deceptions and lies. And they are well-documented indeed, primarily because it was documented at a time when the media was still making nods to at least the pretense of being an objective and honest broker of information. Biden’s first run at the presidency in 1988 ended in failure when it was revealed that he was plagiarizing other people’s political speeches, most notably those of British Labour MP Neil Kinook, going so far as to even steal Kinook’s stories about his own family’s history. The late Robert Kennedy was also someone from whom he stole.
And it wasn’t Biden’s first foray with presenting other people’s work as his own. Back when he was in law school, he was caught plagiarizing from others’ work in one of his law papers. In a confrontation with a reporter, in which he prefaced his remarks with the Trumpesque braggadocio “I probably have a much higher I.Q. than you do, I suspect”, he claimed that he earned three degrees as an undergraduate, was the only person in his law school class to get a full scholarship, and ultimately finished in the top half of his law school class. All of these were lies.
During that 1988 campaign, his staffers tried to stop him from falsely claiming to have joined the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, but the lie was repeated at several campaign stops. When the campaign was imploding on the back of the plagiarism charges, and Biden was struggling to stay in the race, he implicitly copped to the lie while trying to avoid admitting it, saying ““I find y’all going back and saying, ‘Well, where were you, Senator Biden, at the time?’ — you know, I think it’s bizarre. Other people marched. I ran for office.”
But the lies about his activism during the Civil Rights era didn’t start with his 1988 campaign. He’d been telling porky pies about it for years.
When Biden gave up on his 1988 quest for the presidency, he finally admitted:
”I was not an activist…I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Del. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.”
That burst of honesty proved to be only temporary. By the time he was running for the presidency again in 2020, he was back to touting his imagined youthful activism again.
Of course, the 2020 campaign provided Biden with the opportunity to lie about all kinds of things, not just his Civil Rights (non-)activism. In South Carolina he told an audience that:
When I got out of the United State Senate, instead of taking a Wall Street job – and they’re not bad, I’m not making them bad – but instead of doing the things that I never did before, I figured I wasn’t going to change all these years from what I was comfortable doing. So I became a teacher. I became a professor.
Actually, the job he took when he left the US Senate was the job of Vice President of the United States. But aside from his confusion about the job he left in 2016, what he actually became at that point was the recipient of what was essentially a no-show job with a huge salary, an honorary “professorship” at UPenn in exchange for his name and a few appearances at “big ticket” events. He never taught a single student in a single class.
He also repeatedly told campaign audiences that he had been arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela. Eventually he was forced to admit that it wasn’t true.
And it isn’t just his own personal history that he lies about. He’s an inveterate liar about policy. In his final debate with Trump, he claimed that “not one single person, private insurance, would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare.” Of course, Obamacare literally outlawed certain insurance plans, resulting in many millions of people losing their insurance.
In that same debate he said ““I have never said I oppose fracking.” Sure, Joe.
During an earlier debate, speaking about Obama era border enforcement policies, he said “What Latinos should look at is, comparing this president to the president we have is outrageous, number one. We didn’t lock people up in cages. We didn’t separate families. We didn’t do all of those things, number one.” Whether one wants to call them cages or not, in fact the facilities used to detain illegal immigrants under Trump were the exact same facilities used to detain illegal immigrants under Obama.
Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists? Have you ever heard it? That’s the reason I got back in this race because of what happened in Charlottesville. People coming out of the woods carrying torches, their veins bulging. Close your eyes and remember what you saw. And a young woman gets killed, that resisting the hate and violence. And the president gets asked to comment on it. what does he say? He says there were “very fine people on both sides.” He wouldn’t even condemn David Duke, for God’s sake.
As for white supremacy, Trump has repeatedly condemned it. In one White House address Trump said:
Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.
Even his infamous and much mischaracterized “very fine people” comments following the violence in Charlottesville, which is the basis for the Biden’s deceitful insinuation, Trump specifically said (12:55) ” I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
So is President Joe Biden an honest politician, or does it seem more like he is dishonest? On past evidence, it appears that he has been dishonest pretty much perpetually about his past, about policy, about other people, about his own actions, going all the way back to his law school days in 1966. We’ll see if he maintains his record for dishonesty while he remains President. Stay tuned…
Over the weekend, a federal district court judge through (sic) out the Trump campaign’s effort to challenge the Pennsylvania election results in Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar. The strongly worded opinion by Judge Matthew Brann excoriates the Trump campaign’s legal team, their arguments, and their tactics.
In response to the ruling, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) issued a statement that is worth quoting in full, as it provides a model for how other elected Republicans should be handling the Trump campaign’s legal maneuvers.
With today’s decision by Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist, to dismiss the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania.
This ruling follows a series of procedural losses for President Trump’s campaign. On Friday, the state of Georgia certified the victory of Joe Biden after a hand recount of paper ballots confirmed the conclusion of the initial electronic count. Michigan lawmakers rejected the apparent attempt by President Trump to thwart the will of Michigan voters and select an illegitimate slate of electoral college electors. These developments, together with the outcomes in the rest of the nation, confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States.
I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country. Unsurprisingly, I have significant policy disagreements with the President-elect. However, as I have done throughout my career, I will seek to work across the aisle with him and his administration, especially on those areas where we may agree, such as continuing our efforts to combat COVID-19, breaking down barriers to expanding trade, supporting the men and women of our armed forces, and keeping guns out of the hands of violent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill.
Make no mistake about it, I am deeply disappointed that President Trump and Vice President Pence were not re-elected. I endorsed the president and voted for him. During his four years in office, his administration achieved much for the American people. The tax relief and regulatory overhauls that President Trump enacted with Republicans in Congress produced the strongest economy of my adult life. He also should be applauded for forging historic peace agreements in the Middle East, facilitating the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine through Operation Warp Speed, appointing three outstanding Supreme Court justices, and keeping America safe by neutralizing ISIS and killing terrorists like Qasem Soleimani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
To ensure that he is remembered for these outstanding accomplishments, and to help unify our country, President Trump should accept the outcome of the election and facilitate the presidential transition process.
Indulging the President’s continued efforts to delegitimize the election through frivolous litigation and conspiracy mongering is not patriotic. It is quite the opposite. Elections have consequences, and in this election the Republican presidential candidate lost. Republicans and others who supported Trump need to acknowledge this fact and move on, as Senator Toomey has.
Alas, there is reason to believe the shenanigans will continue. The Trump campaign filed a notice of appeal in the Pennsylvania litigation with the U.S. Court of Appeals yesterday, but did not ask the court to delay certification of the Pennsylvania results. Other suits remain pending in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and some Republican office holders are still seeking to prevent the certification of results in other states. None of this will overturn President-elect Biden’s victory. It will, however, continue to exacerbate tribal partisan divisions and undermine confidence in our institutions.
It is long past time for more Republicans to put country over party Trump.
Jonathan H. Adler (@jadler1969) is the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
In January, Australia caught on fire. I don’t even know if that fire was put out, because we straight up almost went to war with Iran. We might actually still be almost at war with them. I don’t know, because Jen Aniston and Brad Pitt spoke to one another at an awards show and everyone flipped the fuck out, but then Netflix released Cheer and everyone fell in love with Jerry, but then there was a thing happening in China, then Prince Harry and Megan peaced out of the Royal family, and there was the whole impeachment trial, and then corona virus showed up in the US “officially,” but then Kobe died and UK peaced out of the European Union
In February, Iowa crapped itself with the caucus results and the president was acquitted and the Speaker of the House took ten years to rip up a speech, but then WHO decided to give this virus a name COVID-19, which confused some really important people in charge of, like, our lives, into thinking there were 18 other versions before it, but then Harvey Weinstein was found guilty, and Americans started asking if Corona beer was safe to drink, and everyone on Facebook became a doctor who just knew the flu like killed way more people than COVID 1 through 18.
In March, shit hit the fan. Warren dropped out of the presidential race and Sanders was like Bernie or bust, but then Italy shut its whole ass down, and then COVID Not 1 through 18 officially become what everyone already realized, a pandemic and then a nationwide state of emergency was declared in US, but it didn’t really change anything, so everyone was confused or thought it was still just a flu, but then COVID Not 18 was like ya’ll not taking me seriously? I’m gonna infect the one celebrity everyone loves and totally infected Tom Hanks, but then the DOW took a shit on itself, and most of us still don’t understand why the stock market is so important or even a thing(I still don’t), but then we were all introduced to Tiger King. (Carol totally killed her husband), and Netflix was like you’re welcome, and we all realized there was no way we were washing our hands enough in the first place because all of our hands are now dry and gross.
In April, Bernie finally busted himself out of the presidential race, but then NYC became the set of The Walking Dead and we learn that no one has face masks, ventilators, or toilet paper, or THE GOD DAMN SWIFTER WET JET LIQUID, but then Kim Jong-Un died, but then he came back to life… or did he? Who knows, because then the Pentagon released videos of UFOs, and we were like man, it’s only April….
In May, the biblical end times kicked off historical locust swarms and then we learned of murder hornets and realized that 2020 was the start of the Hunger Games but people forgot to let us know, but then people legit protested lockdown measures with AR-15s, and then sports events were cancelled everywhere, But then people all over America finally reached a breaking point with race issues and violence. There were protests in every city, but then people totes forgot about the pandemic called COVID Not One Through 18. Media struggled with how to focus on two important things at once, but then people in general struggle to focus on more than one important thing, and a dead whale was found in the middle of the Amazon rain forest after monkeys stole COVID 1 Through 19 from a lab and ran off with them, and either in May or April (no one is keeping track of time now) a giant asteroid narrowly missed earth.
In June, science and common sense just got thrown straight out the window and somehow wearing masks became a political thing, but then a whole lot of people realized the South was actually the most unpatriotic thing ever and actually lost the civil war, and there is a large amount of people who feel that statues they don’t even know the name of are needed for … history reasons, but then everyone sort of remembered there was a pandemic, but then decided that not wearing a mask was somehow a god given right (still haven’t found that part in the bible or even in the constitution), but then scientists announced they found a mysterious undiscovered mass at the center of the earth, and everyone was like DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH IT, but then everyone took a pause to realize that people actually believed Gone With The Wind was like non-fiction, but then it was also announced that there is a strange radio signal coming from somewhere in the universe that repeats itself every so many days, and everyone was like DON’T YOU DARE ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE WITH. IT, but then America reopened from the shut down that actually wasn’t even a shut down, and so far, things have gone spectacularly not that great, but everyone is on Facebook arguing that masks kill because no one knows how breathing works, but then Florida was like hold my beer and let me show you how we’re number one in all things, including new Not Corona Beer Corona Virus, Trump decides now is a good time to ask the Supreme Court to shut down Obama Care because what better time to do so than in the middle of a pandemic, but then we learned there was a massive dust cloud coming straight at us from the Sahara Desert, which is totally normal, but this is 2020, so the ghost mummy thing is most likely in that dust cloud, but then I learned of meth-gators, and I’m like that is so not on my fucking 2020 Bingo card, but then we learned that the Congo’s worse ever Ebola outbreak is over, and we were all like, there was an Ebola outbreak that was the worse ever?
In July…. Aliens? Zeus? Asteroids? Artificial Intelligence becomes self aware?
BHO did not take Russia seriously until 2014 [Crimea]. But after DJT was elected, at least in 2017-18, his Admin continued to take Russia seriously and I can list stuff it did:
Authorized lethal military aid to Ukraine.
Shuttered two Russian consulates, multiple diplomatic annexes, and expelled 60 diplomats – Seattle and SF.
Sanctioned Russian oligarchs and officials. 40 or so of them.
Expanded the Magnitsky sanctions list. This I had forgotten. Had to look it up because I thought he did the opposite.
Made RT and Sputnik register as foreign agents.
I think there were additional sanctions of Russki businesses who aided NK and Iran.
Publicly blamed Russia for a cyberattack on the Ukraine, not a biggie, but I am being fair.
On the other hand, he publicly treats Putin with deference [I don’t need examples here, do I?] and has denied the findings of our own national security establishment regarding Russian meddling in our election process. Personally, I think the Admin responses have become more erratic since his first group of professional advisors chosen from the military have been replaced by political appointees.
I get that he wants out of AFG. I get that he wants out of the ME. These are not stupid goals. I don’t get screwing around insulting NATO and pulling troops out of Germany. I do think that invites more bullying in eastern Europe from Russia.
A schematic and electron microscope cross-section show the structure of an integrated, solar-powered catalyst to split water into hydrogen fuel and oxygen. The module developed at Rice University can be immersed into water directly to produce fuel when exposed to sunlight. Credit: Jia Liang/Rice University
Rice University researchers have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.
The platform developed by the Brown School of Engineering lab of Rice materials scientist Jun Lou integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity. The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%.
This sort of catalysis isn’t new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input.
The platform introduced by Lou, lead author and Rice postdoctoral fellow Jia Liang and their colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano is a self-sustaining producer of fuel that, they say, should be simple to produce in bulk.
“The concept is broadly similar to an artificial leaf,” Lou said. “What we have is an integrated module that turns sunlight into electricity that drives an electrochemical reaction. It utilizes water and sunlight to get chemical fuels.”
Perovskites are crystals with cubelike lattices that are known to harvest light. The most efficient perovskite solar cells produced so far achieve an efficiency above 25%, but the materials are expensive and tend to be stressed by light, humidity and heat.
“Jia has replaced the more expensive components, like platinum, in perovskite solar cells with alternatives like carbon,” Lou said. “That lowers the entry barrier for commercial adoption. Integrated devices like this are promising because they create a system that is sustainable. This does not require any external power to keep the module running.”
Liang said the key component may not be the perovskite but the polymer that encapsulates it, protecting the module and allowing to be immersed for long periods. “Others have developed catalytic systems that connect the solar cell outside the water to immersed electrodes with a wire,” he said. “We simplify the system by encapsulating the perovskite layer with a Surlyn (polymer) film.”
The patterned film allows sunlight to reach the solar cell while protecting it and serves as an insulator between the cells and the electrodes, Liang said.
“With a clever system design, you can potentially make a self-sustaining loop,” Lou said. “Even when there’s no sunlight, you can use stored energy in the form of chemical fuel. You can put the hydrogen and oxygen products in separate tanks and incorporate another module like a fuel cell to turn those fuels back into electricity.”
The researchers said they will continue to improve the encapsulation technique as well as the solar cells themselves to raise the efficiency of the modules.
Saudis, Russians Bury Differences, but Mexico Threatens Oil Deal
Mexico exits talks, putting oil truce at risk; negotiations to continue Friday
From The Economist, an article explaining a Russian “dump” of Venezuela enriching a Putin ally at the expense of the Russian people:
ROSNEFT is responsible for 40% of Russia’s oil output, but it is much more than just another oil firm. A large chunk of its shares are owned by the Russian state. Its boss, Igor Sechin, is one of Vladimir Putin’s closest henchmen. …
Bear this in mind when trying to make sense of the announcement, on March 28th, that it has sold all its Venezuelan assets to an unnamed Russian government entity.
…
Thanks to a low oil price, sanctions and the Maduro regime’s spectacular corruption and ineptitude, Venezuela is in no position to repay all its debts. But this is not too much of a problem for Rosneft, since it can dump its Venezuelan assets on to Russian taxpayers. They will no doubt be delighted to hear that they have paid for this with 9.6% of Rosneft’s own shares (worth more than $4bn), thus reducing their stake to just over 40%. The deal gives Mr Sechin ever tighter control of the firm.
…
The main aim of the deal, it seems, is to help Rosneft escape the consequences of doing business with a pariah. Over the past two months America has penalised the company’s trading arms for handling Venezuelan oil. These sanctions are global in scope and affect its customers, too. Sinochem International, the trading arm of a Chinese state-owned refinery, has rejected Rosneft’s oil. The Kremlin’s solution is to distance Rosneft from Venezuela while reassuring the Venezuelan kleptocracy that it still has Russia’s backing. “I received a message from brother president Vladimir Putin who ratified his comprehensive strategic support for all areas of our [relationship],” tweeted Mr Maduro.
…
The Kremlin would like cheap oil to drive American shale producers, whose costs are higher, out of business. This is a risky game. Russia has alienated the Saudis, who might draw closer to America as a result. Rosneft can survive oil at $25 a barrel. But under Russian law the royalties it pays to the Russian state fall sharply as the oil price slides. As covid-19 spreads in Russia, Mr Putin will have to draw on the country’s reserves to help ordinary people cope. Mr Sechin’s sleight of hand has solved a problem for Rosneft, but not for Russia. ■
In the sanctuary cities panel, I crossed swords with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, among others, and explained why the Trump administration’s attacks on sanctuary cities violate constitutional limits on federal power, and have—fortunately—led to a long series of defeats in court, at the hands of both liberal and conservative judges. I also described why sanctuary jurisdictions have good policy and moral reasons for refusing to cooperate with some aspects of federal immigration enforcement, including the fact that involving local police in immigration enforcement undercuts ordinary law enforcement. Sanctuary jurisdictions are also justified in rejecting cooperation with federal deportation efforts, given the horrific abuses in its immigration detention facilities, and the government’s history of wrongfully detaining and deporting even US citizens.
On the property rights panel, I advocated what might be seen as a right-wing position (defending strong constitutional protection for property rights). On the sanctuary cities panel, I defended what is usually considered a “left-wing” perspective on sanctuary cities. But, despite the seeming contradiction, I think there is actually an underlying coherence between the two positions: both advocate strong judicial enforcement of constitutional limits on government power, and both protect poor and vulnerable populations against the sometimes overwhelming power of the state.
Of course this year’s Federalist Society Convention will probably be best remembered for Attorney General William Barr’s seriously flawed speech extolling an extraordinarily broad theory of executive power. Among other things, he ignores the many ways in which executive power has grown far beyond the Founders’ design and argues for near-total judicial (and often also congressional) deference to the president on anything involving “foreign relations” and “exigent circumstances.” This is a misreading of the Constitution, and such deference has historically led to grave abuses of power. If time permits, I may have more to say on Barr’s speech later.
Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojkt
All Things in Moderation 