It’s bad enough when Democratic politicians commit tax fraud on their own: now they’re having it show up among family members. What is this, contagious or something? Maybe we should make them start wearing face masks. Or biohazard suits. The executive summary of this story is that Tierney’s wife is going to plead guilty to “four counts of aiding and abetting the filing of false tax returns by her brother.” She’s apparently gone with a plea bargain – because not being able to use one’s status as the wife of a seven-term Congressman to get probation for your tax cheating requires skill – and, of course, none of this is her fault, according to her husband. I suppose that it would be a bit unfair of me to expect him to say anything else. Still, these two sentences kind of jump out at one: He said that she agreed to pay her brother’s personal obligations, some family obligations, and tax payments from an account he funded. Tierney said Eremian’s taxes were paid to the government, and the mistake Patrice Tierney made was listing his earnings as ”commissions” rather than ”illegal gambling.” As one of my colleagues noted last night, that sort of gives the whole game away right there. I’m not exactly sure which obscure Treasury official came up with the idea of making it an additional crime not to declare your illegal income to the IRS, but darned if that little wrinkle hasn’t put its share and more of bad people behind bars. Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: Bill Hudak for MA-06 . His immediate family’s not in court for tax fraud today. Man, Massachusetts campaign slogans are as easy to write as Illinois ones are.
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John Tierney’s (D, MA-06) wife to plead guilty to tax fraud.
Let me summarize this Dallas Morning News article about Lisa Blue: if your husband (Fred Baron) is a millionaire and multimillion-dollar Democratic Party fundraiser – John Edwards’ bagman , in fact – and also dying of bone marrow cancer, then you can not only get away with smuggling into the country experimental cancer medicine of dubious efficacy; you can get the Speaker of the House herself to lean on the FDA to let your husband get the medication in question – despite the fact that it didn’t actually work. And then you get to brag about it, while piously talking about how awful it is that regular families don’t have your ability to violate federal regulations on access to experimental and untested medicines*. Which is irrelevant, of course: because it’s not going to get any easier for people to get that access in a system where private health insurance is eliminated. In fact, as the Avastin controversy demonstrates, access to experimental or possibly-marginal medicines will decrease under an universal health care regime. Not that it matters to people like Lisa Blue, Fred Baron, and Nancy Pelosi – after all, they live in the other one of the Two Americas that Edwards liked to so pontificate about. The one where you can publicly call in a marker like this to the Speaker of the House and not be shunned afterward. It takes a lot to erode my instinctive sympathy for both anybody dying of bone marrow cancer, and their families. Being lectured on the need for universal health care coverage by a person who successfully evaded an intolerable medical regulatory regime that her own husband helped spawn will do it every time, though. Moe Lane *Regulations, by the way, that are in place partially because of unscrupulous tort lawyers like… Fred Baron. You see, drug companies are terrified of lawsuits, because they’ve been taught to be by a generation of lawyers. And those lawyers get away with it because many of them are heavy contributors to the Democratic party, like… Fred Baron. Crossposted to RedState .
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Got cancer – and millions of dollars? Nancy Pelosi can help!
