Blogging Blue

While the estimated 50 billion dollars lost in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme is undoubtedly a staggering amount of money, what’s even more staggering is the effect Madoff’s criminality is having on his victims.

• Take, for example, Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who was found sitting at his desk on Tuesday with both wrists slashed. The 65 year-old de la Villhuchet, who ran Access International Advisors, lost approximately one billion dollars of his clients’ money as a result of Madoff’s 50 billion dollar pyramid scheme.

• And then there’s the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, , which lost just over 15.2 million dollars as a result of the Madoff pyramid scheme. The 15.2 million dollars lost by the Wiesel Foundation represents nearly all that foundation’s assets.
• And poor Eliot Spitzer is alleged to be a victim of the Madoff pyramid scheme. 2008 was bad enough for Eliot Spitzer, so the last thing he needed was to be bilked out of money by a con artist.

Fifty billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money, but it’s important to remember that behind those dollars and cents are real people; people like the ones listed above.

For a good long time, I’ve been of the belief that Vice President Dick Cheney is not only dangerous, but that he hasn’t really done a good job as Vice President. I’ve always known I wasn’t alone in my feelings towards VP Cheney, but I suppose I never realized just how many Americans agreed with me. According to a a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, almost a quarter of those polled labeled Cheney as the country’s worst vice president when compared with his predecessors:

Twenty-three percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say that Cheney is the country’s worst vice president, when compared with his predecessors.

An additional 41 percent feel that Cheney is a poor vice president, with 34 percent rating him a good number two.

And since I’m writing about VP Cheney, here’s my favorite Dick Cheney moment, circa 1994:

It’s just too bad the 2001 version of Dick Cheney didn’t listen to the 1994 version of Dick Cheney, because if he had, perhaps 4,212 Americans wouldn’t have lost their lives.

I suppose it’s only fitting that former Milwaukee County House of Corrections Superintendent Ron Malone’s ID card and badge turned up in a toilet at the HOC last week, considering it could be said his career’s in the toilet as well. Malone has done a terrible job as Superintendent at the HOC, resulting in the HOC being rebuked in a federal report for being “marred by security lapses, bad management, poor employee morale and crowded conditions.”

As a former employee of the House of Corrections, I can attest to the difficult (that’s probably putting it mildly) working conditions for security staff at the HOC. Employee morale was a problem for the duration of my time at the HOC, as was a lack of adequate staffing, which resulted in tremendous amounts of overtime for staff. In fact, I distinctly remember working 27 of the 30 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas one year, and I was always amazed that more wasn’t done in the nearly 8 years since I worked at the HOC to alleviate the problem. I was on my way out the door at the HOC when Ron Malone was hired as Superintendent, and I can remember my hope that as a former manager within the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, Malone would bring the fresh perspective that would be necessary to change the culture and environment at the HOC. Alas, it seems Ron Malone was simply content to collect his fat County paycheck without doing much to change things at the HOC, and so I’m not shocked he was demoted and placed under Sheriff Clarke’s authority.

Although to be honest, I’m not sure Sheriff David Clarke’s the kind of leader the HOC needs to change the culture, because he’s not exactly a leader that inspires those who work under him. If anything, Clarke will tighten up security at the HOC, but I don’t see much of a culture change, and until that happens, the HOC will always have problems it has now.

H/T to capper.

Despite the fact that our economy is in a nosedive and their approval ratings are in the toilet, members of Congress are in line for a nice pay raise. Lawmakers will receive salaries of $169,300, a boost of $4,100 over their current pay.

If you ask me, that’s a pretty nice raise….I wish I could get a raise in my like that during these tough economic times. After all, I work hard during the week, so I deserve a nice raise!

That’s a question that begs to be answered.

I’ll admit I supported the bailouts of Wall Street and the “Big Three” automakers, but now that the first 350 billion dollars of the 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout has been spent by the government, I think it’s worth asking how all that taxpayer money was spent. The Associated Press thought that was a question worth asking as well. The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions of each bank, and surprisingly - or unsurprisingly, given your level of cynicism - none one of the banks contacted answered the AP’s questions:

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

Not only did none of the 21 banks contacted answer the AP’s questions, but Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which received about $3 billion in bailout money, said he wouldn’t share spending specifics before adding, “I just would prefer if you wouldn’t say that we’re not going to discuss those details.”

I’m sure the banks who received taxpayer bailouts would prefer not to have to account for the money they received, presumably because either they didn’t use the funds as they were intended or they simply cannot account for how they used the funds. Either possibility shows the stunning lack of oversight in the TARP program, leaving open the possibility that a portion of the 350 billion dollar bailout was used to line the pockets of the same executives who “led” so many of our nation’s financial institutions into the situations they found themselves in prior to their bailout.

• It’s hard to believe it’s December 21st and the 2008 election is still not over. Al Franken now leads incumbent Norm Coleman by 35-50 votes in the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount, but things aren’t over yet. Officials still have to sort and count approximately 1,600 absentee ballots that were mistakenly rejected before the vote is certified, so it could be a bit longer before any winner is formally announced.
• The inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama, which is expected to draw over 2 million people to our nation’s capital, is also expected to have a big price tag. Officials in Washington D.C. have requested an additional $15 million from Congress to help the city cover costs. That would double the $15 million Congress has already allocated to pay for all national events and demonstrations in Washington during 2009, making the Obama an inauguration a truly pricey affair.
• Sherry Johnston, the mother of Levi Johnston, was arrested Thursday in Wasilla, Alaska on six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance. You’ll remember Levi Johnston as the young man having a baby with the daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The undercover investigation that resulted in Sherry Johnston’s arrest “had been going on for a while,” according to Alaska State Police, and it seems a little far-fetched to believe no one in the Johnston family knew anything about what was going on.
• Thanks to the latest snowfall we received, this December has been the second snowiest on record in Milwaukee. With three storms expected to dump 7-15 inches of snow on the Milwaukee area during the coming week, the record of 49.5 inches that fell in December 2000 could be in jeopardy.

I know Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich says he’s innocent, but all I hear when he opens his mouth is, “I’m guilty, guilty, guilty.”

A few years ago, former NBA player (and Milwaukee native) Latrell Sprewell turned down a three-year, $21 million contract extension with the Minnesota Timberwolves, saying, “I’ve got my family to feed.” Perhaps Sprewell shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss the Timberwolves contract offer, considering the financial difficulties he’s facing. On Tuesday federal judge J.P. Stadtmueller signed a judgment against Sprewell for nearly $613,000, a judgement which comes only months after Sprewell’s River Hills house was foreclosed and his yacht was repossessed and sold at an auction.

No house, no yacht, and now $613,000 in debt…something tells me Latrell Sprewell should have taken that $21 million contract the Timberwolves were offering back in 2004.

State Rep. Jeff Wood (I-Bloomer) should resign his office.

I don’t say that lightly, but after having had time to fully digest the circumstances surrounding Rep. Wood’s arrest, including the fact that his arrest was not his first arrest for Operating While Intoxicated (it was in fact his third arrest), I believe Rep. Wood has demonstrated he has not learned from past behaviors. Despite his two previous convictions for OWI, Rep. Wood chose to get behind the wheel of a car and drive while intoxicated, and to be honest, he’s lucky he didn’t kill someone:

Witnesses had called police to report a car driving erratically on the interstate. One of the witnesses said the driver had driven into the median and struck a sign.

The trooper noted damage to Wood’s car, including a flat tire and damaged rim that suggested the car had been driven some distance after the tire went flat. Wood said he didn’t know how it happened and suggested it may have occurred while he was parking.

Rep. Jeff Wood should do the honorable thing here and resign his position, so that the people he took an oath to represent can have representation they can be proud of.

W. Mark Felt, who leaked information to reporters under the moniker, “Deep Throat,” about the Watergate break-in, died Thursday at the age of 95, according to CNN.

Rob Jones, Felt’s grandson, said his grandfather died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. According to published reports, Felt died of congestive heart failure.

Felt admitted in a 2005 Vanity Fair article he was the Washington Post’s source for many of its 400 stories on the Watergate affair during the early 1970s. The Watergate break-in eventually led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon.

“I’m proud of everything that Deep Throat did,” Felt, 92, told CNN’s “Larry King Live” in 2006, his first public interview on the subject.

I’m proud of everything Deep Throat did to expose the Watergate scandal, because he exposed one of the most serious examples of abuse of presidential authority and criminality that our nation had ever seen.