Bernie's Big Adventure

Tomorrow’s the big day for swindler Bernie Madoff, the man who apparently ran the largest Ponzi Scheme in history. He’s expected in court in New York, and he’s expected to plead guilty. Most credible estimates put the total of his swindling in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars, and his victims number over 14 thousand.

There’s an old saw that says if a thing seems to good to be true, it probably is. My sympathy is somewhat attenuated for the “victims”, in this day and age of derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, and scams of every kind and nature coming to light. It’s easy to say the victims were greedy and reckless. But Madoff’s scheme was extremely sophisticated, like any really good con.

One thing I’ll be watching closely is how they treat his wife, Ruth, who was apparently in on the scam from day one. She called herself a mere “bookkeeper” for Bernie, and she’s trying to get the court to set aside about 70 million dollars for her to keep, including the posh Manhattan penthouse. Records, such as they are in this case, seem to indicate she also managed to squirrel away about 15 million bucks in the hours just before the law swooped down on Bernie.

How should such a scamster be punished? Immediate incarceration seems prudent. Forcing him to tell all he knows about other big-time financial scamsters seems obvious. He’s 70, so a 30-year prison term doesn’t seem excessive. He faces over a hundred years in prison. I say let’s show mercy… let him out when he’s 100.

Perhaps a mention of Chinese justice is in order, since they seem to pretty much own us now. Remember the Chinese tainted milk scandal last year? A small group of business people added melamine to milk to boost the protein count. 300 thousand people got sick. Six infants died, 13-hundred were hospitalized with kidney problems. The Chinese government investigated and determined six people were at the center of the scam. Their assets were seized and their businesses shut down. Three were given long prison terms. One was given life in prison. The two at the core were convicted and executed.

Let’s see how much of Bernie’s ill-gotten fortune he and his wife get to keep.

The Commie Plot To Kill Us All

My friend Pat Simms wrote an article in the State Journal about the big fluoride debate in Poynette, and it brought back a flood of childhood memories not only about fluoridating water, but polio, the red menace, fallout shelters, and the like.

Some dweeb who’s a village trustee in Poynette has “researched” fluoridation on the internet and has determined to his satisfaction that it’s poison. Well, it is, Mr. Dweeb, and so is water, if you drink too much of it. Apparently, he and his little committee just shut off the fluoridation equipment and didn’t tell anybody about it, and when the locals finally found out, they got mad, and are now engaged.

I remember the big debates in my small home town of Hortonville, up in the Fox Valley, about fluoridation back in the 50’s. Joe McCarthy, the man from a few miles away in Appleton who saw commies everywhere, had the public’s eyes and ears. This fluoridation thing was just another commie plot to kill all the capitalists, said Senator Joe. Since I palled around with the village dentist’s kids, at least I had another perspective on putting fluoride in the water. Long story short, the village board went ahead with the commie plot and never looked back.

The article also made me recall something from the same time-frame: memories of standing in line with the rest of the village folks to get the Salk vaccine against polio. We trekked to the high school and stood in line to get the vaccine. The postmaster’s son had polio. He was my age, and struggled to get around with his braces and crutches. The vaccine came too late for him.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just our proximity to Tail-Gunner Joe’s home base that led to the “atom-bomb attack drills” we had in grade school. We knew so little about the affects of radiation at the time that it was widely assumed that if we could survive the explosion - by ducking under our desks when CONELRAD warned us - we’d emerge unscathed to rise up and fight the commies. For those who didn’t happen to be in school when the commies struck, the basement of the village hall was the officially-designated fallout shelter. We knew fallout was dangerous, but had no clue as to how dangerous until the 60’s.

It’s interesting how the cycles of history work. Growing up in the 50’s, most kids were worried by the prospect of dying in an A-Bomb attack by the commies. First, my kids were concerned they’d become victims of a Columbine-style attack on their school….now, it’s terrorists with “dirty bombs”. What goes around, comes around.

Saving Daylight Can Kill You!

I hope you’re not reading this from a Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. Daylight Saving Time, apparently, can kill you. Or at least increase the odds you’ll have a heart attack, according to Swedish researchers who found a 5% increase in heart attacks the three days following the “springing forward”….and a 5% decrease in heart attacks the three days after we set the clocks back an hour in the fall. The increase, they think, is because of sleep deprivation.

This whole thing goes back to Ben Franklin, who believed the saving of daylight would also save candle-wax. Franklin, characterized by the comedy troupe “Firesign Theater” as the only American President who was never an American President, had a lot of good ideas.

Then, the government got involved, and, well - they were just trying to help, I guess. Indiana, which reluctantly went along with Daylight Saving Time a few years ago in 2006, did a study. Seems DST didn’t save energy, like the government said….it actually increased it about one percent, and as near as they can figure it was because of increased air-conditioning use. I’m not putting a lot of faith into that study.

The feds countered with a study last year that said we do indeed save energy with DST, so you can pick the study you like, I guess. I rely on anecdotal evidence, compiled by yours truly over the last decade or so. I can attest that our dog doesn’t consult the clock when she thinks it’s time to get up. Our Collie, like the Sheltie before her, doesn’t “spring forward” or “fall back”.
Having just spent a week in southern Arizona at Spring Training, I can see why those folks don’t bother with Daylight Saving Time. That high-angle sun down there around Phoenix provides plenty of daylight year-round. And it’s not like the daylight up here in Madison at 43 degrees north. Being that much closer to the equator (Phoenix is 33 degrees north) makes a HUGE difference in how hot the sun feels and how much relative power it has to cook your skin.

So if you make it past Wednesday and don’t have a heart attack because of the time change, good for you. You’ll need the strength, because on average, Madison gets seven inches of snow in March….and three-and-a-half in April. It’s not the time change that’ll kill ya…it’s the shoveling.

"Exceptional Achievement" Bonuses at the UW

Let’s talk numbers. Badger Football Coach Bret Bielema just got handed a bonus check for a hundred grand for “exceptional achievement”. Not that many years ago, a hundred grand was serious money. Now, it’s just a door prize at the big jock palace on Monroe Street. So with a 3 and 5 record in the Big Ten last season, his performance was .375. That’s a heck of a batting average, if you’re talking baseball, up there in the Chipper Jones mid-season range. But if you’re talking coaching, it means you LOSE 62.5% of the games you play. Hardly “exceptional achievement”. 7 and 6 overall, but a couple of those wins were pre-season victories over glorified high school squads…as Bielema follows Alvarez’ method of lining up some cupcakes to dine on, in the pre-conference season.
Let’s see….did he win or lose that bowl game the Badgers played in this year? Oh yeah, he lost. Don’t know what his “exceptional achievement bonus” would have been had he won, but given the way they throw money around over there, it probably would have been SEVEN figures. Now we’re closing in on Wall Street-style bonus money!
Don’t get all riled up that it’s taxpayer money that’s being handed out to coaches whose performance can best be described as mediocre. It’s money from the corpuscles….the boosters….that underwrites the charitable nature of the bonus system. There’s a great history of generosity over at 1440 Monroe Street. If a rogue chancellor who can’t be brought into line should happen to deny pay raises to the coaches, well by God the boosters will happily hand out more money.
And the big boss, Mr. Alvarez himself, told the State Journal “you don’t change the rules once the game has begun”, in defending the hundred-grand handout to Bielema. How enlightened, Barry, but the “game” is over for another season and even if business isn’t down at your fancy steakhouse on the far west side, a lot of folks who are hurtin’ in this economy might find your statement insensitive at best.
During my days as a daily working stiff in the world of broadcasting, I had a bonus structure associated with my compensation package. If I performed exceptionally in agreed-upon objectives, I got a lot of extra money. Mediocre performance - “at expectations” - garnered a very modest sum (about 1% of my annual total compensation - Bielema got about 10% of his base for performing BELOW expectations, regardless of what his "contract" says); and performance below expectations would earn me a trip to the CEO’s office for a pointed discussion. You may well have a similar arrangement. You get rewarded when you perform well; you don’t get rewarded when you do only what’s expected.
Of course, they won’t change things over there at jock headquarters, because they don’t have to and won’t be under any real pressure to do so. The “exceptional achievement bonuses” will continue to be handed out for sub-par performance. Like the business tycoon who buys a big yacht and puts a Captain’s hat on his head. To him, he’s a Captain. To a Captain - he’s no Captain.

Madison's CEO Speaks Out on Weed!!!!

My old pal Sly is at it again. While my wife and I were off in Arizona soaking in baseball and sunshine, he was up to his old tricks of getting elected officials to say controversial things.
Full disclosure: for those of you reading this who don’t know, I sat across the glass window from Sly’s studio for quite a few years in the early part of this decade, doing news and being constantly interrupted by the local bad-boy. What our city’s longest-running talk-show host (30 years in radio, the last 20 of them here) doesn’t want you to know is that underneath all the bellow and bluster beats a heart of gold.
As near as I can figure, about the time my wife and I were westbound on the Superstition Freeway headed from Mesa to Tempe to watch the Brewers and A’s play last Friday, back in Madison Sly was having a little on-air chat with Mayor Cieslewicz about the Verveer flap. Several days ago, some Madison cop wandered into a restaurant where the powerful downtown Alder was having a chat with the owner of the joint, when she claims she detected the odor of the highly addictive and extremely dangerous mind-altering weed….and, for reasons which no one seems to be able to understand, quickly did an about-face and high-tailed it out of the joint. Her sergeant made her write it up, so it became an “official police report” at that point.
The morning paper reported the incident on the front page, and the Alder, who sits on the city’s potent Alcohol License Review Committee, and is an Assistant Dane County District Attorney, says he did nothing wrong, smoked no weed, and didn’t smell what the officer did.
Sly is no pot-head. Says he doesn’t like the stuff. His demons, as his listeners know, came in the form of pain pills and vodka, a problem he beat several years ago. As I recall, the only time he talked on-air about smoking pot was getting stoned in the back seat of a former Madison mayor’s car. (NO, not THAT one - the female former mayor.) So when he got Mayor Dave to talk about the Verveer incident, Cieslewicz said he thought marijuana should be legalized and pooh-poohed the whole Verveer incident as a tempest in a teapot. Madison de-criminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana in the past century.
Channel 3 TV picked up the story, and that’s how I found out about it - and they ran audio tape from Sly’s chat with the mayor and acted like the mayor’s offhand comment was a real scoop. They ran the story on the local news yesterday morning, complete with an officious quote from some city hall flack about how the mayor’s “opinionated statement” about legalizing marijuana did not signal the advent of a new initiative from the Cieslewicz administration and did not reflect official city policy. (Too bad!) No doubt the next salvo will be one of those famous Neil Heinen editorials on Channel 3 about the recklessness of the mayor’s comment and the horrible effects of the gateway drug.
We’re so hung up on this 1930’s mentality about killer weed. For heaven’s sake, we now have a PRESIDENT who admits he did cocaine when he was younger. Could we mellow out a bit about the offhand comment of a mayor who reflects the predominant attitude of his community?

A Fox News Show That's GOOD

Once a broadcaster, always a broadcaster I guess, even on vacation. Ever since I first started in the biz, whenever I've travelled my custom is to check what's going on, media-wise, in the market. There's an old industry saying about how "listeners/viewers listen/watch, but broadcasters monitor". The first morning we woke up in Mesa last week on our Spring Training vacation, I flipped on the hotel TV to do a scan of the local morning shows. I stopped at KSAZ, Channel 10 in Phoenix, a station owned and operated by Fox TV...what they call an "O and O" in the biz. They were doing a "live shot" from the Superstition Freeway at McClintock Road, about a mile from our hotel. It was the sort of story most newsrooms get their teeth into...a horrible death in a bizarre wreck that bottles up traffic for tens of thousands of commuters. Their young reporter was actually doing a pretty good job of limiting the sensational aspects of the story, and getting good information out. They followed the story and advanced it every single time they came back to it.

I "scanned the band" to see what the other stations were doing for coverage, but after a half-hour of coffee-sipping and channel-scanning, decided Channel 10 was doing the best job. Over the course of the week, I did limited channel-flipping and mainly watched Channel 10 in the morning. They do a live FIVE-HOUR morning show from 5 to 10 AM, which is pretty much unheard of, and unlike the huge majority of TV news operations, they put a HUGE amount of resources into their morning show, with five "named" personalities who all are seen in every quarter-hour. They start each half-hour with a news guy and the "top ten stories on Channel 10 this morning". Unlike the network's "Fox and Friends" morning show, there is not a whiff of political slant in their reporting, their story selection, or their presentation.

The morning show really moves. They do plenty of "light" features, like best bargains in grocery shopping and the latest fashions for the coming summer season, but you never feel you're being cheated out of a news story for the "fluff stuff". Unlike the mid-west, where weather is a prime factor in any TV newscast or show, it's a much smaller part of the Channel 10 show, and rightly so. The weather guy is also one of the two main hosts of the show, and he steps off one set and to another to do a brief weather update. After all, how much should you expand on "sunny and mid-80's for the next week"? The entire presentation was, as far as I'm concerned, top-notch and one of the very best morning shows I've ever seen on TV. And I've lived in L-A and have seen some good morning TV.

This morning, back at home as we were starting our work day, we had the usual local morning TV show on. Just as I was thinking it, my wife (who spent 15 years as an on-camera TV reporter) said "boy, this morning show really doesn't have much energy, does it?". True dat. Even the local TV station that promotes its morning news show as being "fun" doesn't have half the energy the Channel 10 show did. Staid anchors, who think "fun" is doing a trivia bit once a half-hour or tossing in a story about Britney Spears' coming concert tour. By contrast, there isn't much life to be found here. Each co-anchor takes a turn reading the news stories, a long weather segment, a quick feature, and repeat. Formulaic and predictable.

I know, I know....I'm comparing the 5th largest TV market in the US with the 84th...and local ad revenue in Madison would never support a five-person morning show. But what's obvious is something I learned very early in my broadcasting career....enthusiasm makes the difference. The folks doing the Channel 10 morning show in Phoenix have me believing that they really like what they're doing, and they're having fun doing it. I don't get that impression around here.

Spring Training, Take One

My wife and I agreed our past week was the best vacation ever. We'd talked about going to Spring Training since we started "dating", and this year we finally pulled the trigger. The experience was everything we'd hoped for, and more.

Our flights out (Madison-Denver-Phoenix) were ALL on time. I don't need to post about the TSA. The stupid ritual of removing the shoes, etc. etc. is a tired topic. My titanium hip sets off the metal detector every time, so I'm always accorded the pleasure of an individual pat-down and wanding every time I fly. We were cramped in a Canadair CRJ-200 from Madison to Denver, but the flight from Denver to Phoenix was on an Airbus A-320 (yes, the same type of aircraft Captain Sullenberger "landed" on the Hudson River) which was much more comfortable. Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, which the announcements every 90 seconds or so reminded us "it's the FRIENDLIEST airport in the world!!!", was easy to navigate, and we hopped onto the shuttle bus to the rental car facility. In Phoenix, they've just completed a new rental car facility, which is about a mile from the terminals, but is state-of-the-art and check-in took about 5 minutes and we were off and running in a new Chrysler 300 Touring Edition. Nice car.

We headed east down I-10 to the Superstition Freeway (US 60), a gorgeous 12-lane strip of concrete that quickly whisked us to Country Club Road, where we exited and made one turn into the hotel parking lot. It was 83 degrees at 4 PM and we checked in and hit the pool. After some swimming and hot-tubbing, we had dinner at a local steakhouse/rib joint in Mesa and had a nightcap at the hotel bar.

During the course of the next week, we took in ball games at parks all over the Phoenix area, including several at the Cubs' home at HoHoKam Park, where we discovered that the late Harry Caray and every other Cubs fan pronounces it incorrectly, with that flat, broad midwest "A" sound....all the natives pronounce it "ho-ho-com", not "ho-ho-kam". We took in a game at Phoenix Municipal Stadium (Brewers - A's) and the crowning glory was Sunday's game at Camelback Ranch in Glendale. It was the first-ever ball game at the brand-new luxurious facility (White Sox and Dodgers new home)...and the two played the first game there, with the Dodgers as "home" team. Walking from the parking lot to the stadium, we noticed the Hi-Def TV orgination for the game was being done from the Token Creek Productions Hi-Def truck....a touch of home! Once the politicians stopped patting themselves on the back during the pre-game portion, American Idol Jordin Sparks (a local girl, from Glendale) sang the National Anthem and a squadron of F-16's from nearby Luke AFB flew over. Big show. The ball park was ready...my wife Toni's old family friend, Roger Bosshard, the Sox groundkeeper, was in charge of the turf at Camelback Ranch, and since we had Row 1 seats in Section 5, he saw Toni and came over and chatted with her for a bit.

Every person we encountered in the Phoenix/Mesa/Tempe area was friendly. Even the guys hawking the beer and soft drinks in the stands at the ball park thanked you for your purchase and said "thanks for coming and enjoy the game". The hotel staff were falling over themselves to attend to our every need and want. Restaurant staff said "thanks for coming and we hope you're enjoying yourself here". (It's pretty obvious you're not a local when you have pasty white skin, which quickly "browns up" in the hot desert sun.)

At the games, because the stadiums are so much smaller than the big-league MLB parks, you're much closer to the players and the action. The veteran players, who aren't obsessed with making a spot on the roster, joke with the fans and sign tons of autographs for the kids. It's a great experience.

Monday morning we checked out of the hotel, took the rental car back to the new facility at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, and noted that navigation on I-10 was EXTREMELY easy, as the exit for rental cars was clearly marked and the route was simple to follow. We were outta there in a flash, and boarded the shuttle to the airport, and underwent the security check again. Our route back was Phoenix-Chicago-Madison, the flight to Chicago was aboard another Airbus A-320 - which took off just a few minutes late and got us to Chicago only 4 minutes late. The O'Hare experience is....well, enough to make you appreciate your vacation. We came in on one concourse (A) and had to board the next flight in the F concourse...which is about three-quarters of a mile away in a different building. We walked briskly with only 48 minutes between connections, and then arrived at gate F-1-A in time to WAIT for an hour and a half for a delayed flight. We walked down the stairs and onto the tarmac, and they finally herded us onto the small plane (another Canadair CRJ-200) and locked us in the thing for FORTY MINUTES without moving. First we had to wait forever for the de-icing truck to douse the plane, and then we had to wait an eternity for the push-back crew to shove the plane out of the commuter-flight area and onto the taxiway. We were second for takeoff and landed in Madison about 95 minutes behind schedule.

It's tough to go from a week of 85 and sunny to clear and 4 this morning...but, that's the kind of thing that makes a vacation, a vacation. My summation: if you've ever thought about taking in a few spring training games, choose the Cactus League, and head to Arizona rather than Florida. The longest trip between ball parks from the west end of Phoenix (Camelback Ranch) to the east end of the Valley of the Sun (HoHoKam in Mesa) is about 35 minutes, and you'll find friendly people who appreciate your business. The games are fun, the players are friendly, the ball parks are great, and all you have to deal with is the usual negatives associated with air travel.