Someone call the waaaaaaaahmbulance, and then call ME a doctor because I just shattered all of my ribs laughing so hard. Send the bill to Susie Madrak, she’s the one who did this to me.

But just how flush is a family of four with a $250,000 income? Are they really “rich”? To find the answer, The Fiscal Times asked BDO USA, a national tax accounting firm, to compute the total state, local and federal tax burden of a hypothetical two-career couple with two kids, earning $250,000. To factor in varying state and local taxes, as well as drastically different costs of living, BDO placed the couple in eight different locales around the country with top-notch public school districts, using national data on spending.
The bottom line: It’s not exactly easy street
for our $250,000-a-year family, especially
when they live in high-tax areas on either coast.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, holy SHIT. Poor babies. Poor big, fucking crying whiney-ass titty babies with dirty diapers full of indian food. Check THIS out:

State income taxes, taken alone, are just $10,557. But factor in the gas tax ($2,679), property tax ($15,222), phone service taxes and surcharges ($350) and sales tax ($2,258), and the picture looks far different. Their total tax bill, including the AMT and payroll taxes: $78,276.

Hmm, so let me tally that up: horrors, “only” $171,274 to live on.

Gimme a fucking break: I make less than 20% of what this hypothetical family makes, and guess what? I’m doing pretty OK. So here are some saving tips, rich people, from a working-poor stiff.

First of all, you don’t need a $750,000 house. You just don’t, and with housing costs dropping like a stone, you don’t need to spend that much.
You also don’t need a Lexus, a Range Rover, or BMW. Buy a late-model used car, it saves a shit-ton of money. Or, if you must buy new, get a Subaru or a basic Toyota. You don’t need the luxury model, the fucking thing is only there to get you from point A to point B. And if you NEED two cars, make sure at least one is used. Plus, you’ll save a bundle on insurance. By the way, the limited tort insurance is cheaper than the full-coverage. Just sayin’.

Why are you buying your clothes at a brand name store? Shop at Marshalls, you dumb rich motherfucker, or at Target like the rest of us. Why are you buying NEW clothes at all, when you can find gems at the local thrift or consignment shop? Why aren’t your kids wearing the older siblings’ hand-me-downs? That’s what my younger brother and sister wore.
Why are you spending $10 on lunch at work? Folks, it’s really fucking easy to pack a sandwich or bring in some leftovers. (I’m not gonna bust your ass on the $25/takeout meal, every parent has to do this once in awhile). Did you get a BJ’s Wholesale membership? You can save a LOT of money that way. Also, cut up all but one or two of your credit cards, and pay off your debt asap.

Is that NEW furniture in your house? Why? I can understand avoiding used beds and sofas due to bedbug worries, but dining room sets and wooden furniture doesn’t have that issue. Why are you running a really expensive stainless steel fridge, when you can save a bundle at the Sears dent-and-scratch center?

Why are you living in the most expensive neighborhoods of the most expensive cities? Look, I get it Mr. Stockbroker, you gotta work in New York, and that’s expensive. But what the fuck, Staten Island is a shit-ton LESS expensive than Manhattan, and so are Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island, and even a bunch of New Jersey, right across the river. For that matter, why the FUCK do you have a housekeeper? Shit, even if you both work and don’t have time to keep the house spic-and-span, a weekly (or even monthly) cleaning lady is a LOT cheaper than a housekeeper. And why aren’t your kids doing their own laundry, what kind of lazy bastards are you raising?

I get by on far, far less than you do, rich whiny assholes, and I manage to have plenty of dough left over after paying my child support, my student loan, my mortgage, and my bills.

“Down and Out on $250,000″, good grief. $250,000 a year would solve most of MY financial problems, so here’s a tissue:l go cry to someone who cares, motherfucker.

[I'm adding the tag "mentally ill" to this one, because you have to be fucking DERANGED WITH SELF-PITY to suggest that it ain't easy pulling in a quarter-million dollars a year. ]

Putting his money where his mouth is? Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds—and perhaps on inflation in the future.

Please share.

Dear William Saletan:

Your tired diatribes on the ickiness of abortion are bad enough, but the last thing I want to read from you are your thoughts on anal sex and how many women are engaged in it. that’s why I’m not linking to it: I don’t want to send any readers your way.

Your photo shows a man who looks like a king snake that goes through a pack a day of Pall Mall unfiltered, and who just sucked on a lemon. I don’t think you’ve ever had sex in your life, anal or otherwise.

Please, keep it to yourself: no one’s interested in reading your bizarre fantasies masquerading as research.

Kthxbye

UPDATE: I just discovered shocking footage of William Saletan engaged in anal sex. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!

This week, they published an article about which Chinatown brothels offer the best handjobs. I’m not linking to the article because I think it was exploitative, disgusting and was less a news and opinion column than it was an advertorial, like those Exxon-Mobil ads that appear in the print edition of the New York Times. One of the commenters at the Weekly’s latest low opined, “This is really gross. Congratulations on paying for sex from a most likely trafficked woman”, and I have to concur: sex slavery is an ,a href=”http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20100331_Massage_madam_s_Swan_song_.html”>ongoing problem in Philadelphia. It’s something to be ashamed of, not something to celebrate and enable.

I’m not a prude, and have no problem with the world’s oldest profession, which should almost certainly be legalized and regulated for the safety of the sex workers. I’m also fully aware of the financial problems facing the newspaper industry, especially the free alternative weeklies, and have no problem with the ads for brothels, prostitutes, chicks-with-dicks, and other assorted novelties in the back of the paper. And I understand that a column like Lush Life, which is typically about partying and getting drunk, is expected to be edgy.

But this is beyond the pale. The column rejoiced in, and normalized, the exploitation of women. That’s disgusting, and I’m embarrassed to have been associated with the paper.

Over at WHYY, Peter Crimmins tries his best to ignore the ore recent aspects of Condoleezza Rice’s biography. the article is already poorly written, so I have done my best to fix it.

Next week the former Secretary of Statea noted war criminal and the reigning Queen of Soul will join forces at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. Condoleezza Rice will be waterboarding on the piano backing up Aretha Franklin. But, in some ways, it just could be the other way around.

Condoleezza Rice turned heads while with the Bush Administration when she displayed her prowess on the piano endorsed a war based on lies, approved torture, left thousands to drown in New Orleans, and lied repeatedly to Congress about everything, including the color of the sky.

She kept up her classical chops while Secretary of State, performing Mozart and Brahms, and lots of Wagner while celebrating the brutal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq, which left millions of people, including substantial quantities of children and American soldiers dead, maimed, and disfigured for no good reason other than her thirst for fresh blood, and her President’s thirst for oil. But next Tuesday she will go outside her comfort zone, playing “Say A Little Prayer” and “Natural Woman” with Aretha Franklin, while simultaneously decapitating an Iraqi toddler, and drinking the child’s blood as it spurts in great red globs from its neck. She will then waterboard the child’s weeping parents, while sodomizing them with a dead American soldier’s severed leg.

“Nobody Nothing in the world sounds like her the shrieks of pain of an injured child, or the wails of grieving parents,” says Rice of Franklin licking her lips with her forked, snakelike tongue, obviously relishing the very thought of freshly shed Iraqi blood. “Nobody ever has and nobody probably ever will. And I’m very excited. It’s different for me because I don’t play much in the way of jazz or R&B while watching people get tortured, maimed, and murdered– this is a different genre for me. But, she’ll carry me.”

Rice has played since she was three-years-old and she says it was important to keep it up while Secretary of State. Not because it’s a stress reliever – she emphasizes playing Brahms is not as relaxing as siccing dogs on naked terrified POWs who have been sexually humiliated, beaten, and probably raped– but the intense focus required gave her respite from the responsibilities of her day job.

Rice says serious musicianship on an amateur level should not be surprising – not in politics and not in schools and certainly not in the torturers dungeon.

“I do think we’re losing a whole generation of kids who are not playing instruments while torturing people, not getting it in schools,” she says. “Drives me crazy when people talk about music as extra-curricular in the schools and in the CIA black-site torture chamber, it seems to me it’s part of being a broad and well-educated human being.”

Rice will also perform Mozart with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the members of which are hanging their heads in shame: many plan to hide their faces during the concert so they are not recognized later. The concert will benefit the Mann Center’s inner-city school programs, which she hopes will be a new source of human beings to throw into the never-ending meat grinder in Iraq.

The fact is, Obama wanted to cut food stamps to pay for Race to the Top, aka “No Child Left Behind” with a different name:

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the Secretary of Education.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

No wonder he’s signing bills at the Ronald Reagan Building: just like the man he admires, Obama also sees food for the poor as optional.

Don’t mind me of course, it’s the relentless negativity talking. I get that way when people start talking about taking food out of poor people’s mouths. Maybe I should clap harder, so the Republicans don’t win.

This video is disturbing enough: by about the 21 second mark, you can see the fizzing and bubbling in the Pensacola oil surf.

But the next video is probably worse. Christina, my g/f, is from the Gulf Coast, and one of her first reactions to the spewing leak was that is was going to get carried far inland and get into the water supply. A few people I know claimed the aquifer’s are inland and thus safe… but they didn’t count on rain. And if this video’s accurate, it’s raining oil in New Orleans:

FUCK YOU BP. FUCK YOU KEN SALAZAR. FUCK YOU SYLVIA BACA. FUCK YOU TONY HAYWARD. FUCK YOU ALL VERY MUCH.

As you can see, most of southern England is destroyed, including the English Channel. Belgium’s coastline is also ruined, and the Netherlands are threatened as well. Meanwhile, northeast France is just a disaster area. And if you zoom out farther, you can see that if you rotated the slop counterclockwise, it would be almost the exact size and shape as Portugal.

Perhaps Tony would be a little less flippant about the “very modest”, “relatively tiny” when compared to “the very big ocean” mess if it was in his backyard, but I doubt it.

Tony Hayward should have to spend the rest of his life cleaning up our beaches with a goddamn toothbrush, and even that’s too good for him.

(lyircs here)

Then read this, making sure your stomach is empty:

Pearl Carter, 72, says she has never been happier after beginning an incestuous relationship with her 26-year-old grandchild Phil Bailey.

The pensioner, from Indiana, US, is using her pension to pay a surrogate mother so they can have a child, reports New Zealand’s New Idea magazine.

She said: “I’m not interested in anyone else’s opinion. I am in love with Phil and he’s in love with me.

“Soon I’ll be holding my son or daughter in my arms and Phil will be the proud dad.”

Her lover is the son of Pearl’s daughter Lynette Bailey – who she put up for adoption when she was 18-years-old.

When his mother passed away, Phil tracked down his long lost grandmother and they quickly fell in love.

Pearl told New Idea magazine: “From the first moment that I saw him, I knew we would never have a grandmother-grandson relationship.

“For the first time in years I felt sexually alive.”

Some shit is just wrong.

Dear Mann Music Center President Catherine Cahill:

Congratulations on this year’s upcoming concert series! Like many Philadelphians, I relish the summer season, when my family and I can enjoy a few evenings of classical music under the stars at Fairmount Park. I’m especially looking forward to opening night, featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. My young son is spending the summer with me this year, and we look forward to introducing him to the Philadelphia Orchestra.

However, there’s one night we will NOT be attending the Mann: July 27, 2010. That’s the night that you’ve invited noted war criminal, torture-enabler, and footwear enthusiast Condoleezza Rice to perform the middle movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor.

Like millions of other Americans and hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians, I am disgusted by Rice’s role in lying the nation into war, approving the torture of POWs and suspected terrorists, and leaving the city of New Orleans to drown while she shopped for shoes (her boss was eating yummy cake with Senator McCain: leadership at its finest). Frankly, I’m wondering why you made such a choice to begin with: Rice’s reputation as a liar, killer, torturer, and warmonger far outstrips her reputation as a pianist, much as Charles Manson’s talent for songwriting is dwarfed by his role in the Sharon Tate butchery (perhaps you can get Charlie to sing a duet with Condie?).

But since the choice has been made, I’d like to make a few suggestions to make the night one to remember.

Is there any way you can change the selection from Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor to a requiem or funeral mass of some sort? That would seem to be a much better fit for a woman whose lies have led to the deaths of millions of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers, and whose negligence during Hurricane Katrina is the stuff of legend. Another appropriate choice might be Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, which I understand is quite popular with the young men and women consigned to die in the desert by Ms. Rice and her colleagues in the Bush administration. Or perhaps a bit of light pop, such as Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles”, in commemoration of the poor people abandoned to the flood in New Orleans’ 9th Ward.

I also suggest you partner with the Mutter Museum for the July 27 set: I am sure they have a fine collection of human skulls which the Mann could use to set the atmosphere for Dr. Rice’s performance. I guess dropping them at the end of the performance like balloons at a political convention might be a little dangerous for the performers, but certainly no more dangerous than the bombs we’ve dropped on families and children in Iraq, a country that never attacked the United States, and had nothing to do with September 11. Is there any way they can be hung like the tiki lights you see at a luau? Or if that’s too expensive, maybe you can place one on the piano, as a macabre candelabra. I understand white phosphorous, which we’ve used in carrying out the Iraq Adventure Condie helped embroil us in, has an alarming tendency to melt people’s skin: maybe you can use a rendered Iraqi to fashion the candle.

Will there be a live waterboarding demonstration on the stage? I think there should be: Philadelphia is a city with a growing immigrant population, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to find a brown skinned person to drown repeatedly. Dr. Rice could perform the musical accompaniment, or perhaps do the waterboarding herself, to the strains of the Schubert’s Auf der Danau.

I further suggest you set up some kind of plexiglass shield between Dr. Rice and the audience, since I am sure there will be some people who will applaud her appearance with a hail of rotten tomatoes, bags of feces, dead cats, and other detritus. Not that I’m suggesting anyone do that, but in a city that’s thrown D-cell batteries at baseball teams, applauded the neck injury of a Dallas Cowboy, and hurled snowballs at Santa, you never know what could happen. Heck, that Pukemon guy could storm the stage and vomit on Dr. Mengele Rice: I can attest that it turns my guts to know that the murderous warmongering Dr. Rice is being honored with an appearance at the Mann, and I have an iron stomach.

Finally, I suggest that you pick up a dictionary and find the word “shame”. Then look in the mirror, because that word applies to you and whoever else at the Mann thought inviting an internationally despised war criminal to defile the stage of Philadelphia’s pre-eminent outdoor theatre was a good idea. It’s pretty obvious you don’t know what the word means.

Yours,
Brendan Skwire
Philadelphia, PA

PS: In all seriousness, I hope the entire city boycotts this performance. I hope the Mann loses gobs of money on July 27, and that Rice plays to an empty house. That would be my first choice, but considering the odds of no one showing up at all are fairly low, I hope Dr. Rice is treated with the disrespect and disdain she deserves, and that the Mann’s custodial crew has to work overtime to clean up the mess left by outraged concertgoers.