John T. Reed’s news blog

Dana Perino did a fantastic analysis of the presidential race tonight on O’Reilly. The polls have been right since 1952. No Republican has ever come from this far behind in August to win. The crowds and their enthusiasm at his rallies are meaningless. The public now feel they understand who Trump is and probably could not have their minds changed at this point. Far more voters vote in the general than in the primaries so victories in partisan primaries are not indicative of general election victory.   Waiting for Superman Trump supporters are waiting for Superman. FBI Superman. Justice Department...

Readers of my books like Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real estate Investors and The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense know I like to study laws and find ways around them. For example, the law on delayed exchanges says you must not use, as an intermediary, anyone related to you as specified in Treasury Regulation TD 8346. That lists 29 categories of relationships to you who canNOT be your intermediary. Here’s part of it: siblings, spouse, ancestors, descendants, corp where you own 10%, trust officials, tax exempt officials, etc.—29 categories . The usual reaction of investors is wailing about how they...

Last night, my wife and I went to see Beautiful, the Carole King Musical. Fantastic! We love these juke box musicals We also love and highly recommend two other similar such musicals: The Million-Dollar Quartet (which we saw in Chicago twice and Vegas once) and Jersey Boys (which we saw in Manhattan with the original cast).We saw Beautiful in San Francisco at the Orpheum Theater. The cast there was terrific, but that neighborhood really sucks. It is also playing in NYC, London, and Australia. And the group we saw is touring the U.S. The schedule is at http://beautifulonbroadway.com/tour/. Carole King...

Michelle says she lives in a house built by slaves. Not much. In 1948, Truman’s daughter’s piano leg punched a hole in the floor and ceiling of the room below. The White House was rotten to the core.The engineers wanted to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. Truman said to preserve the exterior shell as much as possible. The inside was totally gutted including all floors, ceilings, walls, stairways. It looked like the interior of a circus tent when it was gutted.They created a steel structure then tried to recreate the original rooms. within that steel structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_ReconstructionTruman spent...

During the primaries, I and others warned the parties that they were playing with convention fire when they tried to use various procedural games to deny Trump and Bernie the nomination. With the Republicans, it was “rules are rules” games where Cruz got the delegates Trump had won in some places. With Bernie, it was a sort of pervasive sense that there was no way he was getting the nomination, even if he somehow won the delegates.In the event, Trump gave Cruz a prime-time speech and seemed genuinely concerned about whether Cruz hated him. Then Cruz more or less unified...