Obamas File Taxes, Made $2.7 Million

President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, millionaires from his best-selling books, made $2.7 million last year and paid just under one-third of their adjusted income in federal taxes.

Tax Day ‘Tea Parties’ Show Intolerance More Than Patriotism

By: Tonyaa Weathersbee

Wouldn’t you know it?

Wouldn’t you know that right about the time a black man is elected to lead the country, a whole lot of white people would want to stop paying the money it takes to run it?

That they’d want to pick up their toys, er, taxes, and go home?

That is, after all, really what’s eating most of the people who plan to turn out for one of the many “Tax Day tea parties” that are being held in cities around the country today.

Buoyed by a number of right-wing billionaires who are none too happy with President Barack Obama’s plan to make them pay more taxes, as well as the hot air coming from Fox News’ blowhards, thousands are expected to toss out little tea bags to tell Congress and Obama that they don’t like his budget; that the trillions he is poised to spend will shackle future generations with too much debt.

Now, reasonable people can disagree about where Obama’s budget might lead. But the thing that has these tea partiers in a tizzy have less to do with how much Obama plans to spend – and more to do with what he plans to spend it on.

And it seems they’d rather spend money invading other countries than to uplift their own.

A guy named Tim, for example, told the Ann Arbor News in Michigan that he hadn’t been politically active in years, but that he decided to get involved because of Obama’s big-spending, big-government agenda – and that he believed the country was headed toward a “nanny state.”

Think about that for a minute.

For the past six years, George W. Bush wasted trillions of dollars in Iraq – an unnecessary war generated by neo-con spin and exploitation of fears – on private contractors and other assorted parasites. He also did the fiscally irresponsible thing of cutting taxes while waging war – and caused the surplus left by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to evaporate.

If there was any time for this Tim guy and the rest of tea partiers to protest irresponsible government spending, it was five or six years ago.

If they were genuinely concerned about wasteful government spending - or, as they’re now crying, “taxation without representation” - they would have been protesting the corporate welfare that subsidizes wealthy companies - some of which are probably sponsoring these tea parties - and costs taxpayers around $900 billion a year.

None of that pushed them to the tea party boiling point. Obama, however, did.

And the fact that they’re protesting now – as Obama is faced with having to clean up that steamy pile of fiscal mess left by the last administration – tells me their outrage has less to do with the policies that are coming from the White House and more to do with who is living there.

And, in a way, it’s rather sad.

Tax Day ‘Tea Parties’ Show Intolerance More Than Patriotism....

Records show Sharpton owes overdue taxes, other penalties

By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Big corporations give him money. Presidential candidates seek his endorsement. He has influential friends in Congress and the governor's mansion. The Rev. Al Sharpton has emerged over the past decade as perhaps the nation's most prominent civil rights leader, a status that was demonstrated again this week when he led protests against police brutality that briefly shut down six of Manhattan's major bridges and tunnels.


But he still carries baggage from his early days as a fire-breathing agitator: Government records obtained by The Associated Press indicate that Sharpton and his business entities owe nearly $1.5 million in overdue taxes and associated penalties.

Now the U.S. attorney is investigating his nonprofit group, a probe that an undeterred Sharpton brushes off as the kind of annoyance that civil rights figures have come to expect from the government.

"Whatever retaliation they do on me, we never stop," he told the AP. "I think that that is why they try to intimidate us."

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