Note: This is a repost of a Daily Kos diary I published about a year and a half ago. I was inspired to repost it by the current story about a business owner who’s afraid to earn more than $250,000 because she thinks she’ll lose money by doing so.

When I reposted it last night over at Daily Kos, it hit the Rec list and the poll received over 500 responses. According to those results, 23% of Daily Kos readers didn’t understand how tax brackets worked before reading the diary.

Think about that — this is a pretty highly-educated, policy-savvy, math-and-science-aware, reality-based community overall, and almost a quarter of them weren’t/aren’t aware of one of the most basic tenets of the tax code.

The Full Monty after the jump.

Aw geez, Karl. Just shut the hell up, wouldjya?

Karl Rove (aka “Turdblossom” and “Bush’s Brain”) has figured out how President Barack Obama managed to win re-election this year: Voter suppression.

No, seriously.

Details and Karl Rove-induced hilarity after the jump.

Feed and supply the troops!

In my piece yesterday “Get Out the Vote (GOTV) – Ann Arbor-style“, I mentioned how a couple stopped by our Obama campaign office with a box of Bunny Grahams and thanked us for what we were doing. It was a small gesture but it really perked us up and put smiles on everyone’s faces.

My wife has had some trouble with her back that has kept her from knocking doors. But, she wanted to do something so she packaged up a bunch of her Obama photomosaic posters and sent them to Obama offices all around Ohio to sell to raise funds for their office or to give to volunteers that are going above and beyond the call of duty.

It’s completely in line with the title of the poster “Forward Together” and for Anne’s motivation for creating the image in the first place.

What she didn’t expect was to get an email like the one she got. Read it after the jump.

The return of the Romney Stench

I was a little concerned going into last night’s presidential debate. Not because I was worried that the President Obama that I know and trust wouldn’t show up. I was confident about that. I was concerned that the town hall debate format wouldn’t allow him to be as effective as he needed to be at pushing back against Mitt Romney’s incessant lying. We all wanted him to, and I predicted that he would, go on the attack much in the same way Vice President Biden did against Paul Ryan last week. But town hall debates are notorious for penalizing aggressive, attack-style approaches. Just ask Al Gore or George H. W. Bush about that.

I needn’t have worried. Just like Joe Biden invented a new way to debate liars last week, President Obama figured out a way to go on the attack in a way that seemed compassionate and strong at the same time without coming across as too aggressive. How did he do this? By being angry, and helping the audience to be angry, that his opponents wasn’t compassionate.

ann arbor craigslist > personals > casual encounters Date: 2012-10-7, 3:04AM EDT Seeking a common sense conservative who woke up from a coma on the day President Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated. Seeking a small government conservative who honestly believes that that the government is way too big, except when it comes to policing women’s vaginas, blocking gay marriages and […]

Say, Mitt, when will these guys take personal responsibility & care about THEIR lives?

With Mitt Romney bloviating about how half the country are tax cheats that feel “entitled” to things like food and healthcare and housing, I got to thinking about who else in the USA doesn’t pay taxes. Then I remembered a report by the Citizens for Tax Justice (pdf) that came out earlier this year. It was a report that showed 26 Fortune 500 companies — PROFITABLE Fortune 500 companies, I should add — that paid no taxes or actually got a rebate every year since 2008.

Major rant after the jump.

Ryan and Romney prove the only thing Republicans have learned since Bush is how to lie better Howard Kurtz is the one “media critic” in America with a TV show. And, better than anyone, his take on Paul Ryan’s speech last night typifies the media’s reaction what has become standard practice from the right wing. He called Ryan’s speech a […]

We ALL approve this message

A new video out from the group We Approve This Message does an amazing job of showing how there used to be great Republican leaders, even presidents, who looked out for the interests of America and Americans. And how that is no longer true.

The video is one of the most powerful pieces I’ve seen in a long time and features an image by Eclectablog’s very own Anne C. Savage.

Video and more after the jump.

Thanks, Thad. Allow us to clean up this huge mess you left behind for you.

When last we left the Thad McCotter MI-11 Trainwreck, Republican Kerry “Reindeer Farmer/9-11 Truther” Bentivolio had $300,000 dumped into his pocket by a Ron Paul SuperPAC, while the Michigan GOP desperately tried to save face (and the House seat) by scrambling to run former state Senator Nancy Cassis as a write-in candidate.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Dr. Syed Taj, Canton Township Trustee, former head of medicine at Oakwood hospital and all around good egg, could nary believe his good fortune by seeing his campaign–which was already solidly run and raising some decent money ($200K in the spring quarter)–suddenly go from a longshot against 5-term incumbent McCotter to reasonable odds (if still an underdog) in an unexpectedly open, and very confusing seat.

Well, there have been three major developments since then.

You’ll find them and more after the jump.

So, okay, NOBODY is buying this one…

The Ryan/Romney campaign appears to be in full melt down at the moment. Romney has spent the past two days whining about how mean President Obama and Vice President Biden are to any crowd or reporter that will listen. After spending the past three week telling blatantly made up lies about the President as if they were fact, he’s sniveling that the Obama campaign has “gone to the gutter” because they are telling the truth about the Ryan/Romney budget that will destroy the middle class and transfer massive amounts of their wealth to the super-rich.

It’s laughable and happening way earlier than I predicted it would. Hell, John McCain didn’t lose his shit until after he got the nomination but Romney is already going cuckoo.

But now we get the real evidence that the Republicans have gone around the bend. A group called “OPSEC” has a new 22-minute video out that claims the Obama administration leaked details about the mission that took the life of Osama bin Laden to score political points.

Details about this lame act of desperation after the jump.

It’s Retroactively Retired Man!

A Romney campaign spokesperson recently said that Mitt Romney had “retroactively retired”. But what, exactly does “retroactively retired” really mean?

The Obama campaign asked some folks what they thought it meant. The results are … um … humorous.

Video after the jump.