The Wilpons lost money in the Madoff scheme

CNBC just announced that the Fred Wilpon's Sterling Equities had "accounts" with Bernard Madoff (actually pronounced Made-Off), whose brokerage firm turns out to have been a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Still, it was a better decision than signing Mo Vaughn.

Bloomberg has the story here.

Profiles in Discretion: Rod Blagojevich

You don't see political careers explode that spectacularly very often. When you've got a governor on tape saying, explicitly, "I want money" in exchange for the U.S. Senate seat he's authorized to fill, and pointing out how much leverage he has, since if they don't pay, he can always appoint himself to the Senate... Well, you're just being greedy if you ask for that governor to also be a Republican.

Ted Stevens: Oh yeah he did that

The road to 60 senate seats gets a little less steep as Uncle Ted Stevens is found guilty on all counts:

The jury found Stevens guilty of "knowingly and willfully" scheming to conceal on Senate disclosure forms more than $250,000 in home renovations and other gifts from an Alaska-based oil industry contractor... The 84-year-old senator from Alaska had asked for a speedy trial in the hopes of clearing his name and improving his chances for re-election to a seventh term. He is in a tight race against his Democratic challenger, Mark Begich.

No word on jail time. People get incarcerated every day for less, but he's an old and powerful white person so I'm sure they'll come to some accommodation.

Overheard on "Hardball"

"If they're unable to convict him, I think he's got a real shot, yeah."

- Unknown pundit on Ted Stevens' (R-AK) prospects, should he beat what sounds like a pretty solid corruption case.

"Hi, I'm corrupt Republican Tom Feeney..."

I was just sitting here having having a cup of coffee. Just reading the paper, next to some fruit, in a douchebaggy lavender open-collar dress shirt... Anyways I just wanted to tell you, the good people of FL-24, that I'm really sorry about that Abramoff thing. I didn't know what the deal was. Really.



Via Chris Cillizza, who writes:
Politicians, as a rule, don't like to apologize, and they certainly don't like to apologize in front of tens of thousands of viewers. And, there is recent evidence that a mea culpa by an endangered politician doesn't make things better...

Oh no, I'm sure "I embarrassed you" (he actually says this in the ad) is actually a stunningly effective bit of political messaging. But time will tell.

Update:
“Obviously, the ‘mea culpa’ ad is not a huge genre in American politics,” said Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, a University of Wisconsin project that collects and codes political ads. “If someone has done something bad enough that they think they need to apologize for it with a television ad, they’ve usually decided not to run.”
via

Washington Wire at its very worst

Elizabeth Holmes writes:

The Republican candidate had come under fire for associating with Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who fell from grace after his involvement with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. McCain was one of the leaders of the investigation of Abramoff's lobbying activities that led to his imprisonment. Reed was never charged.

To read this passage, you would think that the very suggestion that Ralph Reed is an undesirable associate is crazy. It is written as if there weren't emails unearthed by the House investigation between Reed and Abramoff. In those emails, Reed bragged about having Karl Rove block a nomination in the Interior Department who was seen as hostile to Abramoff's casino clients. Charged or not, Reed didn't just "fall from grace" because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was up to his eyeballs in the auctioning off of the federal government and there's proof of it.

And now McCain's going to an event "promoted" if not "hosted" by Ralph Reed, and it's wrong for Democrats to object to this, because McCain led an investigation of Abramoff after he was caught? Holmes seems to be under the impression that McCain's leading those investigations, instead of perhaps strongly approving of already-exposed government corruption, should inoculate him from charges of hypocrisy. Holmes would have us pay no mind to the fact that Reed really was intimately involved in the biggest public corruption scandal in years.

At other points, Holmes just lashes out at McCain's critics:

"Yet the Democrats jumped on the email..."
"The Democrats"? All of them?

"That didn't stop the Obama campaign from issuing a 'response' to the absence"
"Will those little jerks at the Obama campaign never be satisfied?!"

"Others took it as an assertion of his involvement with the campaign, going so far as to insinuate he was hosting the event."
Given that Reed sent out invitations to the event in his own name, you arguably have to go further to preserve the distinction between "promoting" and "hosting" than to conflate them. [Bonus points for referring to the guilty parties as unspecified "Others."]

"On Monday evening, there was no sign of Reed at the Marriott Marquis here and no mention of him by McCain during his remarks."
So... McCain's failure to acknowledge Reed's support is evidence he didn't get any? I think it just means he wants to downplay it now that he's taking criticism for it. Yes, especially given that Reed is sending emails/fundraising for him and is on his Victory 2008 team, I think the latter interpretation is more likely.

That just about covers it I guess. It's not as though the WSJ's Washington Wire garners a huge audience as far as I know, and that's all to the good, but it still carries a major news organization's brand and it's churns out more than its share of awful posts. This is just my nomination for the worst of the season so far.

Oh good

Sam Israel is in police custody. If only his fake suicide had been as convincing as the pitch for his fake hedge fund.

Las Vegas Sands and Tom DeLay

I know, it's hard to believe that a billionaire casino magnate and an unbelievably corrupt Republican congressman could have anything to do with one another, but Connie Bruck of the New Yorker says it's so.

Sheldon Adelson is the CEO and majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, which is worth almost $20 billion, which makes him the third richest man in America. The article is primarily about his tireless advocacy for (right-wing views of) Israel, but it also has good backstory on the deal that made his company what it is, namely the first and the biggest casino in Macau. They were not the only casino company willing to build a casino where China goes to gamble, but it appears they got that privilege in part because Adelson and DeLay are friends.

Sands was angling for the casino concession at the same time the Chinese were angling to host the 2008 Olympics. Though his city was considered the favorite, the mayor of Beijing was concerned about a bill being pushed in the House by a Democrat (natch) calling for Congress to oppose the selection of Beijing on account of human rights abuses or some noise.

Here is the account of the president of the company in a sworn deposition:

“About three hours later DeLay calls and he tells Sheldon, ‘You’re in luck,’ ” he continued, “ ‘because we’ve got a military-spending bill. . . . We’re not going to be able to move the bill, so you tell your mayor that he can be assured that this bill will never see the light of day.’ So Sheldon goes and he goes to the mayor and he says, ‘The bill will never see the light of day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

All else equal, that conversation probably didn't hurt Sheldon's chances of becoming a multi-billionaire.