As a small business owner, I understand how depressing it can be to write those big checks. But as people who know what NOT making enough money to pay taxes really means, my husband and I actually feel grateful that we can do so.

Palin's Real Base
Despite several high profile speeches in recent weeks, Sarah Palin seems to be much more influential with the media than she is with Republicans.

You betcha!

Dave Abel of The Boston Globe attends a teabagger rally to hang out with "real" Americans, excuse me, Koch Industries dupes:

Tea party rally generates plenty of criticism, opposing views

Early yesterday morning, Valerie and Rob Shirk corralled their 10 home-schooled children into their van for the 2 1/2-hour drive from their home in Connecticut to Boston, arriving just in time to hear Sarah Palin denounce government-run health care at the tea party movement rally on Boston Common.

"The problem in this country is that too many people are looking for handouts,'' said Valerie Shirk, 43, of Prospect, Conn. "I agree with the signs that say, `Share my father's work ethic -- not his paycheck.' We have to do something about the whole welfare mentality in this country.''
[...]
The couple, who rely on Medicaid for their health care, were also upset about the nation's new health reforms.

When asked why her family used state-subsidized health care when she criticized people who take handouts, Valerie Shirk said she did not want to stop having children, and that her husband's income was not enough to cover the family with private insurance.

Ezra Klein mentioned Sen. Wyden and Sen. Gregg were working on just that but I'm still withholding judgment on their legislation:

It's Time for Tax Reform by Ezra Klein

The Wyden-Gregg plan takes the six income brackets currently on the books and compresses them into three (15 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent). It gets rid of the alternative minimum tax. It triples the standard deduction available to all taxpayers, which means that people don't need to spend as much time trying to itemize deductions and figuring out ways to game the system. It kills off the existing six corporate rates and eight corporate brackets, and replaces them with a flat corporate tax of 24 percent. And it reduces the task to a one-page form.

Pros: Simplifies Code.  Triples Standard Deduction reducing need for Itemizing Deductions.    

A guy at the Daily Beast says it has overtones of the Kennedy v Nixon debates, this time with the more conservative young and upbeat candidate in the Kennedy role and the more liberal older and dour dude playing Nixon.

A couple of Obama advisers (one is Anita Dunn) are actually advising Cameron, while a couple of others have been trying to make Brown presentable.

Interesting theory anyway, and does logically account for how Booth was able to dispose of so much money in his final months, well after he'd lost money in one business blunder and also had retired from acting.

2.  Titanic goes down, 1912.

3.  Jackie Robinson breaks color barrier in baseball, 1947.

4.  Large antiwar protests in NYC and SF, 1967.

Chew on this: Congress is putting pressure on baseball to ban major leaguers from using smokeless tobacco during games. Smoking tobacco while in uniform and in public view is already banned, and don't get Tigers manager Jim Leyland going on that one....

The use of such products has been barred from the minors since 1993. But while baseball can impose such rules on minor leaguers without collectively bargaining them, just like it did rules on performance-enhancing drugs, it would need agreement from the union for this kind of ban on major leaguers