I realize that everyone has to make a living somehow. But I’m sorry…. you steal taxpayer money that was supposed to be used to educate children, and you shouldn’t be allowed to get paid with taxpayer money for… educating children.

Rosella Tucker was charged last month with embezzling over $300,000 from a Milwaukee Public Schools charter school, New Hope Institute of Science and Technology. And now she’s running Sherbro Educational Services LLC… which tutors children under the No Child Left Behind Law. She’s got 27 kids at $1,795 a pop… for a total of over $48,000 of federal money. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.

The tutoring company is one of about 25 that are listed on the MPS website…. advertised to parents as tutoring options. You get on the list by applying with the Departement of Public Instruction, which Tucker did in June.

Well of course he’s going to say it would be great… he wants to do the deal! The gist of it is this… Ballmer says the Yahoo buyout would be great because (***drum roll***)… it’s about the only way Microsoft can compete with Google.

Google is the dominant player in the search engine game by far, with about 75% of paid searches worldwide. Microsoft wants a piece of that and says Yahoo is the key, and that Google shouldn’t be able to have such a corner on the market. (Hmmm…. Microsoft doesn’t otherwise appear too concerned about a certain company having total dominance in a particular arena.)

This is a good time to take a look (again) at how passionate Steve Ballmer is about Microsoft.

The tax world had its eyes on Wesley Snipes last week, who was on trial for tax evasion. I hate cases like this. Snipes didn’t report income of tens of millions of dollars and didn’t pay taxes on it. The rest of us pay our taxes, and most of us aren’t as well-to-do as Snipes. But we do it because it’s the law and it’s the right thing to do (no matter how much we hate it).

Yet Snipes gets mostly off the hook last week. He’s all kinds of happy because he was acquitted of felony charges of tax fraud and conspiracy. But he was convicted of three misdemeanor charges of failing to file tax returns. OOOOOH.

His attorney said Snipes didn’t commit fraud.. that he “had no bad intent.” Really? Well what do you call it when you fail to report $38 million in income? From 1999 through 2004, he didn’t file taxes and was involved with a group (American Rights Litigators) known for selling people tax advice that amounted to fraudulent schemes to avoid paying taxes.