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Perverse Judge Recieves 60-Day Suspension

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Will County Judge Joseph Polito, leaves the Will County Court House Wednesday afternoon, April11, 2012. | Scott Stewart~Sun-TimesA porn-addicted judge who used his courthouse computer to view hard-core sex websites has been suspended without pay for 60 days.

The Illinois Courts Commission ruled Friday that Will County Judge Joseph Polito must serve the two-month ban for what it called his “highly inappropriate behavior.”

The 69-year-old finally confessed a lifelong addiction to porn in November, seven months after the Chicago Sun-Times revealed he regularly looked at a variety of websites during work hours in 2010 and 2011.

In a written ruling, the commission accepted that Polito was addicted to porn, noting that “persons may become addicted to pornography as well as to alcohol or drugs.”

It found that Polito’s workplace porn habit hadn’t affected the quality of his work, but added “in an era of declining judicial resources, many judges carry heavy caseloads, and Judge Polito’s conduct was an inexcusable waste of judicial time that should have been spent on available judicial duties.”

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IRS Loses Lawsuit in Fight Against Tax Preparers

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photo credit: scott*eric

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — A federal judge on Friday barred the IRS from imposing a series of new regulations, including a competency exam, on hundreds of thousands of tax preparers.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington ruled against the IRS in favor of three tax preparers who filed suit last year with the help of a libertarian legal group, the Arlington, Va.-based Institute for Justice.

Since 2011, in response to what it says has been a growing problem of poorly done returns, the IRS has sought to impose a series of new regulations on tax preparers. That included a requirement to pass a qualifying exam, paying an annual application fee, and taking 15 hours annually of continuing-education courses.

Attorneys and certified public accountants would have been exempt from the regulations.

The Institute for Justice argued that the IRS lacked the statutory authority to impose the regulations and said they would put tens of thousands of mom-and-pop tax preparers out of business, because the regulations were onerous and create a competitive disadvantage to the attorneys and CPAs who were exempt.

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