† Imported From Detroit: Around 4 a.m, Storm Connors and his wife, Dee were awakened by the sound of a smoke alarm. They found their garage aflame and immediately called 9-1-1, reports WSFB-TV (Channel 3, Hartford, CT) reports. While investigators with the state fire marshal's office and the couple's insurance company are still looking into the cause of the fire, they have not ruled out that the fire may have been sparked by the couple's new Chevy Volt electric hybrid.

† Surgeon Bilks Medicare With Bogus Surgeries: Portland, OR, neurosurgeon Vishal James Makker, who was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article about Medicare fraud, is under investigation by the Oregon Medical Board for performing multiple spinal fusions on the same patients. His operating privileges at Providence Portland Medical Center have also been revoked.

† Have You Seen The Price Of Arugula Lately?: Produce has become so costly that a gang concocted an elaborate scheme to steal truckloads of vegetables and frozen meat worth about $300K, The New York Times reports:

Transportation company executives and a law enforcement official said the criminals appeared to have set up a bogus trucking company with the intention of stealing loads of produce and other goods.

The company, based in Miami, was called E&A Transport Express, according to Master Cpl. David M. Vincent of the Florida Highway Patrol’s cargo theft task force. The company registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in late February, according to the agency’s online database. That was right around the time produce prices were soaring.

“They were just sitting and waiting, watching the produce because they knew it was climbing,” said Clifford Holland, the owner of the transportation brokerage firm Old North State, which was a victim of the gang. “It was like a snake in the grass and they struck.” …

The thieves apparently began watching Web sites where brokers posted notices trying to connect trucking companies with loads they need carried.

In late March, they contacted Allen Lund. The broker carried out a standard series of checks, including verifying the company’s federal registration and its insurance coverage. Then it assigned the company to pick up a load of tomatoes from a shipper in Miami on Monday, March 28.

Over the next four days, working through Lund and three other freight brokers, E&A Transport picked up four more loads of tomatoes, a load of cucumbers and a load of frozen meat from shippers across Florida, including in the Miami area, Palmetto and Punta Gorda.

At each pick-up, a driver working for E&A showed up at the wheel of a tractor with a refrigerated trailer. The shippers loaded the pallets of tomatoes or the other goods into the trucks and the driver drove off. None of the loads got to their destinations.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: It’s not uncommon for a dog to poop in a neighbor’s yard. But Portland resident Don Derfler says he saw – and took photos of - the postman do his business at the house across the street, KATU.com reports:

The pictures show the postal worker squatting near some bushes and pulling his pants up. Derfler even photographed what was left behind.

“We trust people like the postal service and meter readers and people of that nature,” said Derfler. “To come on to our property and to defecate – it’s just wrong.” …

Within two blocks from where the incident occurred, there is a public park with porta potties and a store with a public bathroom. It is not known why he didn’t go there.

[Hat Tip: OpinionJournal]

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, The TSA Emperor Wears No Clothes: Part II): Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations, is renewing his opposition to the TSA’s gape-or-grope policy after the outcry over a six-year-old girl being subjected to an enhanced pat-down, The Washington Post reports:

The incident, recorded and posted on YouTube by the girl’s parents, prompted critics to label it as another example of TSA’s aggressive security tactics. …

But TSA said Wednesday that the unidentified female officer followed proper current screening procedures. …

In a letter sent Wednesday to TSA Administrator John S. Pistole, Chaffetz asked the agency for an explanation of the incident, saying it violated TSA policy against conducting pat-downs of children younger than 13.

No such policy exists, according to TSA spokesman Nick Kimball.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Eat My Shorts: Goldman Sachs E-Mails): Based on its two-year inquiry into whether Goldman Sachs tricked clients into buying collateralized debt obligations tied to sub-prime mortgages, the bipartisan House Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations concludes that the Wall Street firm used “abusive” sales practices and was riddled with conflicts of interest. Discussing the 640-page report - which includes  2,800 footnotes and thousands of internal documents from Wall Street firms - Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the panel, wants federal prosecutors to consider perjury charges against Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who testified under oath before Congress that his firm did not short the mortgage market even as the firm was selling mortgage-backed securities to clients, The Washington Post reports:

“In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled the Congress,” Levin said at a press briefing yesterday where he and Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, discussed the 640-page report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Much of the blame for the 2008 market collapse belongs to banks that earned billions of dollars in profits creating and selling financial products that imploded along with the housing market, according to the report. The Levin-Coburn panel levied its harshest criticism at investment banks, in particular accusing Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank AG of peddling collateralized debt obligations backed by risky loans that the banks’ own traders believed were likely to lose value. …

The panel’s report also examined the role of credit-rating firms [Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s] in the meltdown, lax oversight by Washington regulators and the drop in lending standards that fueled the mortgage bubble and ultimately caused hundreds of bank failures.

The subcommittee’s findings show “without a doubt the lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions who embraced known conflicts of interest to accomplish wealth for themselves, not caring about the outcome for their customers,” said Coburn. “When that happens, no country can survive and neither can their financial institutions.” …

The Senate report comes less than a year after Goldman Sachs paid $550 million to resolve SEC claims that it failed to disclose that hedge fund Paulson & Co was betting against, and influenced the selection of, CDOs the company was packaging and selling.

Goldman Sachs, in its settlement with the SEC, acknowledged that marketing materials for the 2007 CDO deal contained “incomplete information.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Does The U.S. Need An Election Monitor?): Final tallies from WI’s 72 counties show Justice David Prosser (R) defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg  (D) by 7,316 votes. Kloppenburg has until Wednesday of next week to request a recount, The Associated Press reports:

Turnout in the April 5 election shattered expectations. Unofficial returns from election night initially showed Kloppenburg had bested Prosser by 204 votes. Kloppenburg declared victory on April 6, but the next day the Waukesha County clerk announced she had forgotten to save 14,000 votes on her computer. Those new votes tipped the election to Prosser, giving him an unofficial 7,500 vote lead.

The clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, worked for Prosser as a member of the Assembly Republican caucus in the mid-1990s. Democrats have demanded she resign, and authorities launch an investigation into why she didn't immediately report the votes. State election officials are reviewing Nickolaus' operations, but she has refused to step down, saying she made an honest mistake.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Restorative Capital Punishment): The New York Times reports that the shortage of sodium thiopental “has caused disarray as states pursue a desperate and sometimes furtive search that might run afoul of federal drug laws”:

Recently released documents emerging from lawsuits in many states reveal the intense communication among prison systems to help one another obtain sodium thiopental, and what amounts to a legally questionable swap club among prisons to ensure that each has the drug when it is needed for an execution. …

Until the drug shortage, the routine for lethal injections had been a fairly settled process. States allowed little change for fear of deviating too far from practices that have been declared constitutional. The three-drug protocol widely used for a quarter-century involves sodium thiopental or a similar sedative, pentobarbital, to render the prisoner unconscious. A second drug, pancuronium bromide, brings on paralysis and a third, potassium chloride, stops the heart.

Supporters of the death penalty criticize the recent challenges as yet another delaying tactic in a long history of try-anything challenges. Kent S. Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the conflicts “seem to be accelerating the switch to pentobarbital,” which is more readily available, but also show vulnerabilities inherent in lethal injection. He recently called for a return to the gas chamber, using nontoxic gases that would displace oxygen in the chamber.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Life Imitates “A Law Abiding Citizen”): Taking the opposite approach of CA and IL, both of which release prisoners back into the community after they've served only a fraction of their sentences, VA banned parole 16 years ago. A new report by the Pew Center on the States finds that the state’s 28.3 percent recidivism rate for prisoners in the three years after their release in 2004 is significantly lower than the national average (43.3 percent) rate during the same period, The Washington Post reports:

The state did away with parole in 1995 after get-tough-on-crime initiatives by then-Gov. George Allen (R). Prisoners are required to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. By keeping prisoners behind bars longer, the effect is to “age them out of their crime-prone years,” said Brian Ostrom, a researcher for the National Center for State Courts who has extensively studied Virginia’s prison system.

Virginia’s released prisoners have been getting older. According to state statistics, more than half those released in the early 1990s were younger than 30, a group reincarcerated at the highest levels. By fiscal 2006, a third of those released were younger than 30, and the percentage of prisoners 40 to 49 who had been released tripled.

Another demographic shift: Female prisoners, who are less likely to return to prison than males, have made up a greater portion of those released in recent years. …

Despite successes, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) has said that the recidivism rate is still too high for his liking and that Virginia must do more to help offenders be successful upon release. “Reduction in recidivism means fewer victims and less prison costs,” he said in his State of the State address in January. “America is a nation of second chances and those leaving prison should have the opportunity to change.”

The Associated Press summarizes key findings from the Pew report:

[T]here was only marginal improvement in the nation's recidivism rate even as spending on corrections departments has increased to about $52 billion annually from around $30 billion a decade ago.

About 43 percent of prisoners who were let out in 2004 were sent back to prison by 2007, either for a new crime or violating the conditions of their release, the study found. That number was down from 45 percent during a similar period beginning in 1999. …

The Pew report found that of 33 states that reported data for both 1999 and 2004 releases, recidivism rates fell in 17 states and climbed in 15 states. One state reported no change. …

Wyoming and Oregon had the lowest overall recidivism rates for offenders released in 2004, with rates hovering below 25 percent. Minnesota had the highest - more than 61 percent - while Alaska, California, Illinois, Missouri and Vermont all topped 50 percent. …

The 41 states that provided data for 2004 could save a combined $635 million in one year if they can slash their recidivism rates by 10 percent, the study found. California, the home of the nation's largest prison system, could save $233 million in one year by slashing its recidivism rate by 10 percent.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?): An op-ed co-authored by former Sens. Bill Frist (R-TN) and Charles S. Robb (R-VA), Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, and Clay Johnson, White House director of personnel in the George W. Bush administration makes the case for passing the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011 (S.679), introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

For their first year, new administrations are without a full “team” of senior and policy officials to attend to our nation’s problems and opportunities; the burden on nominees to gather background data could not be more unnecessarily burdensome if designed to be so; the Senate and federal agencies are delayed in vetting nominees by the need to collect background data that has already been collected by the White House; and nominees for [1400] support positions and senior-most positions are subject to virtually the same level of scrutiny. …

The [Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act] calls for about 200 non-policymaking, non-senior positions to no longer require Senate confirmation. Because the Constitution gives the Senate the responsibility to advise and consent to presidential appointments, critics have argued that our plan represents a transfer of power from Congress to the executive branch. But this bill involves no such transfer: It does not diminish the institutional influence of the Senate, which would retain the power to advise on and consent to the appointment of all 1,200 policymaking and senior officials, including those to whom the appointees affected by S.679 report. Additionally, the Senate would still help set high standards for all government functions and programs and use hearings, reports to Congress, and reports from agency inspectors general and the Government Accountability Office to help hold offices accountable for performing to expectations.

Because these 200 positions would no longer require Senate confirmation, new administrations would be able to more quickly install the 70 or so communications and operations people that new department heads need to work effectively with Congress, the public, state and local governments.

The legislation would also allow the Senate to confirm or deny the appointment of more senior officials earlier in new administrations, as senators would have more time and resources to consider nominees.