Daily Archives: 14 August 2026

Why Weren’t Reporters Told?

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It seems that President Donald Trump (R), on the way back from a NATO meeting in Ankara, boarded a “legacy Air Force One,” moved to a catering truck’s container that was ostensibly transferring provisions to the aircraft, via that catering container transferred to a different aircraft, and flew that one to the UK. On arrival there, he transferred to the legacy Air Force One, which had arrived at the same time, and deplaned in view of the press and onlookers, with none of them the wiser.

The press corps and a number of government officials who had accompanied Trump to the meeting had remained on that Air Force One, uninformed about the President’s having shifted to a different aircraft.

The whole business was a Secret Service response to a threat that Iranians would attempt to shoot down the Air Force One aircraft on its takeoff from Ankara, murdering the President.

The Press Precious Ones have their collective panties in hard wedgies over not having been informed of the switch and having seemingly been used as decoys, as CNN‘s Jake Tapper bleated.

An angry press is demanding answers on why reporters weren’t told of Trump’s plane transfer or whether their presence aboard the supposed Air Force One—alongside senior officials Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—put them at serious risk.

There’s this, too:

The White House didn’t plan to disclose the feint, officials said, until the Washington Post revealed it….

And this from John Kirby, who spent his Navy career in the Navy’s press-facing career track and was ex-Presidents Barack Obama’s (D) and Joe Biden’s (D) Pentagon and White House Press Secretary, had this:

They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans….

Sure. Because the sudden mass transfer of passengers from Air Force One to alternate aircraft, coming as close as it necessarily would have to the Air Force One’s scheduled departure given the timing of the decision to set up the President’s transfer, would not have exposed the Secret Service’s and the US and of Israeli intelligence communities’ knowledge of the threat. Right.

WaPo‘s exposure and Kirby’s studied disingenuousness are why the press wasn’t told of the transfer. The press cannot be trusted with information like that. Even revealing the transfer after the fact is dangerous, revealing capabilities and potentially sources as it does.

Pressmen are well aware, as much smarter and so much better informed than us average Americans as they hold themselves out to be, of that danger.

Decoys? That’s the highest value of today’s news writers.

The Answer is Perfectly Straightforward

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New York City has sent letters to folks that city bureaucrats claim are pied-à-terre home owners that contain warnings of impending tax bills on those properties. Many of those homes are primary homes clearly held by their owners, and many others are primary homes that are held in trusts or by LLCs as entirely legitimate devices those homeowners use to mitigate estate taxes and to make things easier for heirs.

Worse, the city is trying to require the home owners to prove their homes are primary residences and not secondary. This throws into a cocked hat the American requirement that government must prove its case, not the one the government is charging or the one government is billing.

It’s true enough that trusts and LLCs can confuse, for some, the ownership of the residence in question. City bureaucrats and their boss, DSA/Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are among the some who are confused, and they’re whining about it.

City officials have said they don’t always have the information they need about a home to know whether it is a primary residence. As a result, they have sent out more notices to homeowners than the tax will ultimately apply to.
“Part of the point of this outreach from the Department of Finance is to ascertain whether or not that reflects a primary residence or not,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a news conference last month, referring to homes owned by trusts and LLCs. “One of the reasons that this is being done now is to ensure that New Yorkers have requisite time before the implementation of the surcharge.”

New Yorkers don’t need any time at all for the city to ascertain whether or not the residence in question is a primary residence or not.

The onus is on the city to prove it is not. If the city’s bureaucrats do not have the information they need about a home to know whether it is a primary residence, then they don’t know that the residence is a pied-à-terre, and if they don’t know, they cannot claim that it is. Thus, no pied-à-terre tax is owed.

The question is answered by a simple declaration by the owner, just as with Federal income taxes, with liabilities attached to lying about the matter, just as with Federal income taxes. And just as with Federal income taxes, city bureaucrats can, after the fact, ask for more information, but they cannot be allowed to assign ownership on their own claim and demand a priori the homeowner prove the contrary.

Of course, it may take a court case to enforce this requirement.