Open Threads

I am about as anti-tax as is possible, but this sure does stick in my craw for some reason:

More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn’t pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.

The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.

Fix the damned tax code. Pronto. If I am way off base here- explain to me why these corporations shouldn’t have to pay SOMETHING.

Corporate WelfarePost + Comments (43)

OK- I will play:

It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for

JooglingPost + Comments (4)

You are William Safire! You’re ruthless and
cunning, and a conservative demigod. You used
to write speeches for Nixon. Now you write
another column on the English language which
has made you the world’s most popular
etymologist. You hate media deregulation, but
love the Bush administration. If only you
weren’t such a brilliant writer. You bastard.

Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Clearly, the quiz graders have not seen my daily assault on the English language.

(via TalkLeft)

Which NY Times Columnist Are You?Post + Comments (6)

The Instapundit links to this particular Day By Daycartoon by Chris Muir (which, I must agree, is genius), and states:

CHRIS MUIR’S Day By Day really deserves to be syndicated.

I could not agree more, and if you click here, you will be taken to a list of syndicates you can write to telling them how good Day by Day is, and how it deserves to be in newspapers everywhere.

How, you might ask, is this shameless self-promotion? Because I believe that if I was not the first, I was pretty damn close to the first blog in the blogosphere to promote Day By Day. He emailed me, I immediately recognized his genius, and it has been a daily read ever since.

While I am promoting things, let me remind everyonethat the best blog in the world is now back after a lengthy hiatus. If you have not been there before, go read Protein Wisdom. If you really want a belly laugh, click here to read the greatest fisking ever done– and I think it was done before ‘fisking’ was even a term. To this day, I still think “Let’s Rall!” is the greatest post ever written in the blogosphere, and when Protein Wisdom disappeared, I was so upset that one night, after a few cocktails and 3-4 months without Jeff and company, I actually used Yahoo’s people search and called every Jeff Goldstein in Colorado. I never found, the right one, btw..

More Shameless Self PromotionPost + Comments (23)

If you like what you see here, feel free to donate to help me replace my keyboard(catsdumped a drink into it) or contribute to the laptopp fund.

Like What You See Here?Post + Comments

Feel free to donate to the Balloon Juice keyboard/laptop fun. If you have noticed- my typing sucks lately (worse than usual). Thank the cats, who dumped a mystery drink into the keyboard. When I tried the laptopfundraiser in the fall, I raised 100 bucks, which was not near enough for a laptop (not even a 486), so I pissed it away on booze andcheap women.

Actually, I just used it tosend money toeveryone else in the blogosphere who may have been down on their luck- so your old tips when to other needy bloggers.

At any rate, click here to donate cash to buy me a new keyboard/laptop:

Thanks inadvance.

Laptop/Keyboard DrivePost + Comments (2)

For those who may disagree with what I havestated below regarding the Kerry campaign’s relationship with thepress, you need look no farther than this statement from the horse’s ass:

And, in a remark that drew a rebuke from the Republican National Committee, Kerry told the donors that the world awaits his ascent.

”I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but, boy, they look at you and say, you gotta win this, you gotta beat this guy, we need a new policy,” said Kerry, who has talked about taking a trip overseas as part of his campaign.

This is the sort of shamless self promotion that got Al Gore in deep trouble. Not only can the press not verify the remark, thus fueling their suspicion about the honesty of the statement, but they find it, like most Americans, to be a little bit bizarre that someone might be endangering foreign policy objectives of the current administration.

This statement is not much different from “I took the lead in creating the internet,” and we all know how that turned out for Al. And, btw- in amost unfortunate turn of events for John Kerry, it doesappear that some foreign leaders are indeed rooting for a Kerry win:

“In the past few weeks, speeches by the Massachusetts senator have been broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported in glowing terms by the Korea Central News Agency, the official mouthpiece of [Kim Jong-il’s] communist regime,” the Financial Times newspaper of London said last week.

At the same time, the Pyongyang government, which Mr. Bush has labeled part of an “axis of evil,” has continued to hammer at Mr. Bush in unusually personal terms. A Dutch TV crew touring the country found schools were using the “Diary of Anne Frank” to teach students that the United States is a Nazi dictatorship with Mr. Bush its contemporary Adolf Hitler.

That should make for an amusing SNL skit.

For Those Who DisagreePost + Comments (36)