On another note, go ahead and bitch and moan and whine about taxes (55%…yeah right. Get a decent accountant, then), and then vote Republican because you think they will cut your taxes. Then pay an extra $350 a month in health care costs, assuming you still have a job.

The time for the revolution is now.

My guess? She’ll enter sexual addiction therapy, and thus have some connection to her AA boyfriend.

Criswell predicts!

Spoiler space

Give her breast cancer.

First, I don’t believe that 55 percent figure. It just sounds preposterously high, and based on the sorts of figures people grasp for when they’re trying to make an argument entirely in their own favor — like the ones that claim women are better off staying home, because working women supposedly pay $150 a week for dry-cleaning and manicures. Don’t hold me to these figures, but I’d estimate our little co-properity sphere went no higher than 25-30 percent on our gross for everything, and I can’t believe it’s that much higher in California.

Second, try thinking of “the government,” that entity you say you’re working for more than half the year, this way: It’s the firefighters protecting your house. It’s the roads you drive on. It’s the schools that educate your children. It’s the library that offers you a world of literature at the corner. No one’s saying there’s no waste in government, but it seems entirely counterproductive to demonize every public office, when we all benefit from them to some extent.

Grover Norquist’s argument is insane.

Okay, I’ll bite. What are they going to do to Samantha?

As a resident of California, my combined tax burden (federal, state, property, and sales) approaches 55%. That means that until about mid-July, I get up every day, get my kids off to school, and then settle in for a mind-numbing day of work - All for the benefit of the government. I do not get to keep a penny of what I have earned for the first half of the year.

And IF I actually manage to save some of the money I do get to keep and choose to pass this money along to my children in the form of an inheritance, then THEY can pay estate taxes on that after-tax money. Sounds fair.

Now I am unlikely to ever have enough money saved to trigger the payment of estate taxes to my children (cf tax burden above), but I still think that it is reasonable to object to what can be the double taxation of earnings.

Also, it is so trivial to paint taxes as a Rich/Poor divide. It is not my “unbridled selfishness” that fuels my virulent anti-tax sentiments. It is my belief in personal liberty, and the right to use my body, my time, and my talents in a way I choose, and to keep the results of such labors and efforts. Low taxes and small government increases individual freedom, and those who hold that the increase in personal liberty is a critical social good have a principled objection to the current tax structure in the United States. They should not, as a matter of common decency, be demonized as selfish, immoral money-grubbers.

Also, Richard Cohen’s article was incoherent. I think that Norquist quite clearly explained that he was not saying that the estate tax is the equivalent of mass murder. What he was equating was the impulse that says something is okay as long as it only affects a small minority of people. Cohen’s big finish - “Norquist has gone even further, likening the morality of mass murder to the imposition of a tax on the rich” - is a specious and improper conclusion of Norquist’s argument as based on the interview text.

But I do agree that, as Fran Libowitz once said, genocides are like snowflakes. Each one is unique. The frequent comparisons of almost anything one finds objectionable to the Holocaust is profoundly offensive, and I for one would be thrilled if all such comparisons were retired.

No matter how enlightened “Sex” pretends to be, they still punish the one who is sexually liberated. Sort of like the teenagers who have sex in the horror films always die.