Stop the presses!

Apparently, the MSM is not dead yet. The Toledo Blade in Ohio has been performing yoman-like work in digging into the "Coingate" scandal. The story has now officially jumped the shark.

COLUMBUS — Gov. Bob Taft’s office learned seven months ago — not this week — that the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation had lost $225 million in a high-risk investment.

In an Oct. 26, 2004, e-mail to Taft aide James Samuel, the bureau’s administrator-CEO, James Conrad, wrote that the "entire value" of the portfolio managed by MDL Capital Management was down about $225 million.

Mr. Conrad also alerted the governor’s office that the bureau had rejected MDL’s request for another $25 million and the firm was in danger of collapsing, which he said would be "likely to make national news."

No shit, Sherlock!

The Republican leadership in the state is in deep doo-doo, and they know it. What's even better is that this story has ties to Dubya as Mr. Noe, the numismatic collector who "lost" (ahem) $13M (I mean really, the coins were "lost in the mail"? How gullible do they think we are?) was one of Dubya's top fund-raisers in Ohio. But now it seems that the $13M is small potatos as contrasted with the most recent revelations that $215M of the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation fund had been shifted from a "long-bond" fund to what effectively amounted to a hedge fund and that that hedge fund had subsequently lost all of its value.

Better still is that it is now known that there was a loss reflected against the initial $100M investment at the time that the additional $125M was added! Yikes!

This story is just oozing with wide-spread corruption and cover-up, and now the Republican candidates for Governor are trying to a) distance themselves and b) prove that they are the more aggressive in pursuing investigation and remedies. The fact is that they are all at least tangientally tainted since Mr. Noe was a large contributor to each of their respective campaigns.

You just have to follow this story as it unfolds. It gets better and more tangled by the day.

However, the important point in all of this is that the Toledo Blade is doing its job, and admirably at that, and fighting against a lopsidedly Republican-controlled state in the process. Without the Toledo Blade breaking and continuing to dig into this story, Ohioans would have no clue that there was a problem at all because the Republicans were doing everything in their power to cover it up.