Here's what Harry Truman had to say about making money after being the POTUS:

http://www.c-span.org/presidentiallibraries/president.aspx?ID=33&Program=TV#Player

Surprisingly, just minutes before TPM's post on the tax returns, I added my own on TPM:

Let's talk tax returns

As I shared their, I think the real comparison is that 1) Obama has yet to release his 2007 returns or data and 2) that the Obama's do not walk the talk on their charitable giving. I found it informative that my wife and I have a solid record of more charitable giving in percentage or in actual dollars than has been seen in Obama's past. I suspect that may be true of many readers here at TPM.

Matthew
http://www.TheProblemWithObama.com

Clintons spent 33 million on taxes and want to pay more by eliminating the bush tax cut. 10 million to charities, transparency and this will help her campaign.

Too bad Obama supporters waste their money trying to buy the Presidency but she still wins.

Donate to charities instead like the Clintons.

All this makes one nostalgic for those simpler Walmart days.

I love that the Hillary trolls are out in full force this morning, touting Hillary's charitable contributions. I'm going to say this slowly in the hopes you'll be able to comprehend it: The. Contributions. Were. Made. To. The. Clintons'. Own. Charity.

And of that $10 million given by the Clintons, only $5 million has been given away. Where is the other $5 million? And has anyone ever done a specific analysis of what the Clinton Foundation actually accomplishes, charity-wise?

There's a reason the Clintons did this on a Friday, a week ahead of their own self-imposed deadline: It's called taking out the trash. Release something heading into the weekend and hope it gets buried.

Gee. Makes the Obamas look poor. And generous.

It now becomes crystal clear why the Clintons have been so buddy-buddy with the Bushes during the past eight years and so generally quiet about the economic squalor and civil-liberties tyranny therein represented. All of that has produced a climate in which people like the Clintons make out beyond the wildest dreams that they can have had before they boarded the White House Gravy Train.

"Feeling our pain" indeed.

I have no beef with people who have or make a lot of money, merely for their making a lot of money. But when it's done by influence-peddling by virtue of the access our trust has given them, I'm afraid I'm a little irritable. So don't ask me to give you my vote for further access, okay?

Am I the only one who feels, over the last couple days, their TPM life force is slowly ebbing as a rabid handful of Hillary supporters bitch and moan about everything.

I realize Obama supporters do this too, but I'm talking about 6 or 7 people here who respond to every single post saying the same things over and over.

I mean, I get it. Obama's a liar, he's a racist, he's wasting everyone's time, he's selfish, he threw his grandmother under the bus. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, he's also probably going to be the nominee.

Maybe it's just that baseball season has begun, but my interest in this stuff, encapsulated perfectly in this week's inane Richardson nonsense, is waning...........

Clinton is joking about how much money her husband made by giving speeches.

They both wrote books that sold well. Their charities helped folks after disasters but you donate to Obama in a lost cause.

All in all, the whining about her tax returns helped her.

God bless America!

Yes by all means lets look at the numbers-

$10,256,741 donated by Hillary and Bill Clinton
$148,394 donated by Barack and Michelle Obama

Anyone can talk a good game. But talk is cheap. Do the math for yourself. Bill and Hillary gave almost 10% of their income to charity. Barack “the Community Organizer for the Poor” and his wife donated less than 1%. This is another stark difference between the character and substance of Barack and Hillary. Hillary talks and does. Barack just talks and barely does.

I am interested in the Clintons' investments in the Quellos group.

As far as I know the only Quellos investment group registered with SEC is Quellos in Seatlle.

A high percentage of their investmetns were tax shelters andthey are featured in the 2003 and 2005 Senate reports on abusive tax shelter promotion.

What are the Clintons hiding?

Hmmm.

Here's an interesting story has piqued my interest.

Sniper-Gate II: I fought the truth, and the truth lost.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq5BwOujrNQ

Senator Clinton's story is debunked here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/us/politics/05woman.html?ex=1365134400&en=7824b4f8ea3b363d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

And to think Hillary trolls want to know why we want to see their tax records.

Simple. They say they're not hiding anything.

They've proven themselves liars, over and over and over again.

If she can't tell the truth about NAFTA, Bosnia, FMLA, Ireland and this stump story, why should we trust her about her taxes and potential conflicts of interest or undue influence?

It's odd that they were a week overdue if this is all there was to it, yo?

From today's Washington Post: "In 2006, tax returns detail $2.65 million in income from Bill Clinton's partnership with Burkle. But Sen. Clinton's campaign did not release a separate filing known as Schedule K-1, which could reveal more income after write-offs, said Dean Zerbe, national managing director of Alliant Group tax consultants."

Most income from partnerships like these never gets reported on tax returns because it's tax-deferred -- a real sweetheart deal for the wealthy and in-the-know. So the figures released yesterday most assuredly understate their true income -- perhaps by seven figures or more.

Moreover, this only adds weight to Greg's point above: "Some folks are wondering what Bill Clinton did to earn $15 million from billionaire Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Companies." What IS up with that?

These tax returns also make the point that anytime Hillary tries to come off like an ordinary person, she's being as honest as she was about Tuzla and sniper fire.

For some reason, I just find it deeply amusing that the Clinton's charitable donations went to their own charity.

I don't imagine that this is unusual, among those who run their own charities, but still, it just seems so...Clintonesque.

And the Clinton campaign is probably glad that these tax returns are out there, because that's what people are talking about, rather than the Mark Penn flub (the Colombia government has demonstrated better judgment than Hillay by firing his ass) and the fiction that she tells on the stump about that woman in Ohio...

This article is full of innuendo by Greg Sargent, who seems to suggests that the Clintons deserve to go to jail somehow, or deserve to be punished by some ethics commission.

It was to be expected that Sargent would become an Obama hack sooner than later, once his "Horses Mouth" website was mysteriously shut down.

w and cheney do not. Where is the outrage for their accountabilty? Where are the demands for their resignations?

Moving goalposts in hyperspeed! Giant strawman of previously unseen proportions!

The subject of this post is the Clinton's Tax Returns.

LOL!

I say this: If the Clintons had done anything wrong, they'd be in jail. The IRS knew abou their tax returns before they went public this week.

But obvious things are not so obvious for the once-upon-a-time progressive Talking Points Memo website.

What happened to the list of tidbits from BHO tax returns,I misplaced my copy. Please post again.

From a real honest Ralph Nader supporter

thank you

We are hearing a lot of bad stuff here about Hillary, now let's be fair and balanced and hear some "good" stuff about Baracko.

Come on guys, there must be something good about Baracko, let us here it.

Oh, and by the way, "just the facts mam", dreams and hopes don't qualify.

Yeah, all my intellectual honesty leads to absolutely no rebuttals, just personal attacks.

And they call me a troll.

Fine, for now on you are the trolls. Clinton supporters rule this blog.

Your posts are attacks and are troll worthy. We just point out the obvious reality and for some reason, the trolls attack.

Does our truth hurt and you can't take it? Why the personal attacks trolls?

And finally, Hillary says that the returns show that Bill made all that cash "doing what he loves doing most -- talking to people."

Well, second most....

(Thanks! I'll be here all week!)

You are truly a great man, much greater than I.

Bravo, Matt!

Giving to yourself - Great way to make your charity look like it's getting a lot of donations. Sort of like making it look like your campaign is getting a lot of donations.

Wrong damn thread - finally posted a link and it's the wrong damn thread.

in the immortal words of Clay Davis "sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit!"

Are all of you people really so uninformed that you weren't aware of the Clinton Foundation before this? A foundation is a pretty standard method for wealthy people to manage their charitable giving, so all this "I find it pretty suspicious" stuff is just bullshit. The Clinton Foundation has done a lot of good work, which has been well reported. People who are critical of the foundation because it hasn't distributed all of its money just sound like idiots. That's not how foundations work.

I get it, you're all Clinton haters. But try to maintain some kind of grip on reality.

Thank you for your uncanny analysis. The portrait alone is worth the admission!

I am not bothered the least little bit that Bill and Hillary Clinton made the kind of money they have, since Bill Clinton left the WH.

What makes me livid enough to start breathing fire is the thought that Chick Daney....er...Dick Cheney and George Dumbya Bush will have the potential to make more. They will make more after they have saddled us with trillions of dollars in national debt, a wrecked economy, a broken education system, a military stretched dangerously thin and a perilous environment which they insisted on not addressing..

Dumbya and Dick’s corrupt administration's destructive legacy will continue to engulf us while they leave the WH and rake in the big $$$ because of their contact networks. They will leave the WH with nary a glance backwards at what they have left us in the midst of or what we will endure as we dig out of this hole.

well, at least one good thing about Clinton, her supporters don't come in their pants when they see her on youtube. It's extremely distasteful to observe the smug and smarmy attitude of Obama's folk, even more distasteful than the Rev Wright's dashiki. I assure you, when pretty boy screws up foreign policy and the economy, you won't be coming in your collective pants anymore, you'll be shitting bricks : )

Something I noticed about the tax returns. 90% of their income comes from Bill. I don't know why that jumps out at me but maybe it's that Hillary is the feminist's feminist according to her supporters yet she is relying preliminary on her marriage to Bill to support her. Not a big deal, just caused me a little mental noise since I'm one of those women who really did make it on my own.

Earmarks
Obama Requested $1 Million For Construction Of A New Hospital Pavilion At The University Of Chicago. In 2006, Obama requested that the University of Chicago receive $1 million to support its Construction of New Hospital Pavilion.

Like I'm sure this is not in any way related to the 160% salary increasa M. Obama received in 2005, which happened to be the year after BHO went to US Senate.

Obama never!, probably something Clinton would do

This is found under "energy/water" category in the listing, unless it's an energy saving/clean water pavilion of some sort, don't see tie-in