Nothing up their sleeves... Presto!

If you ask the government for a bunch of documents, and they hand over 80% of them, it's a safe bet that there's nothing of interest in any one of them. The only good bits will be found in the ones they don't want to fork over. As the vettting process of John Roberts continues, the Bush administration has announced that they won't be handing over several sets of documents. What sort, you ask? Probably some top secret, homeland security stuff, right?

Nope. They're going to keep Roberts' tax returns secret.

The Bush administration will not give Senate investigators access to the federal tax returns of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr., White House and congressional officials said yesterday, a break with precedent that could exacerbate a growing conflict over document disclosure in the confirmation process.

Although nominees to the high court in recent decades were required to provide their three most recent annual tax forms, the administration will neither collect such documents from Roberts nor share them with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the officials said. Instead, the Internal Revenue Service will produce a one-page summary.

Now, I suppose this must be "legal" somehow, or they wouldn't have even tried it. But who gets elected or appointed to anything these days without handing over their tax returns. People want to see what you earned, who was paying you, and that you paid at least a modicum of the taxes you owed.

Hrmmm, Precious. We wonders what the tricksy, nasty hobbit could be hiding in his dusty old tax returns.

He never would have made it this far if he hadn't been paying his taxes. And there's no real secret about who he's been working for, unless he was doing some moonlighting work for some seriously hardassed neocon interests and not mentioning it.

I'm betting it's more along the lines of donations that he made, and then took a tax credit off for cheritable contributions. But rest assured, it's something, or they would have just given them up.