Mitt Hides His Money Behind a Bunch of Mormons!

A post on Bloomberg.com by Jesse Drucker finally helps expose a part of why Mitt Romney wouldn’t release his tax returns. Essentially, he used the Mormon Church’s tax exempt status to defer taxes for over 15 years.

Romney used the tax-exempt status of a charity — the Mormon Church, according to a 2007 filing— to defer taxes for more than 15 years. At the same time he is benefiting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires, according to tax returns obtained by Bloomberg this month through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In general, charities don’t owe capital gains taxes when they sell assets for a profit. Trusts like Romney’s permit funders to benefit from that tax-free treatment, said Jonathan Blattmachr, a trusts and estates lawyer who set up hundreds of such vehicles in the 1990s.

The entire article can be read HERE.

Just another reason why churches shouldn’t have tax exempt status.

The Art of Distortion: How Gregg Jarrett Sucks at His Job

With enough distortion, you can convince anyone of anything you want. Want your audience to be disgusted with leftists? Sneer slightly every time you say the word ‘liberal.’ Want to portray the current president as a bumbling fool, keep interrupting him while you’re interviewing him. Don’t give him the chance to get his footing. Then, kick him in the balls when he doesn’t answer your question quick enough. Everyone at Fox News has nearly mastered the art of distortion.

All of them except Gregg Jarrett.

Arrested Developments

How Assange might escape Ecuador’s London embassy.

 It’s pretty amazing that a man like Julian Assange gets so much interest from so many people. After all, the guy who gave the world Wikileaks and is now held up in an Ecuadorian embassy under political asylum status has never revealed any stories people didn’t already know.

Shroud Notes

Earlier this week I had a pretty long post on The BEAST about a Shroud of Turin presentation I attended. Some of the details didn’t really fit with how I wanted to write the story, so I thought I’d add them here. This isn’t an admission of hiding facts which would have contradicted what I had to say about Russ Breault’s presentation. These are neutral omissions that just would have made the article too sprawling and rambling. Still they’re kind of interesting and I thought I should get them down somewhere and this is kind of the place for me for that sort of thing. So here we go:

The church this was held at had two flags on either side of its altar. One was a US flag and the other was a “Christian flag.” Now these are used by lots of Christian organizations, but they’re all pretty creepy. Here is is outside of the HQ of Focus on the Family:

It’s a Pious Fraud, I Can Tell By the Pixels

I Go To Church and Learn About Jesus’s Fake Do-Rag

The cover of Jesus’s debut thrash metal album.

A couple weeks ago I heard about a presentation  at a local church. Some guy called Russ Breault (unfortunately not pronounced BRO!) was going to talk about the Shroud of Turin and how it was magic. Or something like that.

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth with the image of a person on it. Some Catholics claim the cloth was Jesus’s burial shroud and that God Photoshopped a .jpg of Jesus onto it as part of his resurrection.

What the Fuck is Wrong With You People?

The Earth-Spirit exposition is this flea market of New Age products and ideas which pops up around once a year. So I felt I had to go to find out what it’s all about.

The way we originally wanted to cover this was to register as a vendor, get our own table, and sell “Hitting You In The Face With A Stick” therapy. But this would require actual money up front, so it never ended up happening. Also you might have noticed we’ve been busy with other issues at the moment.

I Am Not Sure What “Pseudo-Religious” Means

So an editor at AlterNet asked to re-post an article I wrote. They just wanted to take out one joke about anal rape, which I thought was no big deal, so I said OK. They also added a sub-headline and air quotes to the title, which I’m sure they also saw as no big deal. And what it says is something that’s become a bit of a cliche amongst people into liberal politics who maybe don’t think about religion so much. Here it is:

Random Notes On Lily Dale

There were a lot of details left out of my recent article on Lilydale which didn’t really fit into the story that well. We wanted to get to the punchline of having the medium identify Taibbi and Randi as spirits around me before boring people with too much of the minutiae, even if some of it was kind of funny/interesting.

Fuck Lily Dale

In the mid-19th century, three sisters from a sleepy upstate NY community managed to convince the world that they could communicate with the dead. Late in their lives, two of the Fox sisters demonstrated how they pulled off this fraud (one of them simply cracked the knuckle in her big toe). Unfortunately, their confession wasn’t enough to change the minds of true “spirit world” believers, and the legend continues to the present. So does the tradition of bilking the gullible.

X-Day Notes

Last week I wrote about the X-Day festival in Sherman, NY. It was basically 1100 words of “Meh,” but what was more interesting than the story itself was how a few SubGeniuses revealed themselves to be very thin-skinned and incapable of tolerating any criticism.