I notice that he doesn’t actually tell us what his tax rate was.  You’d almost think he was whining about having to pay 20% of his income or something.

And who the hell still complains about people drinking gin?  What is this, 1739?  Why is he using 300-year-old cultural references?

What the fuck is he complaining about, anyway? How difficult is his job: you get in front of microphone and scream at some guests for a while.  He’d be the one drinking gin if it wasn’t for the extensive infrastructure that enables television in the first damn place.

*Sigh* he can’t possibly be saying that his tax rate breaks his multi-million dollar bank.

I read this yesterday in the local paper and all I could think was “what a turd.”

And then my husband came home and reported that his father told him Michael Moore and Bill O were basically the same.

*sigh**

*uncle?*  For reals?  Jesus Christ.

Also, I can’t help but wonder how many people this can possibly appeal to. I mean, my reaction to Bill O’Reilly trying to make me feel sorry for him is to roll my eyes so hard I pull a muscle.  But do other people actually take it seriously?!

According to recently released Internal Revenue Service figures, about 50 percent of my fellow Americans paid no federal income tax at all that year. My fellow 1-percenters and I covered for them.

Translation:  Just because you’ve barely managed to keep your head above the poverty line doesn’t mean I should suddenly start ponying up for the ridiculously over funded wasteful War on Terra that I’ve been personally pimping for the last six years.  Poor people have it too easy.

I love how he actually used the term, “reefers”. That is just priceless.

Who wants to bet he calls Obama a “mulatto” before the race is over?

President Obama and a Democratic Congress will likely dole out entitlements like free health care, child care and cash payments to anyone who falls under a certain income level, no matter their circumstances. That means people who drink gin all day will get some of my hard-earned money.

This would be fine if they were Iraqis, mind you.  But when you start pissing away this kind of coin on Americans… well, fuck that!  If my tax dollars aren’t being spent getting you killed, they sure as hell shouldn’t be spent keeping you alive.

“Who wants to bet he calls Obama a “mulatto” before the race is over? “

I’m betting on “that boy is miscegenated.”

I’ve been hearing the whole Reagan-era “welfare-queen” whinning coming out a lot more lately.  Not that it ever went away, but it just seems people I encounter on a daily basis are referring to it more.

“people who drink gin all day”?!

Where is this moron living? 18th century London?

Clay Shirky talks [ http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html ] about gin being used to fill in a “cognitive surplus” during the early industrial revolution, and goes on to discuss how the next major “cognitive surplus” in history (during the post-WWII period) was filled in by passive, brain-dead TV programming.

Which is to say, Falafel Boy may not be a gin drinker, but he’s manufacturing and peddling the stuff by the barrel-full. And when one does that, sooner or later the fumes go to one’s head.

Poor Bill. I wonder if he’s had to cut back on loofahs to make ends me.

How long until O’Reilly notices that Obama’s going to raise taxes on the filthy rich?

I actually think that this, right here, is actually the core of conservative thought. I know this is what drives my father to be a conservative, and my sister, and my brother in law, and mother, and brother. Progressives everywhere should commit this ridiculous argument to memory and deconstruct it for all it’s worth: here lies the linchpin, the cornerstone, of conservative philosophy in this country. If you could somehow pull it out of the structure, the whole reeking mess would collapse.

I summarize it like this: conservatism is the fear that, somewhere, somehow, some poverty-stricken person is not suffering enough.

Shorter Bill O’Reilly: Those fucking poor people are so fucking lucky! They get all the breaks! When will someone, please, someone think of the injustice and endless suffering visited upon the extremely wealthy!

Hey Bill, you’d have a lot more money right now if you didn’t call up your subordinates at night and offer to lather them up.  Just a tip.

O’Reilly’s right.  The working poor don’t exist.

No siree . . . .

At some point the mantra that if everyone worked hard, everyone would be rich . . . just belies its own stupidity.

What makes me laugh about how conservatives say that “poor ppl who dont earn muniez iz lazy” is that many of them WERE poor at some point and thus are insulting themselves—i.e. was O’Reilly raking it in when he was working on his two master’s degrees?  Was Assrocket raking it in when he was in law school?

Has Bill O’Reilly ever considered who makes money? Actually makes it? Who or what makes those pieces of paper actually worth something that you can trade for stuff?

That’s right, the hated, bad, awful government.

Next time someone says, “It’s MY money,” just tell them “no it isn’t” and watch their heads explode.

Then ask them whether a probably relatively fit but still rather old man like Billo could defend himself and his money against a person or a group of people who want to take it, or whether he would need the services of a police force and/or a National Guard or an Army.

Oh, sure, they’re willing to pay taxes for that - to protect THEIR riches. Other than that, though, not so much.

What makes me laugh about how conservatives say that “poor ppl who dont earn muniez iz lazy” is that many of them WERE poor at some point and thus are insulting themselves

Um, that’s not that surprising, actually.  One common element is the belief that “I did it - I made myself rich - everyone else should be able to do it too.”  This is usually combined with a belief that you did it all by yourself and didn’t have no help from no one nosiree.  And it’s tough to rattle the cages of someone who believes that they’re completely “self made”.

As an example - my conservative father (who used to be a Democrat before Carter, and who also moved from labor to management after Carter) fits into this group.  His family was fairly poor off.  He was the first of his family to go to college.  He went to Vietnam, came back, went to college and got a job, worked his way up and was making six figures by the time he left the company he was at (due to health issues - the stress was giving him heart attacks).

Anyway, he’ll insist he did it all by himself.  Except that he had a GI Bill to pay for his college education.  And he and mom used food stamps while he was in college.  And my parents got GI assistance on their first home.  Not to mention all the other bits and pieces of assistance they got along the way.  Those get edited out of the narrative because his ego wants him to believe that he did it all for himself.

Lots of conservatives who “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” fit right into this stereotype.  Attributing all of their success to their own hard work and ingenuity and leaving out the fact that they were born into a first world nation with a decent safety net that helped them get a leg up where otherwise they might have been left behind.

Those fucking poor people are so fucking lucky!

Lucky Duckies!

http://images.salon.com/comics/boll/2002/12/19/boll/story.gif

.

yeah, rich people trying to weasel out of any kind of social contract is the dark heart of movement conservatism.

the random wars, patriotism, religion, racism- conservatives of those stripes come and go, wax and wane, but complaining about all those lucky-ducky poor people is the one thing that will shepherd conservatism through these times. Eventually, they’ll hit on some other issue that resonates, and come back, but decade after decade, this is what they rely on when times are bad.

I expect I’ll be crying myself to sleep tonight thinking about poor Bill O’Reilly.

Lots of conservatives who “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” fit right into this stereotype.

Bill-o keeps insisting he was “working class” even though he grew up in a middle-class suburb and his father made $30K in the 1950s.

That’s part of the problem—they have a very skewed idea of what “poor” is.  Today that $30K salary is more like $100K, but he probably considers those people making only $100K to be poor, too.

How long until O’Reilly notices that Obama’s going to raise taxes on the filthy rich?

With the White House projecting a record deficit for 2009, Obama is going to raise taxes on just about everybody.

Mnemosyne —I’ve come to the conclusion that most Republicans aren’t dishonest about believing their tax cuts and other policies are better for the middle class, they just sincerely believe that the middle class means people who make over $250,000 a year.

The fascinating thing is that conservatives love to talk about how “it’s your money” and the government is just taking it. Well, guess what, conservatives? Bush ran up a huge amount on “your” credit card, including writing a convenience check to give you a “tax cut.” And you continued to vote for him and his lockstep congressmen.

So if it was “your money” when you had to pay it, why are you complaining now that it’s “your debt” that has to be paid back? (Especially when the vast majority of it was spent on stuff you think we should have more of, like wars and weapons.)

With the economy going south The Repugs will get less and less help from this sort of rhetoric. Too many people in the middle class know people who are poor or on their way there. The divide between the rich and the workers is becoming too obvious, and this sort of rubbish is going to backfire.

damn I hate this guy. I do know people who will/hear read this and side with him though. Amazing how a lot of people can and do read this kind of crap and then vote against their own interest. That being said, there are actually a lot of lazy people out there, of all classes/incomes/backgrounds. Its a country of 300 million, there are millions of people content to get checks from the state/feds just as surely as there are millions of people who lucked into being born into an affluent family. Thats the issue thats hard to work past, people often don’t look beyond anecdata and if you personally know people, a brother or cousin or in-law, who is an incorrigable lazy person who takes welfare, unemployment, works just enough to game the system, its easy to project that out onto a whole group of people. Not necessarily the “welfare queens” reagan trotted out but there are a lot of people out there like that and many people react the way they do because of their sense of fairness.

Bill-o keeps insisting he was “working class” even though he grew up in a middle-class suburb and his father made $30K in the 1950s.

The BLS calculators says that $30K in 1959 would be worth $225K in 2008. He grew up rich.

many of them WERE poor at some point and thus are insulting themselves—i.e. was O’Reilly raking it in when he was working on his two master’s degrees?  Was Assrocket raking it in when he was in law school?

A lot of grad students are able to use student loans and other forms of credit (or, you know, their wealthy parents) to live far more comfortably than most truly poor people.  You just go get that nice big corporate job after you finish and pay it all back in a couple or 3 years.  Especially law students—it’s customary to have summer “internships” that pay in the thousands per week.

Not to mention the wingnut welfare, of course.

What’s telling to me is that O’Reilly, who is politically, culturally, and financially at the top of society, is so largely fueled by resentment of people at the bottom. 

Seriously, what kind of shriveled raisin of a conscience does it take to agree with this kind of thinking?

“Gin and reefers”? Apparently Bill-O’s internal calendar is stuck on “Jazz Age”.

Yes, I am part of the 1 percent of Americans that paid an astounding 40 percent of all federal income tax in 2006. According to recently released Internal Revenue Service figures, about 50 percent of my fellow Americans paid no federal income tax at all that year. My fellow 1-percenters and I covered for them. But for some it is still not enough.

Wanna trade, shithole?  Your income, minus taxes, for, say, my next-door neighbor’s income, minus taxes?  How ‘bout it?  You want to pay less taxes, I’m sure they’d LOVE more post-tax income.

C’mon, people, anybody else wanna trade paychecks and tax percentages with Bill O’Reilly?

Seriously, he’s like a little kid that got the most expensive present in the room and is whining that some other kid’s present has a shinier bow.

Where is this moron living? 18th century London?

Bill O’Reilly: Victorian-Era Superhero

The sad thing is some of those strips are actually amazingly relevant.

He seems to have forgotten that he’s making his money using public airwaves. What a phenomenal douche.

(perhaps Bill has an affinity for Tennesse Williams… BRING BACK CURRENT AFFAIR at least then the world was not aware what a moron you were…Bill…we knew you when…):

worth repeating comment winner—>

“Gin and reefers”? Apparently Bill-O’s internal calendar is stuck on “Jazz Age”.
june on 07/31 at 05:44 PM

ps - fantastic blog… indeed intelligence is beyond sexy

Ms Kate: “Oh yeah, notice how o’reilly can move freely, not razor wire and broken bottle the fence around his house, and live a pretty normal life if he chooses because there are no roving gangs of poor people - yet. “

Exactly. Not to mention another conveniently ignored point - I don’t know the exact percentages (and of course his 1% paying 40% probably came out of his ass, too), but he’s talking about the fact that rich people pay more dollars into the pot. Um. Duh. The reason the richest people pay the majority of the dollars in the tax funds is that the richest people have more of the money. Even with a fricking flat tax, the top 1% of the richest are still going to pay the vast majority of the money.

He’s talking as though it’s a smooth curve, or a line, and that the top 1% have, like 50% more money than the people at the 70th or 50th percentiles. But it takes a hell of a lot of minimum wage earners to add up to the annual multi-millions that the top ones get. Especially if we really do talk about that top 1%, I’d bet that a shift to a flat tax wouldn’t shift that 40% (or whatever is true) a whole lot.

And yes, there will be some freeloaders in a system that has social assistance for the poor. Unlike, of course, the freeloaders at the top. Or the middle.

Hey, O’Reilly - if you really want to pay less tax, all you need to do is quit your fucking job and give all your money to charity.

if poverty is so great, how come more rich folks don’t try it? (See also: work)