Taxes "owed" vs. taxes "paid"

What's the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid?
Everyone is talking about how Romney's info dump yesterday showed that he did pay taxes between 1990 and 2009.
But PricewaterhouseCoopers said in the first bullet point that "each year during the period there were federal and state income taxes owed", and in the second bullet point "The lowest of any annual 'effective federal personal income tax rate' ... was 13.44 per cent".
Everybody is now reporting that Romney paid at least 13.44 per cent in federal income taxes annually between 1990 to 2009.
No, I don't think this is what those figures mean at all.
He "owed" income taxes every year -- of course, everyone who earns income owes taxes. Does this mean THAT HE ACTUALLY PAID ANY TAXES? How much you owe depends on income, but how much you pay depends on the deductions which can be found to offset the tax owing. And his annual tax rate was 13.44 per cent. Again, does this mean THAT HE ACTUALLY PAID THIS RATE? Again, it depends on the deductions which can be found to offset the rate.
The last carefully phrased bullet point tells the tale --it uses the terminology of "federal income taxes owed" and "state income taxes reported".
Harry Reid, I think you're going to be proved right after all.
Crossposted at Daily Kos.

Calling them out

Sixth Estate calls out Harper on his excuse for pension "reform" and the Globe and Mail for falling for it.
First of all, its not much of a reform:

The “reforms” are, in a word, horseshit. They’ll make MPs wait a few extra years before collecting, and they’ll apparently up the contribution rates. And — best yet — they won’t apply except to new MPsafter the next election. In short, the current crop are all safe. That’s Conservative “reform” for you.

Zing!
Second, the spin is already being spun:

And then I turn to the Globe & Mail for its coverage:

This would present their political rivals with a dilemma: If the NDP and Liberals oppose the budget – because of other measures in it – they will leave themselves open to charges they didn’t support MP pension reforms.

Oh, come on, Steven High. You’re getting paid for this, aren’t you? You’ve got to do better than that.
I won’t bother explaining to the national correspondent of a major newspaper why voting against an omnibus budget is a piss-poor way to judge whether you support any one of its many measures. I will, however, wonder precisely why said correspondent thinks it is his job to anticipate and even make some advance suggestions for the bullshit spin that some 30-year-old Conservative propagandist in the party campaign office might one day try to put on the budget.

Pow!

Be nice to the people you meet on the way up

Because you'll meet them again on the way down, as Mitt Romney has now discovered -- he shouldn't have said all those mean things about Jimmy Carter:

James Carter IV has come forward as the online sleuth who tracked down undercover videotape of Mitt Romney's damning comments four months ago to a US$50,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser in Florida....
For Carter, his mission was personal — the 35-year-old online researcher, currently looking for work, said he'd grown sick and tired of Romney slagging his 87-year-old grandfather, a Nobel Peace prize winner who has long worked towards peace in the Middle East.
..."I don't like criticism of my family," the younger Carter told NBC News on Tuesday after it emerged he'd persuaded the fundraiser attendee who secretly taped Romney to hand the video over to Mother Jones magazine.
"It gets under my skin. I'm proud of my role in being able to track it down. My motivation is to help Democrats get elected."
In an interview with The Associated Press, he added: "I've gotten a lot of Twitter messages from people supporting me and saying that it's poetic justice that it was a Carter that uncovered this, considering the way that the Romney campaign has been talking about my grandfather. I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly."

Great line of the day

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos sums up the Occupy impact::

There may no longer be occupiers sleeping out in parks every night, there may never have been a unified set of goals for the movement, there may be no Occupy candidates for Congress a la the tea party, but a year later there's no doubt that Occupy reinvigorated the economic left, gave even non-political people a language to question the great American wealth divide, and made protest exciting and creative again.

Occupy Wall Street is back, baby

It's already September 17 on Wall Street and the crowds are building in Zuccotti Park. Here's a photo taken around midnight.


Follow #s17 on twitter for the latest news.

Empty chair Obama betrays America!

Romney said this week that Obama sympathized with the embassy rioters and everybody else said "Whaaa?"
What we didn't understand was that John Bolton and Dan Senor and the rest of the Republican campaign retreads and also-rans who are supposedly giving Romney such expert advice on foreign policy were talking about the invisible Obama, the one who sat in Eastwood's empty chair and swore at him, the secret Mooslem Kenyan usurper Obama that no one can see except nutbar Republicans.
But I imagine we'll see lots more dumb attacks on the invisible Obama before this election is over.

Who knew?

I guess the biggest news of the day is that Kate Middleton has breasts.
Just, wow.

What Juan Cole says

When things are going wrong in the Middle East, I always check on what Juan Cole says about it to gain some perspective on how serious it really is:

What happened in Benghazi was the action of a tiny fringe, sort of like Ku Klux Klan violence in the US. It isn’t typical of the new Libya, and Benghazi is not a lawless or militia-ridden city. One of the narratives of what happened there, in fact, is that the police may have been *too* heavy-handed in an attempt to curb the militants’ demonstration, provoking the latter to bring out their one RPG launcher.
The crowds both in Egypt and Libya were tiny. Their militancy is not typical of Egypt or Libya today, both of which are struggling toward more democratic forms of governance. In Cairo, there may have been a failure of policing; police in Egypt feel unfairly demonized because they had been seen as bulwarks of the Mubarak regime, and they often decline to show up to their jobs as a result of this low morale. This police foot-dragging has allowed an increase in petty crime, though Cairo is still far safer than most Western cities.
The government of Egypt is still pretty powerful, and will likely act to curb the militants, as it did in the Sinai recently.

#romneyshambles

I thought we would have to wait until the debates for Mitt Romney to demonstrate his manifest unfitness to be president. Instead, it happened already and its still eight weeks until the election:

Romney’s decision to use a fatal attack on Americans as an opportunity to seek political gain based on a complete lie is just the latest example of his copyrighted #romneyshambles campaign. It is a classic #romneyfail.

Bush and Cheney were the hollow men

Its like caring for someone who had been mentally ill, as they gradually recover their sanity and begin to understand how delusional they were.
As the years go by, the United States seems finally to be able to acknowledge what everyone else in the world has known for years -- 9/11 happened because Bush and Cheney were too stupid to prevent it.
Contrary to all the "nobody could have predicted" excuses, the CIA knew that Bin Laden was dangerous.  They warned Bush and Cheney again and again, month after month.  But Bush and Cheney didn't listen because Rumsfeld and his neocon brain trust in the Pentagon (Wolfowitz, Cambone, Feith) were too busy creating fairy tales about Saddam Hussein:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.
In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

Banjo Bowl

The Banjo Bowl in Winnipeg follows the Labour Day Classic in Regina -- which (ahem!) the Riders won this year by 52 to zero, thank you jeebuz. How the Banjo Bowl was born: In 2003, Blue Bombers placekicker/punter Troy Westwood was being hauled over the coals for insulting Saskatchewan and he decided to reply:

"I had referred to the people of Saskatchewan as a bunch of banjo-picking inbreds," Westwood said that afternoon in the Bomber locker-room. "I was wrong to make such a statement, and I'd like to apologize.
[wait for it]
"The vast majority of the people in Saskatchewan have no idea how to play the banjo."

UPDATE: 25 riders 24 bombers. Yay, team!

In the blink of an eye

I was about to post something a little snarky last night about how Pauline Marois couldn't quite close the deal with Quebecers. Then I read about the shooting and saw her amazingly confident ability to react quickly but calmly, and prevent panic.
In the blink of an eye, my opinion of her changed. As the Montreal Gazette put it, In moment of crisis, Marois shows Quebecers formidable poise:

Take her measure. She showed sangfroid — cold blood — in a moment of crisis.
She hit the correct notes in her news conference on Wednesday, pointing out that Quebec is not a violent society, that the incident had nothing to do with politics.
Quebecers will take note of the formidable Madame Marois’s poise today. She can be expected to benefit, especially, from appearing in a positive light to the majority of Quebecers, who did not vote for her.
Marois was elected with the weakest possible mandate: 31.9 per cent of the popular vote and 54 seats. Facing an unpopular premier in the midst of a student crisis and a corruption inquiry, she was unable to make the sale.

But that was then and this is now. She's shown now that she has what it takes.

Invisible Obama Derangement Syndrome

*Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

Jon Stewart thanked Clint Eastwood for making it clear to the nation that only the Republicans can see the Kenyan socialist fascist who they think is Barak Obama:

By criticizing an invisible Obama for doing things that the real Obama hasn’t even done, Stewart could reach only one logical conclusion: “there is a President Obama that only Republicans can see,” and this Invisible Obama is the one they have been running against all along.

As if we needed any more proof that they can see invisible people that no one else can see, today, the rightwing blogs celebrated "empty chair day" . And here's the latest from Chuck Norris:

A video released this weekend by action movie hero Chuck Norris claims that America faces “1,000 years of darkness” if President Barack Obama is reelected.

These people are nuts.

Deja vu

Bill Maher - New Rules 31.08.2012 - YouTube:
"

Texts from the dog

I'm impressed that somebody actually thoughtof this:

And The Guardian did an interview about it -- with the dog, of course.