Through the back door:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.
The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days.
. . .
[S]ix I.R.S. estate tax lawyers whose jobs are likely to be eliminated said in interviews that the cuts were just the latest moves behind the scenes at the I.R.S. to shield people with political connections and complex tax-avoidance devices from thorough audits.
Sharyn Phillips, a veteran I.R.S. estate tax lawyer in Manhattan, called the cuts a “back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax.”

If the executive branch refuses to enforce the law, it won’t be enforced, will it?

William Bennett, on CNN yesterday: “Not to be flip, but give war a chance.”

The self-proclaimed “America’s Anchorman” on embryonic stem cell research:

I’m telling you, and I have from the get-go, who is behind this — is the — the militant pro-abortion crowd, because you need abortions to get these.

Uh, fertility clinics perform an abortion as part of the in vitro fertilization process? I wasn’t aware of that. That would defeat the whole purpose, wouldn’t it?
If that wasn’t comical enough, he then added this:

This — the — I think we need to re-examine this whole term “scientist.” You know, there are certain things in our culture that are never questioned. They have instant credibility. If a scientist says anything, [gasp] it’s gotta be true. Scientists have this aura.
. . .
Science is not politics — well, it’s absolutely BS. Science is all about politics, and science has been so wrong about so many things.

Yes, in offering brilliant insights like the one above, Limbaugh demonstrates that we should drop “scientists” all together and get our information from those holding Ph.D.s in radio punditry. Because clearly they don’t have a political agenda.

As they stand up, we’ll stand down run for cover:

U.S. officials have long claimed that as America trains more Iraqi forces the violence in the country will subside. Actually, the exact opposite has happened, veteran Iraq correspondent Tom Lasseter (formerly with Knight Ridder, now with McClatchy after the sale) calculates today.
“Despite the addition of almost 100,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops in the past year, American efforts to pacify central Iraq and the capital appear to be failing, challenging a central assumption behind the U.S. strategy in Iraq: that training more Iraqi security forces will allow American troops to start going home,” he observes.
Of course, one problem has been that some of these newly-trained forces are joining in the sectarian carnage. Uniformed officers or official police vehicles are often spotted the scene of killings.
The raw numbers: the number of trained Iraqi soldiers and police grew from an estimated 168,670 in June 2005 to some 264,600 this June. “Yet Baghdad’s morgue is receiving nearly twice as many dead Iraqis each day as it did last year,” Lasseter notes. “The number of bombings causing multiple fatalities has risen steadily. Attacks on American and Iraqi troops last month grew 44 percent from June 2005.”

Maybe it’s time to head back to the drawing board again.
Funny how history repeats itself. I predict that just as in Afghanistan, we will sooner or later be fighting some (many?) of the same people we are currently training in Iraq.

Senator Tom Harkin:

Virtually everytime a couple goes to a fertility clinic, leftover embryos are created…if that’s murder, how can the President permit it to continue? Where’s his outrage at the IVF clinics in this country? Why isn’t he up here proposing legislation to shut down in-vitro fertilization in this country? Make it a crime, a federal crime, to conduct in-vitro fertilization? In the President’s narrow, moral universe, it seems to be just fine to destroy embryos, to throw them away, as the by-product of producing babies through IVF, but it’s murder to use the embryos to conduct life saving research. Someone please explain the logic of that to me.
And why isn’t the President prosecuting the many thousands of American men and women who use these IVF clinics? If their attempts to have children results in leftover embryos and these embryos eventually get discarded, aren’t they complicit in murder? Under the President’s narrow, moral logic, and I’d hate to call it logic, the President’s narrow, moral view, any man or woman who allows their embryo to be discarded, something that happens everyday, is authorizing murder. Why is the President standing idly by? Why isn’t he putting all these men and women in jail?

Good questions. Perhaps someday someone in the White House press corps will manage to ask about it.