NICK DENTON, INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY: “Gawker is organized like an international money-laundering operation. Much of its international revenues are directed through Hungary, where Denton’s mother hails from, and where some of the firm’s techies are located. But that is only part of it. Recently, Salmon reports, the various Gawker operations—Gawker Media LLC, Gawker Entertainment LLC, Gawker Technology LLC, Gawker Sales LLC—have been restructured to bring them under control of a shell company based in the Cayman Islands, Gawker Media Group Inc.” Nobody tell Liz Warren.

Or Joe Biden — because then you’d have to explain what a shell company is, and that the Cayman Islands aren’t part of Oiho.

Meanwhile, Kevin Williamson comments:

So we have evil offshoring — exploting those poor marginalized Hungarian nerds — baroque tax-minimizing schemes, assets that will not be repatriated because of U.S. taxes, and that favorite sin of the Left: hypocrisy. In my mind, hypocrisy is a lesser sin than stupidity, and it is sort of stupid to write up a breathless account about Romney’s doing the precise same thing your company does. Incidentally, there is nothing in the Gawker report or the accompanying documents suggesting that Romney or Bain did anything improper. And neither did Gawker, for that matter: U.S. tax practices create very powerful incentives to pursue avoidance strategies. Gawker’s owners apparently know that, even if its writers lack the guts or the intellectual capability to acknowledge as much.

We eagerly await the next Gawker editorial on the need for corporate-tax reform.

Heh. Hoist, petard, etc.

UPDATE: The Gawker story kind of undermines this leak of Mitt Romney tax information, which, as a reader emails, “has David Axelrod’s fingerprints all over it.”

You know, one reason to abolish the income tax is that it puts private information into the hands of politicians and government officials who are able to abuse it for political reasons.