Happy Mothers Day…if it applies.
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Won’t You Be…Please Won’t You Be…
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Password Envy
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Own a home in California? Tax Break secret Arnold won’t tell you about.
First, find your state or locality’s assessor’s Web site to get specific instructions. Look for the application or instructions for the procedure to challenge your assessment. If you can’t find the site easily on your own, drop by Assessor.com to find a link to your state assessor’s Web site. See the site.
Just in case you’re expecting an argument, get some objective proof that your home declined in value. If you’ve recently refinanced, your lender insisted on an appraisal. That would help. Some homeowners with long-term equity lines have just gotten letters from their lenders cutting the amount of the equity line. One homeowner in Dana Point, Calif., was just notified by Washington Mutual that his home equity line was cut from $225,000 to $72,500.
If you have know a local real estate agent, you can ask for a printout of comparable home sales for you.
In a market like this, you probably won’t have to fight much. Your assessor already knows the values have declined. The question is, will you agree with the amount of the decline proposed by your assessor.?
If you don’t, there is always an appeals process. The whole process of revaluation can take months — or years, depending on the volume of applications. In the meantime, property tax payments are coming due. What should you do? Pay the taxes, then challenge.
When you file your request for revaluation, ask the assessor to look back for as many years as you think the market has been declining in your area. And file a claim for refund, or overpayment, for the excess property taxes you paid in the past.
The Los Angeles County application, for example, includes a box to check asking the Los Angeles County Assessor’s office to treat it as a claim for refund as well. Perhaps your assessor’s office has similar foresight. And, like Los Angeles, it may also have an in-house advocate or ombudsman to help you.
Eva Rosenberg is the founder of TaxMama.com and an enrolled agent licensed to represent taxpayers before the IRS. She is the author of the new e-book, “The 100% Home-Based Business Tax Solution.” Reach her at taxwatch@gmail.com. 
Q. When can I appeal my assessed value?
A. Under State law, if the current market value of your property (using recent comparable sales) falls below the assessed or taxable value as shown on your tax bill, the Assessor’s Office is required to lower the assessment. This type of property tax relief generally applies to recently purchased property. Appeals may be filed between July 2 and November 30 for the annual roll. For supplemental events, or escaped assessments, the appeal must be filed within 60 day of the mailing date of the notice. Appeal forms can be obtained and must be filed with the Clerk of the Board. For more information, call 925-335-1901.
Yer welcome.
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Dear IT Support
Dear IT Support,
Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a slow down in the overall performance, particularly in the flower, gifts and jewellery applications that had operated flawlessly under boyfriend 5.0.
In addition, Husband 1.0 un-installed many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, but installed undesirable programs such as Formula One 5.0, NBA 3.0 and World Cup 2.0.
And now Conversation 8.0 no longer runs and House Cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.
What can I do?
Signed,
Desperate Housewife
******************************************************
Dear Desperate Housewife,
First keep in mind: Boyfriend 5.0 is an entertainment package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system.
Try entering the command C:\ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME and download Tears 6.2 to install Guilt 3.0. If all works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewellery 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.
But remember, overuse can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Late Night Kebab 6.1. Late Night Kebab 6.1 is a very bad program that will create FartingLoudly.wav files.
Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-Law 1.0 or reinstall another Boyfriend program. These are not supported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.
In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have a limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider additional software to improve memory and performance. I personally recommend Hot Tasty Food 3.0 and Tongue Kisses 6.9.
Good Luck,
IT Support
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Lesser-Known Miracles of St. Patrick
- Drove ice weasels out of Norway.
- Always had exact change.
- Made the lame to walk, or at least roll downhill while he kicked them.
- Transcribed lyrics to Louie, Louie.
- Turned water into whisky and water.
- Survived 37 separate leprechaun attacks.
- Made this one face that always totally cracked everyone up.
- Smelled like graham crackers.
- Explained tripartite god with a straight face.
- Could juggle.
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Happy St P Day
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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It’s the bachelor life for me
I’ll let ya know when these show up.
I’m gonna post ‘em on this blog.
Copyright? Schmoppyright….that’s right I’m a rebel.
I ordered the Special Set….I’m such a cheap bastard.
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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Worth the read
Occasionally there are things worth stopping what you’re doing and read this….this is one such article…thank you Mary Francis
There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ’07.”
The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ’06 rate.”
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.
No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes—they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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the NEW Rambo
Have ya seen the new Rambo flick?
As an aging mercenary myself I can appreciate and congratulate Mr Rambo on the second statistic in particular ever since my daughter saw me shirtless the othe day and said (loud enough for the neighbors to hear ) “Dad, put your shirt on, you’re scaring the cat!”
Increasing in Him,
DJ
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