Dear fellow Americans: Now that you have been lied to, and promised pie in the sky, and the banks have been paid off for screwing you, you are now going to have to repay the tiny little smidgen of bullshit money that you were promised. Joy to the fucking world.

By Stephen Ohlemacher
Associated Press Writer
April 30, 2009

Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama’s “Making Work Pay” tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.

The tax credit is supposed to provide up to $400 to individuals and $800 to married couples as part of the massive economic recovery package enacted in February. Most workers started receiving the credit through small increases in their paychecks in the past month.

But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.

“They need to get the Goodyear blimp out there on this,” said Tom Ochsenschlager, vice president of taxation for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

For many, the new tax tables will simply mean smaller-than-expected tax refunds next year, IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said. The average refund was nearly $2,700 this year.

But taxpayers who calculate their withholding so they get only small refunds could face an unwelcome tax bill next April, said Jackie Perlman, an analyst with the Tax Institute at H&R Block.

“They are going to get a surprise,” she said.

Perlman’s advice: check your federal withholding to make sure sufficient taxes are being taken out of your pay. If you are married and both spouses work, you might consider having taxes withheld at the higher rate for single filers. If you have multiple jobs, you might consider having extra taxes withheld by one of your employers. You can make that request with a Form W-4.

The IRS has a calculator on its Web site to help taxpayers figure withholding. So do many private tax preparers.

Obama has touted the tax credit as one of the big achievements of his first 100 days in office, boasting that 95 percent of working families will qualify in 2009 and 2010.

The credit pays workers 6.2 percent of their earned income, up to a maximum of $400 for individuals and $800 for married couples who file jointly. Individuals making more $95,000 and couples making more than $190,000 are ineligible.

The tax credit was designed to help boost the economy by getting more money to consumers in their regular paychecks. Employers were required to start using the new withholding tables by April 1.

The tables, however, don’t take into account several common categories of taxpayers, experts said.

For example:

–A single worker with two jobs making $20,000 a year at each job will get a $400 boost in take-home pay at each of them, for a total of $800. That worker, however, is eligible for a maximum credit of $400, so the remaining $400 will have to be paid back at tax time — either through a smaller refund or a payment to the IRS.

The IRS recognized there could be a similar problem for married couples if both spouses work, so it adjusted the withholding tables. The fix, however, was imperfect.

– A married couple with a combined income of $50,000 is eligible for an $800 credit. However, if both spouses work and make more than $13,000, the new withholding tables give them each a $600 boost — for a total of $1,200.

There were 33 million married couples in 2008 in which both spouses worked. That’s 55 percent of all married couples, according to the Census Bureau.

– A single college student with a part-time job making $10,000 would get a $400 boost in pay. However, if that student is claimed as a dependent on a parent’s tax return, she doesn’t qualify for the credit and would have to repay it when she files next year.

Some retirees face even bigger headaches.

The Social Security Administration is sending out $250 payments to more than 50 million retirees in May as part of the economic stimulus package. The payments will go to people who receive Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, railroad retirement benefits or veteran’s disability benefits.

The payments are meant to provide a boost for people who don’t qualify for the tax credit. However, they will go to retirees even if they have earned income and receive the credit. Those retirees will have the $250 payment deducted from their tax credit — but not until they file their tax returns next year, long after the money may have been spent.

Retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from pension benefits also are getting an income boost as a result of the new withholding tables. However, pension benefits are not earned income, so they don’t qualify for the tax credit. That money will have to paid back next year when tax returns are filed.

More than 20 million retirees and survivors receive payments from defined benefit pension plans, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. However, it is unclear how many have federal taxes withheld from their payments.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union raised concerns about the effect of the tax credit on pension payments in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in March.

Geithner responded that Treasury and IRS understood the concerns and were “exploring ways to mitigate that effect.”

Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said Geithner has yet to respond to concerns raised by committee members.

“So far we’ve got the, ‘If we don’t address this maybe it will go away’ approach,” Camp said.

P.S.: And goddammit, he’s NOT black. He’s as much white as he is black. Geez. Are brainwashing techniques this antiquated? They can come up with something better than that. Like he’s really Kunta Kinte from Roots, or maybe he’s made of kryptonite and fell to earth from a planet in another galaxy. But black? I don’t think so.

Reporters laugh Gibbs’ ass right off the fucking podium as he tries to cover up the utter incompetence of the Obama administration:

The military is taking lessons from Israel’s handling of the media. Caroline Glick, who has a very successful blog and is managing editor of the Jerusalem Post gave a talk to U.S. military commanders about strategic communications. Here is an article explaining a bit about her presentation. Note how Israel does not embed reporters, whereas the U.S. did in the Iraq war, and as Glick points out this has the effect of shifting the focus from the combatants as perpetrators to their being victims, albeit wrongly so.

April 2, 2009
Fort Leavenworth Lamp

Caroline Glick, a columnist and deputy managing editor for The Jerusalem Post, spoke about tactical and strategic communications March 30 at the Combined Arms Center’s Grant Auditorium.

“We (communicators) have to understand the atmosphere in which we operate and we fight, and we also have to think about what our specific goals are, what (message) are we trying to get across,” she said.

Glick gave examples of tactical communications methods the Israel Defense Forces used against Hamas in the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. She said mass leaflet drops and direct phone calls to specific homes warned Gazans about impending IDF operations.

“What tactical communications allows you to do is minimize, to the extent possible, the amount of collateral damage that is going to be incurred in your area of operations,” Glick said.

She said another effective means of tactical communications was the interaction of IDF troops with Palestinian civilians in homes they took over during the fighting, and the manner in which the troops treated the civilians. Glick said these interactions, while generally positive, were ultimately limited in scope and not enough to overcome lies told by the enemy on a persistent basis.

“The long term impact of an immediate experience with an Israeli is limited by the strategic communications of the enemy,” she said.

Glick said Al Jazeera, Hamas TV and other media may spread false accusations and outright lies, but it is a losing strategy to respond to the enemy. She said the best way to project a strategic communications narrative is to make the story about the nature of the enemy.

“In Israel, and to an increasing degree in the United States, we have forgotten how to tell our story. In order to explain why we do things, we have to stop talking about ourselves, we have to talk about our enemy,” Glick said.
The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is not an American story, she said, but a Saudi, Afghan, Egyptian, Pakistani and Arab story. Glick said the Holocaust is not a Jewish story, but a German story and a European story.

“When we are victims, we are not actors,” she said. “We’re not the story, they are.”

Glick provided some best practices for projecting strategic communications messages based on her personal experiences and lessons learned from recent IDF operations.

Glick was an embedded reporter with the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She said the IDF was criticized for not embedding reporters during Operation Cast Lead, but did this for good reason.

Glick explained embedding a reporter is very expensive for a media organization, and there always exists a potential for conflict between the story the host unit wants to tell versus what the reporter wants to tell, versus what the editor wants to tell. Additionally, she said embedding gives first-person credibility to potentially hostile news outlets to tell inaccurate or unbalanced stories.

“We (Israel) are dealing with an issue of massive hostility toward our fight, not only in the Arab media and in Arab society, but also particularly in the European media and increasingly in the U.S. media, toward what we’re doing,” Glick said.

As an alternative to embedding, Glick said the IDF filmed operations and distributed them through their own YouTube channel, making the IDF a competitor in news.

For example, Glick said, Israel has claimed for years that terrorists use human shields, which Hamas and others have denied. She said during Operation Cast Lead the IDF filmed a Hamas gunman in Gaza using a child as a human shield in order to safely cross a street. Glick said the images were uploaded to the IDF’s YouTube channel and viewed by several million people.

Glick said another way to put strategic communications on the offensive is to use existing national and international laws to go after terrorists, and those who finance and support them, by trying them “Nuremburg style” in war crimes tribunals.

“If you simply follow the law and enforce it, then the discussion becomes about them. That’s the kind of thing that strategic communications should be doing,” she said.

Arlen Specter has reached almost iconic proportions in the U.S. Senate. People almost forget that he is one of the most dry, yet most listened to senators around. His background tells it all about who he is as a person. He grew up as the son of immigrants and worked his way through the Great Depression all the way to Yale Law School, only one generation removed from his father’s in which he was a wounded war veteran from World War I and later a junkyard owner in Wichita, Kansas.

Determination is probably the best word to describe Arlen Specter. After all, in 1965 he was a registered Democrat and ran for District Attorney on the Republican ticket. Party affiliation had very little to do with Arlen Specter’s start in politics, and if you look carefully at how he literally clawed his way up through the Republican Party to become a senator in 1980, you see a sense of determination that is a strange element in a club in which political party affiliation is everything.

The way American politics is boiling down in the sunset years of steroid politics in which frogs are leaping out of the cauldron right and left, is that to succeed at this art form you have to understand that when the power shifts and the money goes to somebody else, then if you are going to survive you had better get on over there. In short, what we have today is a system that literally survives on egos which have eclipsed anything anyone has ever seen before. Arlen Specter simply signifies this absolute desire to win and hold on to power, which now has reached epic proportions in this country.

The way that politicians brazenly lie to everyone is remarkable to say the least. The presidency and the government have become media rock stars, who know how to deliver lines better than any Hollywood actor could ever hope to pull off. It has gotten so bad that even Sean Penn, the poster child of the political left elite in America, is quietly getting divorced from his wife. Yes, quietly the great hero of the political correctness movement has folded his hand and ridden off into the sunset. The one who encapsulates far flung leftist dictators like Hugo Chavez together with a smattering of good old American media diversity training is no more, and yet the media who once so adored him has dropped him like a hot potato. Poof, and you’re gone. Just like that.

Now it’s Obama who is the media darling. He is being adored and petted like a exotic animal that has been captured during an African safari and brought back and put on display by the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Come one, come all. Come see the fat lady and the two-headed midget. View the shrunken heads of the pygmies and the seductive Obama. Watch as Obama is led around the big top by a proud cavalry as the fans roar in adulation.

If somebody didn’t give a damn about loyalty, then who wouldn’t want to be a part of the big show going on? But of course, the only problem with all this is that it is all make believe. The circus could just fold tomorrow and pack up and move away. Who really knows. Maybe the media might just fall out of love with Obama, but frankly speaking the only way they are going to do that is if Obama does something completely off the hook like declare war on Israel, which, ahem, is probably something I shouldn’t even mention because it doesn’t really seem like such an impossibility.

Imagine that. Obama becomes frustrated that he can’t make the Jews do what he wants them to do, and then he hauls off and lets loose on Israel. Maybe this is what the ancient philosophers and thinkers used to ponder what would happen in the “end of days”. Maybe this is the big war of all wars, where the mighty false prophet tries to bend the entire world to his way of thinking and then there is this great big war to end all wars. This should be interesting actually, because frankly who wouldn’t want to stand up to this guy? I mean, history is only kind to those who take on very big things and win. Obama doesn’t realize this, but in his great egotistical orgy he has created a very wide opening for someone else to exploit him for history’s sake.

Arlen Specter is just going with the flow and looking out for number one. He couldn’t care less about the big picture. He doesn’t see power as a means to an end, but rather he sees it as an end in itself. History is going to judge this administration and the movement it is creating very harshly, and those who sold out for it are going to be relegated to the trash bin of history.

-TDN

The headline at Bowdoin College’s newsletter boasts, “Bowdoin Islamicist Wins Top Iranian Book Prize”. Bowdoin Associate Professor of Religion Robert G. Morrison wrote the book, “Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi”, which was selected as one of Iran’s 2009 International Books of the Year in Islamic Studies. He was awarded his prize by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a Feb. 7, 2009, awards ceremony in Tehran.

And if you need further proof as to where the far left gets its support, i.e., from college campuses, then please by all means let us know and we at The Daily Nigger will literally flood you with information supporting the fact that leftist dogma is being shoved down kids’ throats on U.S. college campuses. The hypocrisy of this is so stark and real that it defies the imagination and we are literally left speechless. Suffice it to say that the political correctness movement that is nurtured on college campuses and reinforced by the corporate mainstream media is what is elevating people to positions of power in government who couldn’t care less if the people they are associating with are Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.

Of course, let’s be honest. All this is cloaked in political correctness, and I am struck by the fact that Obama’s Passover seder last week was the second one the first of which took place during his campaign, and which turned out to be a celebration of his ascendancy to the White House rather than a recollection of Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt. Mr. Obama may be able to fool some people with his fake populism, but he isn’t fooling us. We see him for the power hungry, political hack that he is because at the end of the ritual, after the traditional refrain “Next year in Jerusalem!” then Sen. Obama and others in the group jokingly added, “Next year in the White House.”

Couple this with the fact that Obama is seeking changes that would permit aid to Palestinians even if officials backed by Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist group, become part of a unified Palestinian government. Yes, it is true that Hamas is pondering linking up with Fatah, and Obama is prepared to fork over $840 million to them. Jewish Democrats are “alarmed” and the LA Times is reporting this.

You see, the bottom line is that the Democratic Party has always been interested in dissecting people into small groups for the sake of claiming the mantle of “diversity”. This failed process is rooted in the leftist dogma that is being drummed into kids on college campuses, and now has progressed to the point where people are literally willing to forget the Holocaust for the sake of their own misguided, egotistical world views that only leads to more death and destruction. But like I said, if you don’t believe me then feel free to comment and we’ll put up some more bullshit from these fucktard college professors who are probably happy as pigs in shit over their ability to hang out with Holocaust deniers like Ahmadinejad.

-TDN