On Boston:
– Obama’s speech at the press briefing room.
And non-Boston:
– I get that business owners are upset about the sick leave and it’s reasonable to expect that they’ll raise their prices to pay for more costs. But do they think dickishness is going to help?
– Rand Paul’s speech at Howard University.
– A while ago I had a link that the Spokane Street Viaduct would come in under budget. Here’s what Seattle will be using the rest of the money on.
Have a good day, everybody.
Not much to say about Boston this morning. So far, Homeland Security (FBI, ATF, etc.) is investigating. A Saudi on a student visa is in the hospital and was questioned, and an apartment was searched, but as of now any link is little more than speculation. The F.B.I. is asking that anyone with video footage to come forward so they can examine it.
J.M. Berger @intelwire
Pressure cooker is used in a number of bomb recipes, but notably in Inspire, so we’re going to hear a lot of speculation on the front now.
Bomb was shrapnel in 6L pressure cooker, in black duffel bag, apparently both locations.
‘Inspire’ is an Al Queda publication.
@1 Same to you, Bob.
@2 The Saudi student gave the FBI permission to search his apartment, and the search didn’t find anything. Authorities say there are no suspects. Looks like that guy’s only guilty of (1) being Saudi, and (2) being near the bomb when it went off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04.....nyone.html
Uhhh. Folks. That sucks. That’s got to change. That right there says “only the little people pay taxes”.
@6 Actually, a lot of investors pay nothing in capital gains tax, because a lot of investment money is in IRAs.
Oh yeah, I know, IRA withdrawals are subject to ordinary income tax rates. But by then, the taxpayer usually is in a lower tax bracket, or his retirement income may be too low to pay any income taxes at all.
Yes, we investors are getting away with highway robbery at the expense of wage earners. Seems like everyone is taking advantage of wage earners. Which is why I don’t work anymore. From almost every standpoint — taxes, expenses of earning income, stress and hassles, etc. — working is by far the worst way to get money there is.
Working for wages should be banned by consumer protection laws.
@3 Well, I think your source is onto something there, Bob. Who would build a bomb to an Al Qaeda design? The answer to that question probably tells us who was behind this bombing.
The theme of these comment threads is and has always been “the right wing sucks”..
http://www.independent.ie/worl.....00908.html
Need any further proof? What a miserable dumbass this guy is. A shining example of the interminably wrong wing in U.S. politics.
@ 6
As long as you want to cherry-pick, YLB, here’s one for you:
It took MailOnline 35 minutes to calculate the taxes paid by a hypothetical $240,000 salaried earner who is married and filing taxes jointly with a spouse, using the same conditions as in the White House’s example for an $80,000 earner.
That $240,000 salaried employee, would contribute toward every federal program more than 10 times what the $80,000 employee chips in, despite earning just three times as much money.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....z2QeRRji3w
You wish it to be so simple, YLB. It isn’t.
Gee, it seems Puddy has someone he aspires to emulate:
Erik Rush offensive tweets
# 10: I assume the calculations are ignoring the itemized deductions – the high income earner gets his McMansion subsidized by taxpayer dollars, whereas the $60,000 earner gets his much more modest home subsidized.
But hey, the law treats all men equally, right? After all, the law against sleeping under bridges applies equally to rich and poor, does it not?
10 – Wow! The right wing Brits are such experts on U.S. taxpayers.. Quite a breezy read. Serious readers will avert their eyes from the right hand column..
10 times despite 3 times? Uhh.. Lying with figures much? We do have things called brackets.. Higher income people also take advantage of loads of deductions and breaks.. Pretty silly stuff.
Reminds me of the time you chided me for citing the Economist’s endorsement of Obama, you know that left wing rag.
Retirement plans like iRAs and 401Ks are there for individuals to have a hopefully more secure retirement. Let’s not tax them until the funds are withdrawn in retirement.
For those who are eligible for the Roth IRA, I would advise you to do one. It’s just too good a deal to pass up. I think the Roth IRA is the best thing since sliced bead!
@ 13
Your @ 6 link compared a $70K-earning worker to a 25 year-old with a trust fund living off earnings. You probably didn’t read carefully enough to realize that. I don’t know how many people on HA fall into that category but my guess is zero.
Mine @ 10 compared a worker earning $80K with one earning $240K.
While I’m sure there are 25 year-olds on trust funds, there damned sure are far, far more earners at the $250+K level coughing up big-time, despite the deductions. I bet there are several regular HA commenters, if not more, in that category.
As I said, you want it to seem so simple. It isn’t.
5) Thankfully their was not any mass hysteria around him, and has been ruled out as a suspect.
Your headline du jour:
Factcheck: Biden’s gun check ‘good old days’ never happened
Eugene Kiely, Factcheck.org
POSTED: Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 8:51 AM
http://www.philly.com/philly/n.....check.html
And if right wing whiners want modest income people to pay more taxes than they should be all for policies that promote growth in their wages.
One fact that right wingers can’t accept is that higher taxes generally tend to lead to higher wages.. Most taxpayers focus on take home pay when negotiating wages either on their own or through their union.. Scandinavia, Denmark – highest taxes there are. You see tax revolts, Eyman/Jarvis-style demagogues over there? Not really.
Cutting taxes tends to have the opposite effect.. It depresses wage growth.. Need a raise? Just wait for the Republicans to throw you another tax cut bone. Can’t wait that long? Go somewhere else. Oh that guy’s got the same pitch!
Heh.. It’s a win win for right wing employers. All they got to do sell shit as fertilizer and get enough suckers to buy it.
15 – Taxes on capital gains should be higher..
Period.. Higher than ordinary income for speculators and the same as ordinary income for long-term. Ok maybe just a tad less if you can show positive capital formation effect.
See Buffet Rule. You know that communist guy.
For years and years right wingers like say Louis Rukeyser have shouted to the heavens about the salubrious effects of low taxes on capital gains and dividends..
It was all bullshit.. See the 2008 crash.
@ 18
And if right wing whiners want modest income people to pay more taxes than they should be all for policies that promote growth in their wages.
The right doesn’t want higher taxes for lower earners, YLB.
Although if lower earners shared in the higher tax burden they say in polls they want to see applied to higher earners, they wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about higher tax burdens.
@3, @8 Once upon a time (when I suspect Bob was beginning to learn his present trade by peering at his daddy’s Playboys under the covers) what we now know as Al Qaeda we were being referred to in the US as “freedom fighters” as they drove the Soviets into giving up on their occpuation of Afghanistan. I remember hearing then of their making effective use of “pressure cooker bombs”–and I’d bet dollars to donuts the technique came out of some CIA ops manual and the pressure cookers in question said Mirro or Wear-Ever on them. File as you wish for future reference under “what goes around comes around”.
@20 Well, they sure as hell don’t want higher taxes for higher earners. In fact, judging by the actions of those they’ve put into office, they’d just as soon not have any taxes on higher earners.
@10 $240,000 of annual income is academic for 99% of us. People making that kind of money can afford to pay some taxes.
@15 “a worker earning $80K”
An income you’ll never see if you work in government, unless you’re a manager or agency head.
@ 21
I remember hearing then of their making effective use of “pressure cooker bombs”–and I’d bet dollars to donuts the technique came out of some CIA ops manual and the pressure cookers in question said Mirro or Wear-Ever on them.
Here ya go, Art:
In Nepal, Pakistan, and India, pressure cooker bombs have been common. The pressure cookers can make powerful IEDs.
Many Nepalese (during my 13 trips there, I have gotten an earful) were angry because police and Army would seize their pressure cookers and not return them.
This might sound strange or inconsequential from afar, but for people who live at high altitudes with little fuel, pressure cookers are as important as running water. It is difficult to cook well and cheaply without a pressure cooker.
https://www.facebook.com/MichaelYonFanPage/posts/511410195589598
Never having been there, I don’t know if the Nepalese have used them for generations, or if they waited around for the CIA to show them how. It wasn’t in Playboy.
@23 The GOP shtick is to shift all taxes to wage earners, so people who get most of their income from capital gains, dividends, interest, and rents would pay nothing, except maybe CEOs would pay a modest tax rate on their base salary (but nothing on the stock options constituting 98% of their compensation).
@ 24
@15 “a worker earning $80K”
An income you’ll never see if you work in government, unless you’re a manager or agency head.
Actually, RR, my wife earns 50% more than that. She has an Associates Degree. She’s spent nearly her entire career as a government employee. She is certified in a medical field.
Check out salaries for, say, nurses, surgery techs, radiology techs, etc.
You can go to just about any source that divulges government salaries to learn that your statement is blatantly false.
And I don’t think you were intentionally wrong, Roger. I think you simply are ignorant.
@ 24, 27
Roger, while on the subject, perhaps before the next time you spew about how hospitals charge 70X for some gauze or other disposable item that only costs 1X wholesale, stop and think.
Huge parts of the markup are because:
Hospitals frequently don’t have any other way to bill to cover their support staff costs like nurses and other medical support staff.
Large amounts of what they bill are never collected. Very large amounts.
Virtually everyone who reads here knows this. You aren’t impressing anybody when you post such ignorant material. Ten Years After has only been around here for a couple of weeks and he’s already got you pegged.
@ 24, 27
You have a good day, Roger. I’ll tell my wife you think she’s management material. She’ll like that.
@28 Welllllll, sorta-kinda. Actually this has been going on in many industries for a long time. My father-in-law repaired major appliances, and a few years before he retired the order came from corporate headquarters for everyone to add itemized charges to customers’ bills for every piece of tape, dab of sealant, drop of oil, etc. and to use some kind of obfuscation to disguise them so people wouldn’t get pissed for getting charged five bucks for something like that. Ed decided to use PFC followed by a number i. e. “PFC1, PFC25, etc. He was disappointed that nobody ever asked him what PFC stood for. If they had, he’d have said “Poor F*ckin’ Customer”.
@ 30
And PhD is “Piled higher and Deeper”.
One of the fringe benefits of being pro-choice is the opportunity to make money off of those who need abortion services.
Eric Holder’s wife co-owns abortion clinic building run by indicted abortionist
http://www.lifesitenews.com/bl.....y-indicted
Of course, it’s not money directly taken from those who need abortions.
Just like government money granted to Planned Parenthood isn’t money provided directly to those who perform them.
See how that works?
“Eric Holder’s wife co-owns abortion clinic building run by indicted abortionist”
And Cheney’s Halliburton made $40 billion off of the war he started by invading the wrong fucking country. No wonder he has no regrets.
What, you don’t give a fuck? I already knew that, Bob. That’s how it works.
Just about every right winger I’ve seen here does..
Here’s one example..
Here’s another.
@ 34
Ah, but there was method behind my madness, YLB:
Once everyone is subject to higher taxation, the debate will get serious. People will start caring more about where the money goes when it comes out of their pocket as well.
I know that’s lost on you. But it also wouldn’t affect you, even if your tax rate doubled.
Two times zero is still zero, right?
@35: Your silly argument has a number of logical flaws and incorrect assumptions:
1. People who don’t pay taxes NOW, never paid them and don’t care about government spending.
Many of the people not paying taxes NOW are:
out of work
retired
staying home taking care of kids
are kids
are diabled
2. Retired people certainly CARE about how government money is being spent – even if they don’t pay taxes right now.
3. Republicans have been the biggest spenders – and have wasted trillions on the unnecessary war in Iraq.
By the way – I pay more taxes than most people – and I resent my tax money being spent on:
– unnecessary wars
– religious schools that don’t even teach real science
– unnecessary defense department boondoggles (even if they involve Boeing)
@32: Serial conservtive: If I were you I would be embarassed to link to the article you did. First, the article makes a bunch of accusations – but doesn’t back them up (such as Holder is soemhow deliberately prosecuting antiabortion demonststrators who illegally accost women outside of abortion clinics).
If Holder is simply following the law – then he is not “doing these things to “promote a business”.
Second, just becuase his wife co-owns a building (where she has a practice and another group “rents space” there) does not make it a conflict of interest.
Third, this type of shoddy, biased journalism is worthy of thrid grade level writers – but citing it as actually meaning something – sorry – it doesn’t cut it.
second, all we have here
“The right doesn’t want higher taxes for lower earners, YLB.”
Guess you did not read the fine print and the analysis of the Ryan budget that the house republicans passed. Taxes will go UP on the rest of us to pay for Ryans tax rate cuts for the rich – it is a mathematical necessity.
# 30: A friend of mine in high school used to work at a machine shop. He said that whenever they had been goofing off, smoking a cigarette, etc., they would write “FTD” on their time sheets (shorthand for “F****ing the dog”. Anyway, they finally got a woman in as bookeeper of the shop, and the boss warned everybody to clean up their language, and quit writing obscenities on their time sheets. So instead they wrote “CTD” (Chasing the dog”.
One day, one of the old hands forgot, and wrote “FTD” on his time sheet. The bookkeeper just commented – “I’m glad to see one of you finally caught that dog”.
@ 39
For those recurrently challenging customers, notation in their folder one place I worked in high school was OSTUN.
Nutso, spelled backwards.
Our household pays plenty of taxes. Probably way more as a percentage than wealthy households in this state. Bob is wrong again! Shining example of the interminably wrong wing of U.S. political orientation.
Eric Rush… Sorry dudes, Puddy never heard of him. Puddy doesn’t live on Fox News unlike most of you who live on MSNBC.
BTW what Eric said was stupid.
Hey unemloyed moron ylb… You know where Puddy was when Eric went on Fox News. So where was Puddy? Out of the country ya morons!
So rhpee6033… did you condemn the left wing loons yet? Guess Puddy missed it.
Fox News has pictures of the bombs. EXCLUSIVE libtards. Too bad your favrit locations don’t have it!
HAHAHAHAHA!
Head in a toilet sniffing your poop?
IDGAF!
You mean your wife plays plenty of taxes. You pay nuthin being HA’s unemployed moron ylb! Why don’t you tell the truth for once?
ROTFLRHMBBAO!
I’m not sayin’ that I actually know any of these guys or like hang with them, but I have heard that the survivalist types over here on the dry side are familiar with making bombs from ordinary household items including kitchen items, Apparently some of their favored publications and product catalogs describe such.
Golly correctnotright is here. How you doing? BTW have you seen this CNN chart?
One of the fringe benefits of being pro-choice is the opportunity to make money off of those who need abortion services.
Eric Holder’s wife co-owns abortion clinic building
A) Abortion is legal, so you are just posting this to spread FUD. To Weasel.
Would you be posting this if Eric Holder’s wife co-owned a gun dealer building?
If you don’t agree with abortion, don’t have one. Oh that’s right, you say you are a man, You CANT! you have no stake in the game.
So you shouldn’t be telling what women can and cannot do with their bodies, in the first place.
I was not going to post anything like this today, because of the other important matters, at first.
In Denver, the RTD will be opening the W-Line to Golden this weekend. It is another light rail line for the Mile High City, and the first of the lines of the controversial FasTracks Plan. I hope, in light of the events of yesterday, security will be high.
http://denver.cbslocal.com/201.....e-changer/
Security on the T today was increased, with officers inspecting bags. The Green Line carries such a high number of passengers, in spite of the front-door only boarding policy,as it is one of the few light rail lines in the US that still have fareboxes operated by the driver.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/51557934
On an average weekday, the MBTA Green line carries over 200,000 riders, although yesterday was not an average weekday.
The policy I mentioned, includes CharlieCard users, unless it is a station that has validators. The policy was adopted last year to combat fare evasion.
Guess Puddy has his head up his ass.
@52 …and that’s only one reason why most of what he says is incomprehensible.
@43 That must explain why Fox is so popular in the Islamic world. I wondered about that.
@52 Or in a pressure cooker.
Well Puddy is not The Weasel but if Mrs Holder own a gun dealer building, it would explain something about Fast and Furious. We’d know where Holder got his guns that mysteriously disappeared and the two found around the dead Brian Terry!
@52, Golly herzog…
Michael Moore blames Boston bombing on the Tea Party. Chris Matthews blames it on the far right extremists. Luke Russert does too.
Guess that dick in your mouth tastes great!
ROTFLRHMBBAO! Thanks for playing!
And your commentary is so pithy eh FartArt?
How that dick in your mouth tasting today?
poor puddy, got his head so far up his ass its turned black
Can I ask the community, particularly YLB, a question?
What is the basis for cluelessPiddl and cheapshotBob always making swipes at you for being unemployed and insinuating that your wife supports you (as if that were somehow a character fault)?
The reason I ask, my interpretation is that you may have some non-traditional arrangement (stay-at-home-dad, woman partner major breadwinner) with your spouse – and that is the basis for the ongoing name-calling and snide insults that are constantly hurled at you by these two pinheads. I think if that’s the case, this is another example of hideous and hateful behavior by our resident conservative Republicans, and should be held up to the light as such.
is an interesting question
@60 Bump