Tue Apr 13, 2004 02:27 PM ET
By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney received $178,437 in deferred pay last year from Halliburton, the Texas oil-field services company he once headed that has received billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq.
The White House on Tuesday released the 2003 income tax returns for both Cheney and his wife, Lynne, and President Bush and his wife, Laura.
The Bushes reported paying a total of $227,490 in federal income taxes. They contributed $68,360 to churches and charitable organizations.
The Cheneys reported taxable income of $813,226 in 2003. They paid $258,779 in taxes in withholding and estimated tax payments, but only owed $253,067 and thus were eligible for a $5,712 refund but decided to apply that to their 2004 taxes.
In a related move, ubiquitous supervillain Dr. Xandor also released his 2003 federal taxes. He reported gross income of slightly more than half a billion dollars, but much of that was offset by operating losses related to his various business concerns.
Xandor earned a relatively modest salary of $75,000 from the Supervillain Emplyment Agency last year, but has many other sources of income. He owns a surprisingly large collection of musical copyrights, including most of the rights to music normally played on "classic rock" stations. He acquired them as a part of a package settlement that ended his short-lived invasion of Hell in episode XXV; in return Satan was allowed to keep the souls of Dr. Xandor's assistant, Greg, and of Greg's intrepid reporter girlfriend, Carmine.
The majority of Xandor's income comes from his sole ownership of Xand-man Nanocomputing and Cybernetics, a firm that receives many large government contracts for its work in powered exoskeletons, gene-enhanced species modifications for future warriors, and some dredging work in the Great lakes.
Xandor also owns almost $20,000,000 worth of Halliburton stock, but has pledged that "it will in no way affect my decisions on how and where to launch my diabolical schemes."
Xandor's gross income was reduced by charitable deductions to the Wide-Eyed Puppies' and Kittens' Home in Astoria, Queens, as well as the $10,000,000 fine assessed against him by the UN for his attempt to destroy the moon in 2002. He also paid $1,000,000 in alimony to Miss Lolita Fluff, of Miami, whose tempestuous 8-day marriage to the supervillain was tabloid fodder for weeks until the cranky ex-husband destroyed the offenders with some kind of directed energy weapon.
Xandor called on his nemesis, Plantagenet Longbow, to release his own tax returns, but a spokesman for the swashbuckling crime stopper explained that, as a time traveller, Longbow had an automatic extension of the time to file, until the year 1066, "which, in his time stream, hasn't occurred yet."
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
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