The latest in-your-face behavior involves a public exhibition of lobbyists tucking money into the Republican Party’s garter belt, in ways that are clearly obscene, but may fall just short of meeting the public standards definition of obscenity:

Campaign finance experts said the two main Republican campaign committees are breaking new ground — and treading close to the legal line — in soliciting corporate contributions to help throw an election night party.

The lobbying and law firm Akin Gump, together with the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, are circulating the solicitation, asking between $2,500 and $10,000 for levels of sponsorship of the event at the posh rooftop bar at the W Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The event seeks “underwriters” rather than contributors, and the solicitation reads at the bottom: “This is not a fundraising event. This reception is being held in compliance with applicable federal ethics rules.”

That’s all it takes. You can go out and raise money to finance a clearly political event. All you have to do is make sure that you
a) formally label your donors something else
b) self-certify that what you’re doing is not fundraising, that everything is perfectly legal and ethical.

Not everyone is impressed, of course:

Meredith McGehee, the Policy Director at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan group that favors finance regulation and is chaired by John McCain‘s campaign lawyer, said she’s never seen an invitation to an event that listed both party committees and corporations as hosts.
[...]
“Because of the soft money limits and because there are party committees involved, parties should have an abundance of caution in ensuring they comply with the law, and they seem to have found a clever lawyer who figured out this is permissible because it’s not a fundraiser,” said McGehee. “It’s a little too cute by half.”

Another prominent campaign finance lawyer unconnected to the event asked not to be quoted by name, but emailed: “The NRSC and NRCC are raising money to pay for this event. That sounds like contributions to me and soft money is illegal.”

But there aren’t going to be any consequences to the Republican Party from these people being unimpressed. McGehee herself concedes the point:

But McGehee said the Federal Elections Commission would be unlikely to attempt to enforce anything in this gray area, and this may simply be a pioneering new loophole in the Swiss cheese-like regulatory regime.

So why should the Republican Party care? It may look like a duck, and it may waddle and it may quack. As long as there are not going to be any proceedings to see if it meets the legal definition of a duck, it ain’t no duck at all.

(2)
Here’s how flagrant the GOP’s political prostitution has become. They have no problem putting stuff like this in writing:

With the majority in the balance, donors can pay between $10,000 and $2,500 for benefits beginning with “prominent signage” and special “VIP” access.

Also available are “other benefits as determined by underwriter’s needs.”

Put up the money, guys. And be sure to let us know what you need, okay?

(3)
The NSRC, meanwhile, is trying to hide behind the skirts of this fiction: that it’s really not their event at all, they are just one of a large number of co-hosts.

And NRSC Communications Director Brian Walsh defended the committee’s role.

“The NRSC is not soliciting funds or in any way raising money for this event. We’ve simply paid our allocable share to co-host an election night event and celebrate what we hope to be a great night for Republicans,” he said.

And the NRSC isn’t even one of the big-bucks co-hosts. They’re just a $5,000-level co-host.

All $5,000-level co-hosts are not equal, though. Some are co-hosts with benefits. The “underwriting” solicitation somehow gives marquee billing to a lousy $5,000 co-host.

(In a move that Sarah Palin is no doubt kicking herself for not having come up with in her own time of need, Ensign “has registered his legal defense fund as a 527 political organization”, which makes contributions tax-exempt. So now, all of us are partners in Ensign’s legal defense. Of his apparently illegal actions. In fact, Ensign’s legal defense fund is contributing — in its own humble way — to increasing the deficit. Which Ensign, like all other Republicans in Congress, cares passionately about. Or maybe I shouldn’t use the word passionately in the context of a story about the consequences of his uncontrollable libido?)

Here’s part of what Ensign wrote in his fund-raising appeal (admittedly, the best part):

As I am sure you are aware, I admitted last year to making the worst mistake of my life.

In addition to causing great pain to my family, friends, and supporters, that mistake has also resulted in a difficult legal battle.

I have taken responsibility for my actions and worked hard to become a better husband, father, friend, and senator, but I have been accused of doing things I absolutely did not do.

No, John, the adultery you admitted to last year wasn’t the worst mistake of your life. After all, that’s not what the FBI is investigating you for, is it?

For example, all of the following are much bigger mistakes: having your parents pay hush money to your ex-mistress and her husband; displaying a reckless disregard for the law by actively pimping for the cuckolded husband’s illegal lobbying activities; deciding to brazen it out instead of quietly resigning when it was clear that you had been caught fair-and-square breaking the law.

But here’s Jon’s response to the above passage from John’s fund-raising letter:

John Ensign is a man of many talents, not the least of which are his skill at twisting the truth and of putting on a false front to the world. (What is it about people with exactly this combination of personality defects that convinces them early in life that they are cut out to be politicians?)

Nevada’s junior senator has been morally superior in public while morally inferior in private, and he created a web of deceit that ensnared friends and supporters now being punished for his indiscretions. Facing an ethics probe and a federal investigation, Ensign has tried to make his scandal about a moment of human weakness (that lasted for months) and nothing more.

But it has always been about much more…
[...]
Where to begin?

That mistake — this is just about sex! — did not lead to a “difficult legal battle.” Ensign is in legal jeopardy not because he slept with his wife’s best friend and his best friend’s wife — that never sounds less grotesque, does it? — but because of how he tried to cover it up, pay off the couple through Mom and Dad and then try to hush up the cuckolded husband by importuning people he regulates to hire him.

The vast majority of people, I think, would forgive Ensign for weakness of the flesh — the social conservative base he pandered to, notwithstanding. But his manipulation of the lives of Cindy and Doug Hampton and his shameful attempt to play the victim now have outraged many who might have been forgiving.

As for “being accused of things I absolutely did not do,” I ask: Really? Do tell. All we’ve heard is “no comment” for more than a year. What is there in the past that should induce us to believe him?

As CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan points out, it seems indisputable that Ensign did all of the following:

Senator Ensign had an extended affair with a campaign staffer, who happened to be married to his chief of staff Doug Hampton, fired them both, and had his parents pay them off without properly reporting it to the Federal Election Commission. He then conspired to help Mr. Hampton to set up a lobbying business to lobby his own office, in violation of federal law.

All of that would have to filed under “Accused of doing and actually did”.

The one thing that Ensign absolutely did not do in the course of his extended and ongoing sexual-shenanigans-and-cover-up scandal is tell the truth about actively aiding and abetting Doug Hampton’s career as an illegal lobbyist.

And last I checked, no one has actually accused Ensign of telling the truth about that.

As 2012 approaches, he has raised as much money as all of his potential rivals combined and sits atop the polls for the Republican presidential nomination.

If Gingrich, who appears to have been not distinguishably different from a repulsive creep for most of his adult life, was serious about his presidential ambitions, he should have first made his peace with his second wife, Marianne.

That’s the one whom he had already proposed to before he was divorced from his first wife. The one to whom he confessed, in 1999, soon after Marianne had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, that he was having an affair with a woman who was in Marianne’s apartment “eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed.” Confessed to the affair, said it was going to continue, and asked Marianne to “tolerate” it.

(His first wife, Jackie was the one whom he asked for a divorce while she was in the hospital recuperating from cancer surgery. Jackie, by the way, was his former high school geometry teacher, and he married her when he was 19 and she was 26, but let’s not go there.)

In case, you were wondering, yes, this is the very same Newt Gingrich who liked to go around piously making statements like:

The Democratic Party has been the active instrument of breaking down traditional marriage.

But back to Marianne. Yes, Newt really should have made his peace with her before he got too heavily invested in his 2012 presidential bid. “Back in the 1990s, she told a reporter she could end her husband’s career with a single interview.” And she now seems to have given that interview. To Esquire, who published it this morning.

It’s a long, long article. Some quick excerpts from page 1:

She was married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years, all through his spectacular rise and fall … This is the first time she’s talked about what happened, and she has a case of the nerves but also an air of liberation about her. … You might be inclined to think of what she says as the lament of an abandoned wife, but that would be a mistake. There is shockingly little bitterness in her, and she often speaks with great kindness of her former husband.
[...]
She says she should have seen the red flags. “He asked me to marry him way too early. And he wasn’t divorced yet. I should have known there was a problem.”

Within weeks or months?

“Within weeks.”
[...]
And he did the same thing to her eighteen years later, with Callista Bisek, the young congressional aide who became his third wife. “I know. I asked him. He’d already asked her to marry him before he asked me for a divorce. Before he even asked.”

He told you that?

“Yeah, he wanted to — “

And here’s what most people are going to regard as the juicy part, the part that Newt will be dodging questions about for a good long while (all the way at the end, on page 8):

But Marianne was having problems of her own. After going to the doctor for a mysterious tingling in her hand, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Early in May, she went out to Ohio for her mother’s birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn’t return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.

“About what?”

He wanted to talk in person, he said.

“I said, ‘No, we need to talk now.’ ”

He went quiet.

“There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”

She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ” ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ ”

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”

“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Like I said once before: Chewt, ya, Newt!

Ten years ago, the Big Branch Refuse Impoundment, a giant coal-waste reservoir owned by Massey in Inez, Kentucky, sprung a leak that flooded nearby waterways with so much sludge that it was declared the largest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Southeastern United States — bigger, in fact, than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

He quotes from a five-year old investigative report by the Washington Monthly:

On Oct. 11, 2000, in Inez, Ky., a town of 500 in the heart of the state’s coal fields, a coal-waste reservoir the size of 306 Olympic-size swimming pools sprang a leak. Within six hours, 300 million gallons of thick sludge had flooded out of the Big Branch Refuse Impoundment, a hilltop facility owned by Martin County Coal, and into two tributaries of the Big Sandy River, which courses along the Kentucky-West Virginia border before emptying into the Ohio River.

The gooey mixture of black water and coal tailings traveled downstream through Coldwater and Wolf creeks, and later through the river’s main stem, Tug Fork. Ten days later, an inky plume appeared in the Ohio River. On its 75-mile path of destruction, the sludge obliterated wildlife, killed 1.6 million fish, ransacked property, washed away roads and bridges, and contaminated the water systems of 27,623 people. Incredibly, no lives were lost. Even so, the EPA declared the spill the largest environmental catastrophe in the history of the southeastern United States. In fact, the Inez disaster was almost 30 times larger than the infamous Exxon Valdez tanker spill, which dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

The company that owned the waste impoundment, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, the fourth largest coal producer in America, claimed that the flood was caused by an “act of God.” Jack Spadaro, superintendent of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, a training facility for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) based in Beckley, W. Va., was part of the team assembled by MSHA to investigate. Working with eight colleagues from MSHA, an arm of the Department of Labor that regulates the coal industry, Spadaro began interviewing engineers, miners, and mine company officials to determine what had caused the impoundment to break. The investigation, which began on the eve of the 2000 presidential election, had within a month begun to collect evidence that Spadaro’s team believed could prove negligence on the part of Martin County Coal.

So what happened? Well, what do you think? Very early in the investigation, it became the time of Bush. And that was pretty much the end of the investigation. Back to Steve Benen:

The evidence was never published — the Bush administration, the beneficiary of generous support from Massey CEO Don Blankenship, intervened to quash the investigation.

And, poof, just like that, Massey Energy walked away from what Bush’s own EPA had declared to be “the largest environmental catastrophe in the history of the southeastern United States.” Just walked away from it, without cost or consequence.

Can you imagine Exxon being able to quietly buy its way out of the Exxon Valdez disaster? (And who was president at the time? Daddy-Bush. So toppling Saddam Hussein wasn’t the only time Georgie Porgie showed us that he could pull off what his Daddy couldn’t.)

Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if the 25 people who died in the Upper Big Branch mine near Whitesville, West Virginia on Monday would still be alive if George Bush hadn’t been so eager to sell his political virtue, if Don Blankenship had learned ten years ago that corporate negligence can carry a hefty price tag?

Is it too late for Blankenship to be taught this lesson?

True love is so touching, especially in Congress:

Just hours after federal agents charged banker Allen Stanford with fleecing investors of $7 billion, the disgraced financier received a message from one of Congress’ most powerful members, Pete Sessions.

“I love you and believe in you,” said the e-mail sent on Feb. 17. “If you want my ear/voice — e-mail,” it said, signed “Pete.”

The message from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee represents one of the many ties between members of Congress and the indicted banker that have caught the attention of federal agents.

The Justice Department is investigating millions of dollars Allen Stanford and his staff contributed to lawmakers over the past decade to determine if the banker received special favors from politicians while building his spectacular offshore bank in Antigua, McClatchy Newspapers has learned.

Agents are examining campaign dollars, as well as lavish Caribbean trips funded by Stanford for politicians and their spouses, feting them with lobster dinners and caviar.
[...]
Sessions, 54, a longtime House member from Dallas who met with Stanford during two trips to the Caribbean, did not respond to interview requests.

Supporters say the lawmaker, who received $44,375 from Stanford and his staff, was not assigned to any of the committees with oversight over Stanford’s bank and brokerages.

His press secretary, Emily Davis, said she was unable to comment on the e-mail sent at 11:31 a.m. on the day Stanford was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “I haven’t seen it, so I can’t verify its authenticity at this time,” she said.

The McClatchy story also underlines this aspect of Stanford’s campaign contributions:

The money Stanford gave Sessions and other lawmakers was stolen from his clients while he carried out what prosecutors now say was one of the nation’s largest Ponzi schemes.

Perhaps that will allow the court-appointed receiver who’s trying to recover hundreds of millions of dollars of Stanford assets for defrauded investors to clawback the campaign contributions?

Of course, under the circumstances, shouldn’t any sensible politician with a shred of conscience just voluntarily hand the money over to the receiver? That’s not what Pete Sessions did, though:

Nineteen lawmakers gave back a total of $87,800 to the court-appointed receiver as of August. Others, including Meeks, Sessions, Sandlin, Sweeney and Crane, said they turned some of the money over to charities.

And did what with the rest? Just keep it?

Franklin D. Raines used to be the chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae. Together with chief financial officer Tim Howard, he resigned in December 2004 after widespread “accounting irregularities were uncovered at the company”.

Raines had presided over not just the company, but also the cooking of its books:

Government inquiries found that between 1998 and 2004, senior executives at Fannie manipulated its results to hit earnings targets and generate $115 million in bonus compensation. Fannie had to restate its financial results by $6.3 billion.

When Raines resigned, the spin he tried to put on what he called his “early retirement” was that he had done the honorable thing, and accepted responsibility for the boondoggle:

“By my early retirement, I have held myself accountable,” Mr Raines said in a statement.

The implication was that this was sufficient punishment, but the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), Fannie Mae’s regulator, wasn’t buying:

Almost two years later, in 2006, Fannie’s regulator concluded an investigation of the accounting with a scathing report. “The conduct of Mr. Raines, chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard, and other members of the inner circle of senior executives at Fannie Mae was inconsistent with the values of responsibility, accountability, and integrity,” it said.

That year, the government sued Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Leanne Spencer, Fannie’s former controller, seeking $100 million in fines and $115 million in restitution from bonuses the government contended were not earned.

Raines’ share of the $115 million bonus over-payment was a cool $90 million.

The resolution of the lawsuit fell far short of anything resembling justice. The NYT‘s Morgenson says: “Without admitting wrongdoing, Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer paid $31.4 million in 2008 to settle the litigation.” That $31.4 million, however, was arrived at by valuing stock options Raines and Howard surrendered under the settlement at the $20.8 million they were worth at the time they were issued, instead of their almost negligible value at the time of the settlement, and by including $2.75 million that was actually paid by Fannie Mae’s insurance company:

The regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, said Raines had agreed to forgo stock, cash and other benefits worth $24.7 million in exchange for dismissing the charges against him. However, the regulator’s estimate wasn’t the only way of looking at the value of the settlement.

The agreement includes stock options worth $15.6 million at the time they were issued; those options are currently under water. They entitled Raines to buy shares at prices of $77.10 and higher. Fannie Mae’s shares are currently trading at about $29, so the options Raines is surrendering would not produce any benefit to him unless the share price rose dramatically, according to sources familiar with the settlement who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as criticizing the regulator.

OFHEO said Raines’s settlement also includes the payment of $2 million to the federal government. That sum would be covered by a Fannie Mae insurance policy, the sources said.

The settlement also includes proceeds from the sale of stock worth $1.8 million, to be donated to programs aimed at assisting financially strapped homeowners. Those are shares Raines had been fighting in court to obtain from Fannie Mae.

He also agreed to part with $5.3 million in other unspecified benefits, OFHEO said.

Raines was one of three former Fannie Mae executives to settle.

Former chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard agreed to a settlement OFHEO valued at $6.4 million — $5.2 million in stock options — and former controller Leanne G. Spencer agreed to pay $275,000.

Howard’s cash payment of $750,000 is also being covered by a Fannie Mae insurance policy, and his options are similarly under water, one source said.

So if you treat the stock options surrendered by Raines and Howard as worthless, and leave out the cash paid out under Fannie Mae insurance policies, here’s how the math works out. Raines, Howard and Spencer pocketed $115 million in fraudulent bonuses. Raines’ paid back $7.1 million (leaving him with a net profit from the fraud of about $83 million). Howard disgorged only $450,000, and Spencer spit back $275,000. Between the three of them, they paid back less than $8 million, so they walked away with an astounding $107 million as the net profit from their fraud.

That’s quite a settlement the government put together. Wonder if anyone in the Obama administration would consider investigating how and why we ended up with such a paltry settlement?

(Morgenson’s NYT article misses the real crime. The focus of her piece is on the $6.3 million taxpayers have paid after the Fannie Mae takeover defending Raines, Howard and Spencer against stockholder lawsuits.)

By all accounts, it was an excellent evening. For the 75th anniversary of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC’s Historical Society — an independent, nonprofit organization — threw a lavish dinner for 950 at the National Building Museum.

Critics, though, might gawk at the spectacle of a commission that’s been criticized as too close to industry celebrating itself in a dinner paid for largely by firms that have business before it.

Earlier this year, fraud investigator Harry Markopolos called the SEC “both a captive regulator and a failed regulator” for its failure to detect fraud by Bernard Madoff, who had been in the close orbit of the SEC before being unmasked as possibly the most corrupt money manager of all time.

But none of that, apparently, was on the minds of the industry attendees and SEC staffers who began their meal Thursday night with fennel-spiced prawns and five-citrus salad and heard tributes to current and past SEC chairmen and a speech by the current top regulator, Mary Schapiro.
[...]
A giant screen projected images of SEC luminaries over the diners, who savored main course selections that included port wine and orange-glazed rock Cornish game hen. Each attendee was given a hardcover, elaborately produced book commemorating the occasion with photos from the commission’s history, including Joseph P. Kennedy giving a press conference in 1934 and the all-female 1939 SEC bowling league.

The dinner was financed by donors to the Historical Society who purchased tables ranging in price from $3,500 to $7,500 and placed notices in the bound book congratulating the commission on its achievements. (“Each new day presents an opportunity to celebrate,” read the ad from Fidelity Investments. “A blue ribbon achievement? It certainly is!” gushed a full-page ad by the accounting firm Ernst & Young.)
[...]
More than 70 tables were sold for the event, largely to law and lobbying firms that do business with the SEC. Among the table sponsors were Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency that came under criticism for failing to scrutinize the subprime mortgage market before it collapsed…

When questioned, the SEC defended itself as follows:

The event was organized by the nonprofit SEC Historical Society, a 501(c)(3) organization which is not in any way affiliated with the SEC. The SEC staff who attended the event all paid their own way.

The SEC’s elastic definition of paying your own way might explain a lot about that agency’s troubled performance:

Tickets cost $250 per person but $50 for SEC staffers or government employees.

Too bad all those people who accepted free tickets to ballgames from Jack Abramoff didn’t think of simply paying him $5 a ticket. That would have got everyone off the hook pretty fast, right?

Nevada Sen. John Ensign has acknowledged that his parents paid his mistress and her family $96,000 in April 2008, according to a statement made by his attorney moments ago.

“After the Senator told his parents about the affair, his parents decided to make the gifts out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time,” said Paul Coggins, counsel to Ensign.

Look for it to get even more uncomfortable today. That Washington Post story didn’t realize it was omitting a juicy, relevant detail:

In April 2008, Senator John Ensign’s parents each made gifts to Doug Hampton, Cindy Hampton, and two of their children in the form of a check totaling $96,000.

Why that odd amount of $96,000, you might ask. And if you did, here’s what you might come up with:

$96,000 is a lot of money. Interestingly, it is precisely the amount you can give as a gift without having to report it to the IRS, multiplied by eight: one gift of $12,000 from each parent to Ensign’s lover, her husband, and two of their children. I wonder what the IRS will make of that? I certainly hope that neither of the parents has made use of their children’s money, or done anything else to suggest that this was all one big gift split up to avoid paying gift tax, or (more likely) having to report the gift. It’s bad enough asking your parents to cough up $96,000 to cover up your indiscretions; asking them to violate the tax code and risk prison is a whole lot worse.

Now, here’s the thing. The Hamptons actually have 3 children, but the eldest is apparently 19. So why weren’t all three children included in the payoff gift? After all, the concern of Ensign’s parents “for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time” presumably doesn’t extend just to 80% of the Hampton family.

The most sensible working hypothesis would seem to be that one child was excluded because a 19-year-old would control their own money. If you’re trying to give Doug and Cindy Hampton a large sum of money through Ensign’s parents that will not have to be reported to the IRS, the best you can do is make two gifts of $12,000 each to each of the Hamptons and their two minor children.

Of course, this awkward arrangement has the drawback of making it rather transparent that this is just a tax dodge. And, as Hilzoy says, if Doug and Cindy Hampton have already “made use of their children’s money”, then things could get a little more uncomfortable for everyone concerned.

Hasn’t Madoff got exactly the outcomes he began to fervently hope for as soon as it became clear last December that the game was up?

Humor me, and assume that when Madoff realized he couldn’t keep up the lie any more, before he staged that brilliant confess-to-my-sons-and-have-them-turn-me-in stratagem, he first sat down and wrote out a script for how he’d love to see events play out. Now ask yourself if that script could have contemplated much more than exactly what has come to pass?

First, the billions he stole remain thoroughly unfound.

I’m tired of reading media reports that make it sound like Madoff somehow managed to spend all the billions he stole:

The statements sent to investors showing their accounts were worth as much as $65 billion were fiction.

The investigation has found that in reality Madoff never made any investments, instead using the money from new investors to pay returns to existing clients _ and to finance a lavish lifestyle for his family.

That’s from yesterday’s Huffington Post, and the Huffington Post should really know better, especially at this stage in the Madoff story.

Madoff’s net take — what he took in from investors, minus what he paid to investors who cashed out, minus the modest 9% annual return he paid out to those investors who were not reinvesting that return — obviously isn’t $65 billion, but equally obviously it must be in the tens of billions. That’s a hell of a lot of money to just piss away, even if you were determinedly pissing it away for years. And there’s no evidence at all that the Madoff family was.

So, “lavish lifestyle” is all very well. But all the tens of billions Madoff stole didn’t go into conspicuous consumption. He stole billions more than he spent. And not only does nobody know where the hell any of that money is, nobody seems to even be asking.

Madoff may now be in prison for the rest of his life. But once the gig was going to be up anyway, there was no evading that. And it looks very much like the Madoff family has got away with billions that are safely stashed away nobody-will-ever-know-where.

Second, everyone else in Madoff’s family gets away scot-free. Yes, they did have to part with a few paltry millions in real estate and other assets. But not one of them faces charges, or even the prospect of charges. And somehow I suspect that the loss of those millions doesn’t hurt too deeply.

Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen, who suggested and supervised waterboarding at secret prisons around the world … according to their associates, boasted of being paid $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the technique on top al Qaeda suspects.

It’s bad enough that they made money from torture. But these lowlifes liked to boast about it!

One former military psychologist tells ABC News that Mitchell & Jessen charged the CIA roughly $500,000 a year for their services. It was this source’s understanding that the money was largely tax-free and did not include expenses, which the agency also paid for.

How the eff does that even work? The money was presumably paid to Mitchell & Jessen Associates, the consulting company Mitchell and Jessen created for purposes of aiding, abetting and presiding over torture. No-bid contracts weren’t enough of an abuse of power, so the Bush administration decided it was empowered to award tax-free contracts? (Or maybe they hired Mitchell & Jessen Associates as a subcontractor through the UN or the IMF?)

In any case, it looks like Mitchell & Jessen Associates hit the trifecta of government contracting: tax-free no-bid cost-plus contracts. Even Halliburton never had it so good.