Apparently he hasn't lost a match in several years.

That's pretty amazing.

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."

Guess who.

No, go on and guess.

If you said the Government's head of law enforcement, you'd be right.

It pains me that i have to point this out, but yes, Virginia, every "violation of the law" is in fact a crime. That's how we &^%$ing define "crime," in fact.

Now Mukasey could try arguing that not every crime is worth prosecuting. That argument would come across as conveniently self serving since the crime in question is one committed by, you know, his boss, but at least it has coherence.

His current argument lives smack on the corner of Gonzales and Goodling lane. It's a lovely flat with hot and cold running semantics and windowsill gardens full of rationalizations in bloom.

I never would have guessed.

Link

OK, maybe I would have.

according to a government study released on Tuesday.

"About two-thirds of U.S. companies and foreign firms doing business in this country paid no federal income taxes from 1998 to 2005, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office...To be sure, many of the nonpayers were small or new companies that probably made no money. But the report said that about a quarter of large corporations - ones that had more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts - paid no taxes. In 2005, for instance, 3,565 large U.S. companies and 998 large foreign-owned companies operating here did not pay any income taxes.

But corporations can do a lot of creative accounting to "lose" money. One such practice identified by the report is "transfer pricing abuse." Essentially, that means shuffling money among corporate subsidiaries by charging pumped-up fees for goods and services instead of market-rate "arms-length" prices. "A company will incorporate offshore where there are no taxes," he said. "That (parent) company charges the U.S. company lots of money for things like the trademark for the company logo. The U.S. company says, 'I made $50 million, but my stupid parent company charged me $50 million for the logo.' The U.S. company gets to deduct the royalty fees as an expense and move profits to the parent company offshore in a tax-free haven."

I myself don't want to soak the rich, but I would like them to actually pay taxes. Because if they don't, guess who gets to pay off bush43's $1 Trillion debt? Yep....you and me.

Tax fairly and make them pay. Allowing those who have more money to pay less or nothing is immoral. Funny how some don't think morality applies to tax paying.

Military contracts in the Iraq theater have cost taxpayers at least $85 billion, and when it comes to providing security, they might not be any cheaper than using military personnel, according to a report released Tuesday. "About 20 percent of funding for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors, the report said... Since the end of the Cold War, the military has relied more heavily on contractors as it reduced the size of its force... Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, which requested the CBO review, said the Bush administration's reliance on military contractors has set a dangerous precedent.

The use of contractors "restricts accountability and oversight; opens the door to corruption and abuse; and, in some instances, may significantly increase the cost to American taxpayers."

here's the really sad part. This shrinkage of the Government isn't occurring along with a reduction of the budget. That is what some have claimed to want for years now. here we have many of those very same people, now setting this up so that it is private corporations who use the government as their personal ATM machine. And yet these very same people still claim to be against federal spending and the government.

I'd say they were speaking out of both sides of their mouth and we're all paying for the privilege.

When Julie Peterson decided to have a baby on her own two years ago, she picked a tall, blond, blue-eyed Danish engineer as a sperm donor to match her own Scandinavian heritage. But when she went back to the sperm bank to use the same donor to have another child, she was stunned to discover that the federal government had made it impossible.

...

The sperm bank had run out of vials from Peterson's donor and could not replace them, because of restrictions health officials have instituted to protect Americans against the human form of mad cow disease. Since May 2005, the United States has effectively barred sperm banks from importing from Europe for fear it might spread the brain-ravaging pathogen that causes the affliction.

huh.

Among the weird details of mad cow disease sperm quarantines what I find truly remarkable is this woman's apparently strong desire to have the exact same donor provide the DNA to her second child. Not someone with traits she likes, or even similar traits to the original donor but the exact same donor.

In her own words, speaking about her first child:

"I'd love to give him a full sibling. But I just couldn't do it. It's so unfortunate."

I just find this remarkable. I wouldn't expect the kind of person who is willing to use a surrogate sperm donor in the first place to put much or any stock in the idea of being a "full" sibling. Seems an odd contrast of very modern reproductive sensibilities with very traditional views of family bonds.