April 15, 2005 by s.z.

UnAmerican Pie Oh, and here's Ann Coulter's latest column -- it's about pies again.  Well, pies,   the classic film 'Naugulins vs. the Earth, and Ann's secret plan to take out Laura Bush.  So, it's probably her best column ever! And scroll up and you can read the latest on the Wendy's finger.  (No, nobody threw it at Ann Coulter -- at least, not YET! But wouldn't it be fun to do?) 9:36:36 AM

Happy Tax Day, Charlie Brown! [A new holiday special for the whole family, with guest stars Bill Frist and James Dobson as the wacky neighbors who tar and feather a judge for being too uppity.] Okay, I finished my taxes.  Sure, I waited until the last minute, but that's what I always do.  Well, this year I was going to do them early, so in February I took all of the forms and receipts and stuff from the file where I throw tax stuff, and put everything on the kitchen table, so it would be right there, guilting me about my taxes every time I walked into the kitchen.  And I did feel guilty, and vowed frequently to do taxes the very next day.  However, after a few weeks of this, I had to hurriedly clean the kitchen because company was coming, and I scooped up everything and put it ... somewhere.  I didn't think about taxes again until yesterday, when I saw some reference to the 15th being tax day and panicked.  So, I watched "CSI" and "Missing" to help me focus.  Then I arranged my calculator, stapler, pencils, and such on the table, and got out the file that's supposed to contain all my tax stuff -- and saw that it was empty.  And then I remembered that I had put everything on the kitchen table, where it had sat for months, until I needed to clean up, and had put it all  ... somewhere. I interrogated all of the usual suspects (drawers, magazine racks, the china cupboard, etc.), taking out their contents and demanding that they show me the tax stuff.  And, in order to send a message to the clutter about the consequences of harboring fugatives, I threw away a bunch of old periodicals, expired coupons, Christmas cards, and requests for donations from my college.  But the missing tax stuff remained hidden.  Finally, in desperation, I tried looking in the hamster/guest/junk room.  And there, under a stack of books, was the tax stuff.  Well, except for one form that I needed.  I could have downloaded it from the IRS site, but that didn't feel official enough, so I drove to a couple of post offices until I found one that still had federal tax forms in the lobby.  (Sure, it might sound like procrastination to you, but really, everything has to be just right for me to do taxes effectively.) So, I returned home, form in hand, and put it neatly on the table with the other forms, receipts, stapler, etc., and got down to business.  But then Jet Jaguar tried to "help" me by sitting on the forms, so I had to play with him for a while.  But eventually, I put some numbers on some lines, added and substracted some figures, and put some papers in some envelopes, which I sealed, stamped, and put in the mail box.  Oh, and I included a check.  At least, I hope I did. But at least my taxes are done!  They may or may not be right.  (This state has the weirdest tax code the world -- the way you figure out your taxes here basically involves:  taking your federal gross income, subtracting the square root of what your federal tax came to, adding $165, multiplying that sum by some mystery fraction (whichever one you pick will be the wrong one), adding $421 to that, and then adding on an amount to represent all the state sales tax you tried to cheat them out of by buying stuff on the internet, and then adding $211 to that.)  But they are done.  So, in summary, my taxes are done -- at least, until somebody at the IRS or state tax commission actually looks at them, and sends them back with a request for several hundred more dollars, or audits me, or something. But on to other things.  In honor of tax day, the Philly Inquirer did a piece about whether bloggers need to count donations as income or not.  It quotes various bloggers, to include Susie Madrak fromSuburban Guerilla.  (Her part is the best, so let's just skip to it.) Susie Madrak's tip jar yielded a car. "My readers sent me $1,500 when my car died," said Madrak, of Bensalem, whose feisty Suburban Guerrilla is at www.suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com. Madrak, a fraud investigator and former newspaper journalist, is tooling around in a used Infiniti after sharing her car woes. She begged, hectored, and put up a photo of a cat, warning: "Hit the PayPal or I kill the kitten." [...] While the IRS requires employees to report tips as income, some bloggers say their tips are really gifts. "Tips are gratuities for services rendered," Madrak said. "A gift is not taxable. You don't pay taxes on your birthday presents." I agree with Susie's way of thinking.  I don't have a tip jar (mostly because I have enough income to manage my frugal life style, and figure that guys must have your own problems, and if you don't, you must know of better causes to which you could donate any spare cash -- but also because I don't want to lose my amateur standing and be disqualified for the Blogging Olympics).  But if I did get some donations to fix a broken car or something, I wouldn't pay taxes on them unless the government promised to stop using the money I already gave them to send Bush from town to town to try to sell fake audiences on his social security plan, and could guarantee they would use the funds for something less stupid.  Anyway, since this is an article about bloggers, it includes the obligatory Andrew Sullivan quote.  (Hey, didn't he quit blogging a couple of months ago?  At least, he said he was going to, and I took him at his word.  Why is he still being contacted for these kinds of things?) Andrew Sullivan is not asking for any more tips, either. The widely published gay conservative blogger said in an e-mail this week that he would never do another pledge drive. The last one provoked outrage. Previous beg-athons, it was widely reported, netted him $79,020 and $120,000. Sullivan said only, "My critics think I did much better overall than I did." In July, on www.andrewsullivan.com, Sullivan asked again for funds to help defray rising bandwidth costs. Mockery ensued. It sure enough did!  Ah, good times, good times ... "As you all know, blogosphere bandwidth, like fine diamonds and Grey Poupon, is incredibly expensive," wrote Iowahawk at iowahawk.typepad.com. "It takes a cool $8.95 each and every month to keep this blog humming... [which] comes directly out of my budget for Pabst Blue Ribbon, or, as I like to put it, 'research.' " One angry blogger launched the Give Your Money to Anyone But Andrew Sullivan Project. "When I started to criticize Bush, the money dried up," Sullivan said, adding that he is now "trying to get by on blog ads. They are helping a lot." Sullivan is asking fans to become "supporting subscribers" for $20 a year. And that's NOT the same thing as asking for tips, despite what YOU might think. Oh, and speaking of creative financing, while I'm not asking for tips, if any corporations out there want to be supporting subscribers, I will open the blog to this kind of sponsorship.  I would do like PBS and announce that each day's blogging was "Brought to you by a grant from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, which wishes to remind you that the profits from your impotence pills are being used to find a cure for cancer (among other things), so quit complaining about the prices of prescription drugs, you ungrateful wretch!"  Inquire about my corporate rates. Of couse, the Inquirer had to give the last word to Glenn Reynolds.  It's blog law. "Thanks to all the folks who've sent donations lately. They do a fine job of offsetting the hate mail," University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds wrote recently on Instapundit (www.instapundit.com). Reynolds, who averages 175,500 page views daily, has told readers he prefers tips to ad revenue because "there's something about someone paying you when they don't have to that makes it nice." Reynolds, who is a law professor, presumably doesn't NEED the tips his blue-collar workers send him in an effort to feel some connection with a celebrity like him, but the donations are nice boosts to his ego. And that's the true spirit of Christmas ... I mean, blogging. And Tax Day. I will be back later with a wrap of all the "Revelations" news (like Count Floyd said, "Spooky stuff, boys and girls," but I need to get some sleep now. And make sure I really did put a check in the envelope going to the Tax State Commission. 8:28:49 AM