Obama needs to appoint himself head of the IRS. He displays an uncanny ability to locate tax cheats.

Meanwhile, his THREE Rethuglican nom’s seem to be getting smooth sailing…and get a fillibuster encouraging minority in the Senate.

Is this Change We Can Believe In or just a new variety of Democrats wimping out while in power?

Republicans are just much, much better at cheating on their taxes in ways that won’t get caught.

Apparently the tax laws need to be changed, if even the rich and powerful can’t figure them out.

And what happened to that storied Obama-vetting-process?  They were supposed to let Obama know of any sort of nannygate type problem before they were offered a position.

Alara - I think you have a point.  It’s like the asshole kids in High School who know how to conceal their bullying because they have experience, but the person being bullied doesn’t have that level of skill, so when they fight back they get busted.

Also: Apparently the tax laws need to be changed, if even the rich and powerful can’t figure them out.

Simplicity is a virtue in any legislation because it makes the democratic process more accessible to non-professionals.  The horrible complexity of the tax code is more than just a set of traps for the unwary, its downright undemocratic.

Wow.  Enough IRS audits of political nominees and we might be able to pay for TARP without China.

Paging Dr. Dean.

Dr. Dean, you are needed in the Oval Office for an HHS appointment.

Ahhh, but you missed the best one:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs later insisted Killefer and Daschle decided on their own to withdraw. “I think they both recognized that you can’t set an example of responsibility but accept a different standard in who serves,” Gibbs told a White House briefing.

Now, how could Mr Gibbs say that with a straight face after Tim Geithner has already been confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury? Doesn’t he realize that he just said that the new Secretary of the Treasury has accepted a different standard when it comes to himself?

Oh, please.  This is a blessing in disguise.  Daschle was a collaborationist turd whilst in the Senate and a bought-and-paid for corporate healthcare shill after it.  He was Village to the nth degree and he got caught because his Village perqs for once brought trouble instead of a jillion benefits.  Boo. Fucking.  Hoo.  And good riddance.

Now can we appoint somebody who isn’t a corporate whore and GOP go-boy?  I’m with DTG in STL: Howard Dean.

PS: For all of you who pissed down my neck for insisting that Obama was making a mistake in turning only to much-vaunted oh-so-special! centrists (and I mentioned Daschle specifically) instead of equally talented progressives, please don’t let the schadenfreude hit you in the ass on the way out.

The horrible complexity of the tax code is more than just a set of traps for the unwary, its downright undemocratic.

Another form of corporate welfare.  Those of us who can’t afford an army of lawyers and CPAs pay more than our fair share.

Never trust a man who wears lifts.  Good riddance to Tiny Tom.

Yeah, I do have to share that while I understood the reasoning behind Obama’s choice, I’m not precisely sorry to see Daschle go.

I’m glad there’s one less distraction and embarrassment, also for an administration that doesn’t throw in a Medal of Freedom with each pink slip.  I wasn’t expecting smooth sailing in this vetting process.  And that’s where these people were found to be lacking, so it can be called a success—it’s the pre-vetting that went wrong.  Rich people tend to have maids, nannies, landscapers, pool cleaners, and a host of other employees who will provide tax difficulties if they aren’t handled in complex ways that I’m glad I don’t have to figure out.  And that’s not an excuse, as I think pretty much everyone who doesn’t clean their own toilet is out of touch with the majority of humanity and needs an occasional dose of scrubbing to cure them of it.  In general, I’m glad I don’t have have a lot of money, property, trusts, sources of income, debts, businesses, capital gains, IRAs, a 401K and whatever else that would make tax time something other than an exercise in “How much do I owe?” or “Yippee! I’m poor enough to get more back than I put in!”  If I was responsible for a $30K or $120K error in taxes, I’d have to have forgetten a few years rather than a few obscure rules, but I’m mostly glad I don’t deal with those sums.  Rich?  I feel that way because I have money left over after the bills are paid, not because of demographics.  And I’m pretty happy with that.

You remember how when Enron failed it was because Bill Clinton got a blowjob and detached all those smart businesspeople from their ethical moorings? This is more along those lines. A couple generations of soi-disant conservatives pushing “greed is good”, along with huge increases in income inequality, have left a lot of people thinking that tax laws are more of a serving suggestion than real requirements. If you’ve got enough money to be paying a part-time or fulltime household staff—or to have someone else supplying you with household staff members as a perk, you’ve got enough money to pay an accountant to handle the details for you properly.

And the same law that says people have to file the proper tax forms for their honest-to-goodness employees is the law that lets someone audit whether they’re paying them a lawful wage, working them a legal number of hours, and so forth. “Simplify” the tax code, and watch how many rich people suddenly reclassify a pile of hourly and salaried employees at their offices as independent-contractor personal assistants…

(In fact, I think the whole way this is being framed is a little bit of a sucker’s game, like the estate tax, because enough of us aspire to have someone who does the cleaning or the laundry or the lawn a few hours a week that we can be roped into an effort to let rich people avoid accounting for their fulltime employees.)

I think Dean deserves an honorable promotion, but I’m not sure Sec of H&HS;would be that for him.

He’s certainly done a great job where he is, and I’d like him to stay there, and worry about who might replace him.

OTOH, H&HS;is going to need someone who is both creative and scrappy running it; its budget is surely in for rocky times, and I bet the place needs a thorough housecleaning after Bush—but then, what in our Executive branch doesn’t? And Doctor Dean is an MD, after all.

Saving H&HS;to do what it should do, as opposed perhaps to a lot of what it has done, may require someone like Dean after all, and if Dean hopes to save the larger patient—democratic America—that part definitely must survive as well.

Gotta agree—I’m glad it’s not Daschle too.

To clarify—I worry about who would replace Dean in his current position; I’m not saying I want him to be preoccupied with that conundrum.

Dang, I previewed that and still didn’t catch that ambiguity!

Something I did catch, and fix, was those pesky semicolons after my abbreviations for “Health and Human Services.” They showed in in Preview, in both texts—the actual Preview and the source text below. I deleted them from the latter but they came back anyway. Apparently they are some artifact of HTML code I’m not familiar with.

And while I don’t want Dean obsessed beyond reason with the question of his successor, I do hope he has a good plan to leave behind someone who shares his values and determination.

Glad it’s not going to be Daschle; meanwhile, annoyed at all these nominees with tax issues. As several people have joked, the more people get nominated to cabinet positions, the more the IRS actually gets to collect taxes owed. It just makes me unhappy that it’s people Obama’s nominating—couldn’t he find people who didn’t screw around with things? (I know the tax code’s complicated. Still. *sigh*)

Howard Dean doesn’t really have a “current position” right now.  He’s the FORMER governor of Vermont, and the FORMER Chairman of the DNC.  I believe he’s doing private sector consulting right now.

I’m sure that in the USA there are a multitude of tax professionals available who can do “compliance sweeps” on people like Daschle and provide a list of errors.  No sympathy.

Er, Mark - Dean hasn’t been Chairman for about two weeks now. He’s been replaced by Tim Kaine.