no more candy for you, whoever you are

President Obama today signed a bold new directive with the controversial goal of preventing new Federal contracts from being awarded to contractors who are ripping off the government "Somehow, it's become standard practice in Washington to give contracts to companies that don't pay their taxes," Obama said at a ceremony announcing the directive. "What's up with that? According to the GAO there's thousands of these deadbeat companies and instead of being punished, we're giving them more business." The directive, which thankfully does not require congressional approval, has one small flaw: the IRS is not legally permitted to share delinquency information with contracting officials. Dean Zerbe, the Bush-era Senior Tax Counsel for the Senate Finance Committee who specialized in the scrutiny of nonprofit charities, sees bad hoodoo at work. "Pounding for pounding sake on business owners during this tough economy is going to be a job destroyer for business. This is another blow against free enterprise and the God-given right to cheat on your taxes and it just smells like Socialism and besides, the tax laws are confusing and furthermore there's no one at the IRS to answer the phones. Have a cigar." "Obama thought he was gonna pull a fast one on us," chuckled conservative senator Jim DeMint. "Tax data is secret for a reason. I guess the framers of the Constitution must have seen this one coming, cause Obama's got to come to Congress to get that law changed, and I can tell you straight up that we've got forty-one solid votes against that particular invasion of privacy." "Make that forty-two," chimed in Joe Lieberman, "and maybe more. Don't think of this as a partisan issue, Jim. Just because these companies don't pay there taxes, it doesn't mean that they don't make campaign contributions."