There’s an old maxim in Washington that when politicians are either unable or unwilling to tackle a problem directly, they appoint a commission to give the issue more intensive study. So it was lastweek when President Obama created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan group of 18 souls charged with...
Monthly Archives: February 2010
John Yoo Defends ‘Torture Memo,’ Blasts Bush Administration
John Yoo’s book Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power is getting good reviews from historians. But Yoo is perhaps more accustomed to criticism, given that he coauthored some of the controversial Bush administration memos regarding the use of torture to interrogate suspected terrorists when he served as a deputy assistant attorney general...
IRS Cracks Down on Fraudulent Tax Preparers
Karen Miller of Nashville had a good hook for attracting customers. According to government filings, she claimed that if they just filed a certain tax form, they could receive “astonishing” refunds from the Internal Revenue Service. Last year, Miller prepared and filed 41 such returns for customers, who in total claimed more than $8.3...
Partisan Rancor Follows Terrorism Announcement
In their annual threat briefing for legislators last week, the administration’s top intelligence experts ran through a long list of adversaries, from a theocratic Iran obfuscating on its nuclear intentions, to a crumbling North Korean military increasingly reliant on a nuclear deterrent, to unknown cyberfoes capable of wreaking havoc on the nation’s power grids...