Count your blessings

I feel very fortunate that I have enough that I have to pay taxes instead of not having to pay taxes because I have nothing.

Buck Norris sings "Busted" by Johnny Cash

Thanks to bucknorrismusic.

Tax Day Fact Check: Most Americans Got A Tax Cut This Year

Sam Stein at HuffPo.

On Tuesday, a wave of protesters, upset with overly-burdensome taxation by the federal government, are set to descend on the nation's capital to express their displeasure.

But does their anger reflect the truth about today's tax rates?

After all, neutral economists insist that, under the Obama administration, the overwhelming likelihood is that your tax burden has gone down, not up. Even conservative economic analysts acknowledge that there really is no basis for middle- and working-class Americans to believe that they're suddenly paying more.

"The only tax I think that has been put in place so far is an increase in the federal cigarette tax. I can't think of another Obama tax that has gone in place so far," said Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the conservative Cato Institute. "I would say that people are angry because big taxes are coming down the road because of the gigantic deficit built up under Bush and continued under Obama."

The bill for the 'borrow and give to the rich' Bush years and the aftermath that Obama may or may not be trying to deal with will eventually come due. Taxes? We ain't seen nothin' yet.

That's no shit about the 'cigarette tax', actually a tax on tobacco. I roll my own smokes and the price of a 6oz can of tobacco went from about $10 to $23+. I know they're trying to make folks quit smoking for health reasons, so I've got no problem with it.

"Belief is triumphing over reality," (my em) explained Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. "Part of it is they watch the wrong television shows and believe it. Part of it is the tax cut that went to almost everybody, the making work pay credit, was dribbled out... people didn't get a check. They paid lower taxes and might not have noticed it.

"It is like arguing whether Jesus rose from the dead," McIntyre concluded. "If you believe it, you believe it."

Belief in something that sounds crazy and has no facts to support it is called "faith". The teabaggers and wingnuts have put their faith in F**Noise, Moosebreath, and Miss Becky. Crazy, and no facts to support it.

The biggest part of our income has no withholding taken out of it, and we're still getting money back from Mrs. G's part-time job. There have been years when I had to pay extra, but not this year. Thank you Barry. And TurboTax.

There are other taxes, of course, ask any homeowner who just coughed up property tax. I don't begrudge taxes, we all gotta chip in, but I do resent some of the things my tax money is used for that do nothing for the people who actually need help, such as going into the pockets of all the wrong people who don't need it. I think I need not go into details.

All I really want from the government is for the Fire Department to show up if I need them. And my rocking chair money, of course.

Make Texas a Concentration Camp for Wingnuts

Josh Holland at AlterNet.

It’s Tax Day, and Glenn Beck is talking about secession. But he’s not simply re-litigating the Civil War, as is popular in conservative circles these days, he’s calling for an ideological secession. Right-wingers, he says, would kick the rest of the country’s ass hands down if only they could get their hands on a single state. “Think of it this way,” he says to the treasonous MSM, “Make Texas our concentration camp.”

Man, am I down wid dat! I further propose a double-fenced minefield around it!

Then I thought about what a hellhole that concentration camp would be (even if the barbecue is awesome). Let’s not forget that conservative America, contrary to the Right’s tough talk about being self-sufficient, is deeply dependent on us nasty liberals for handouts; without them, their state’s services would be toast.

A nice red and blue map of the donor and leech states.

If Lincoln had let the South go, we’d be living in a wealthy modern state with universal health-care, and the Confederacy, well-positioned for 19th century agriculture, would have developed an economy similar to Mexico’s.

We'da still have had to kick their ass or they'd still have slaves.

If such a thing came to pass, it would be progressives bitching about illegal immigration by Texicans and southerners. Profiling would be easy - just listen to 'em talk.

I think Miss Becky is right for once, just for the wrong reasons. He has a delusional idea about the outcome, but I say give this theory a test. I betcha within two years we'd have to build a sound wall because of the whining from within. Make sure there's lotsa broken glass embedded in the top.

What they think ...

Digby excerpts an NYT poll on the teabaggers:

...

Here's a shocker: Only 58% of Americans think Obama was born in the US as opposed to 41% of teabaggers. The rest either think he was born in another country or don't know. (It's possible that some of these people don't understand the significance and simply heard something about Indonesia --- or think Hawaii is a foreign country.)

64% of these fools believe their taxes have been raised.

80% think you shouldn't raise taxes on people who make over 250k a year in order to help pay for health care. (That's opposed to only 39% of the public as a whole.)

They really don't like poor people. 73% of them think that government benefits encourage people to remain poor (73%) while only 33% of the country as a whole believe that.

...

Behold the power of propaganda:

...

Where are they getting their information? 63% of them get their TV news from FOX. 53% believe that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are news shows.

...

There ya go ...

No pull trigger, no get food

Not pissed off enough so far today? This'll do it:

When the Army Uses "Enhanced Interrogation" on an American Soldier

...to deny him service connected benefits. The Army has saved $billions by doing this. Bastards.

Quote of the Day dos

From El Rude-o in a piece about new oppressive laws in AZ and NE:

Again and again, in Nebraska, in Arizona, Republicans demonstrate that the only response they have to social problems is to punish the victims.

The great happy Vatican death spiral

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford.

I wasn't kidding above. I firmly believe we have this apocalypse thing all wrong, backwards. The Second Coming has nothing whatsoever to do with some melodramatic return of a bearded, sandal-wearing hippie anarchist who comes back to take away all the booze, porn and tattoos as he whisks away the trembling "true believers" to a land of harps, minivans and horrible sex.

Wrong. The Rapture is when the major karmic roadblocks of man -- all the Vaticans, popes, temples, cults, megachurches and even most organized religions all stagger and collapse under the weight of their inherent hypocrisy, all the oppressed sexuality, the homophobia, misogyny, fear of science, the denial of true spiritual source.

You could call it one of the greatest ironies of man: Only when our supposedly "holy" dogmas, institutions and leaders fail, can the human soul ever truly be free.

Hear, hear.

The Republicans are like frat boys in Animal House

Once again, the Limey press outshines ours. A 'recommended read' from the Guardian:

In the classic teen movie Animal House there comes a moment when the ne'er-do-well students of the Delta fraternity finally realise their pranks have gone too far. Faced with expulsion from university, the most violent, antisocial drunkard of the group, Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi), gives one last rousing, rambling speech to his crestfallen comrades. "Nothing is over until we decide it is," he yells. "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!"

Bluto, of course, ends up as a U.S. Senator. A Repug no doubt.

The Republican party, in particular, and American conservatism in general, have taken to operating in a similar manner to the Delta fraternity – increasingly reckless, anarchic and strident. Faced with defeat they respond with desperation. Only where the Deltas were motivated by ribaldry, conservatives are driven by rage.

On the one hand there are the Blutos – characterised by their contempt for even the most basic facts. [...]

So much for the Blutos. Far from reining them in, the Republican leadership increasingly reflects their excesses. Absent any legislative agenda or coherent ideological approach, they have spent the last two years crafting "a really futile and stupid gesture … on somebody's part" that Otter would be proud of. Small government is a legitimate philosophical and political position. But in the hands of people who voted to bloat the deficit and unleash a huge state-grab of civil liberties, it is shorn of credibility. It isn't government they don't like; it's Democrats in government.

And how would the Republican party explain to most of its supporters that while their living standards stagnated or declined under George Bush they are set to improve under Obama? As Otter explained to one of the fraternity after trashing his brother's car: "You fucked up ... you trusted us!"

That's about it, yep. The right wing didn't fuck up - everybody else did for falling for their shit.

Quote of the Day

Our pal Nunya:

... I'd rather have the bad news than walk around with my head up my ass.

Sarah costs more ...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Sarah Palin will get first-class airfare for two and three rooms at a luxury hotel when she gives a speech in June for a university foundation.

And organizers better not forget to stock her lectern with two water bottles and bendable straws.

The details of Palin's contract with the California State University, Stanislaus Foundation were contained in five pages of the document retrieved from a campus trash bin by students who heard administrators might be shredding documents related to the speech.

...

Same old tricks but the Johns are more gullible.

Thanks to Watertiger for the link.

Blah Tuesday

Not much goin' on today that moves me to blog it. Just sittin' here waiting in breathless anticipation of the right's response to Obama's next move. Whatever it is, the response will be the same - lies, bullshit, and fearmongering. Ho-fuckin'-hum.

This is dedicated to those assholes, who are truly running on empty.

Thanks to galantdo007, Japan.

I'll have a cold one ...

My kind of beer.

Unpacking ...

Stays on top today - G

Matt Taibbi takes the suck-up David Brooks apart:

...

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

...

I've worked like a dog since I was fifteen years old. There are parts of my body that are just about at the end of their service life. My orthopedist can't wait to get a hold of me so he can send his kids to MIT (I need a new shoulder, hip, and surgery on both knees). I've worked in shops where 12-14 hour days were the norm, for not much money and fewer benefits and if you were thinking of calling in sick, you might as well take the day to look for another job. I never broke six figures; getting halfway there was the best I ever did.

It would have been a lot easier to take if I was making a salary where I knew I could afford what I needed when I needed it, if I had no worries about having to pay a hospital bill if I got sick, if I could afford to fix the piece-of-shit car I had (that I got from a customer who was junking it), so I could get to work. If I didn't have those worries then, it would have been easier to take working with broken ribs and fingers (I can reset a break like a pro now), or sicker than a dog, afraid to take a day off in fear of losing my job.

Yes, the Mrs. and I have made a good life for ourselves, thanks not so much to our employers. It took a lot of scrimping and saving and not having kids (not that having a comfortable life was a factor in the choice not to have them). We have a nice house because I've done all the work myself instead of having to worry about paying contractors. We live pretty well thanks to hard work on both our parts and foregoing a lot of things those more well-off deem necessary.

So, for David Brooks to say that some rich guy works harder than I do makes me want to throttle him. Believe me, it's easier to spend 80 hours a week at work when you know your kids will be fed well, clothed well, educated well, and want for nothing. It's easier if you know you'll have enough to pay the bills at the end of the month and, god forbid, if you get hurt somehow, you won't go bankrupt paying the bill.

I've been very poor (to the point of living in a van for a while) and I know what average people go through just to put food on the table. A lot of folks work 80 hours a week and there's still not enough money. I'm sorry, I can't shed too many tears for people who pull down six or seven figures and not break a sweat, regardless of how many hours they put in. No matter how hard the average person works, they'll never make as much, nor enjoy the rewards the rich do.

What Brooks did with his latest column was give a couple hundred million hardworking Americans a slap in the face. Thanks to Matt Taibbi for slapping him back.

Great thanks to Cookie Jill for the link.

Commodities ...

Friends of ours bought a parking space in a building in Manhattan about 15 years ago for $29K. They can sell it today for $90K. A fucking parking space.

On Piracy

I have no love for pirates, but this is an interesting article in the Nairobi Daily Jump Up And Hallelujah. Actually, it's in Time magazine, but I thank Molly Ivins for her lovely description of the New York Times in a letter to a friend.

Good information on the inner workings of the piracy trade is hard to come by, but evidence from out of Somalia indicates that criminal syndicates with financiers and investors based in Dubai and London and Mombasa, Kenya, have taken over piracy in Somalia, which got its start in the early 1990s as a way to mete out retribution on ships that fished illegally or dumped toxic waste in Somali waters. Now the warlords at the top take almost all the money and pay the men at the bottom next to nothing. The pirates caught on camera bobbing in their skiffs are the high-sea equivalent of the Cosa Nostra's lowliest associates. "The people being arrested are actually foot soldiers. They are not the real pirates," says Dickson Oruku Nyawinda, a lawyer who represents accused Somali pirates in Kenya's jails. "We are dealing with people who have no idea where the ransoms are going."

According to the report, rank-and-file militiamen receive $15,000 for their role in hijacking a ship. They get much more if they bring their own weapons or a boat. But pirates who have fled Somalia for Nairobi say that figure is much inflated. Ahmad, for example, says he might get a $10,000 share but his bosses would withhold as much as half of that to pay for his expenses. "The big fish are the guys who lead us, the ones who invest in the equipment, the boat, those things," he says. "Whether we die or not, they don't care." (my em)

The Somali pirates seem to have a lot in common with American coal miners.

Also, what is it with these Somali yay-hoos firing on warships? In the third incident of late, the other day they fired on USS Ashland (LSD 48) and were captured.

Just as an aside, I got all excited when I saw Ashland. She was in the flotilla that accompanied me on my Med cruise. I thought she must be getting a little long in the tooth so I looked her up. Turns out the ship that went with me on LanForMed 2-65 (First up at Google! - G) was USS Ashland (LSD 1) which served in WWII and was broken for scrap over forty years ago. Just another in a long line of constant reminders that I'm old. Waaaah.

Anyway, the pirates can't be attacking warships for ransom. The drugs can't be that good. Can they?

Are they hoping to be taken to America where they will get a book deal and get rich? Unlikely.

I get the feeling that someone among them heard about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and, in a complete misunderstanding of the results of that more or less made-up justification for the Vietnam war, think that's the way to get the United States to invade Somalia, install a weak, corrupt government (which the Somalis are quite used to), drop untold billions of dollars trying to do the undoable, and leave in ten years with their tails between their legs.

Hey, it worked in Vietnam and it's working in Iraq and Afghanistan, so why not in Somalia?

Quote of the Day

Time:

Malou Innocent

Decrying the ongoing war in Iraq, in the Christian Science Monitor:

"There's a growing narrative that Iraq's solidifying democracy makes the seven years of U.S. war and occupation a worthy enterprise. Some observers have even spun Iraq's March 7 elections as proof that democracy promotion via military occupation can succeed. Don't believe the hype. The Iraq war remains a mistake of mammoth proportions. And Iraq's election represents a pyrrhic victory, as the ... costs of the occupation far outweigh any benefits."

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Obama Authorizes Assassination of Radical American-Born Cleric
And entire cast of “Fox and Friends.”

Texas Removes Bust of George Washington From School Grounds
He was a godless atheist, according to latest American History textbook.

GM Sales Up 68%, Ford Sales Up 84%
In China.

1 in 5 Believe Aliens in Our Midst
4 in 5 think 1 in 5 is nuts.

Baseball: Umpire Publicly Criticizes Teams for Slow Play
Then he's reminded of the millions fans spend on beer, hot dogs, peanuts, Cracker Jack, soda, cotton candy, pizza, ice cream, nachos, popcorn and souvenirs while the game drags on forever.

Simple ...

It's all them black people:

...

Seriously, if the shiftless welfare queens would just stop stealing all this money from hardworking white people, we wouldn't have all these problems. I don't see why all everyone always jumps to the conclusion that it has anything to do with race.

I'm surprised some Republican hasn't come up with the idea of sending them all back to Africa.

Quote of the Day

Karoli:

...

My personal message to whining doctors

Get over yourselves. It's law, it's staying law, and you're going to make a boatload of money one way or the other so you can fund your racist conservative teabagging buddies in the Southern states. If it's so repugnant to you to practice medicine for the welfare of patients instead of the welfare of your checkbook, get out of the medical profession, get out of the way, and let someone who gives a damn step in your place.

...

Indeed. I remember a day, my mom was a nurse for 60 years, when doctors practiced medicine for the good of their fellow man first. Now, all but one (my ENT) of the doctors I know are more concerned about their share of a 'hospital corporation' and their vacation home in the Bahamas. But then again, most of the doctors I know are my customers, and most of them live here.

I bet they mentioned 9/11 and health care

Republicans convene in New Orleans, with no mention of Katrina

That they have the nerve to even show up there shows not only an amazing cluelessness but absolutely unmitigated gall. So what's new? All the usual suspects took the podium and told lies. So what's new?

They won't mention Katrina, but I will.

Thanks to rosenpenis, Norway.

Thanks to NettwerkMusic.