One sometimes has to wonder what our political leaders are thinking? Take for instance the hub bub over the use of places like Las Vegas and Hawaii as destinations for conferences and meetings. Hard to forget the hit that Vegas took about three years ago. What they seem to forget is that the hospitality industries in Vegas and Hawaii employ people and when they were trashed it caused a large number of layoffs. Further it no doubt contributed to the crash in the real estate market in Vegas. What makes this even more amazing is that Vegas is one of the least expensive locations to hold conferences and the like. Hawaii while not inexpensive is typically less expensive than similar accommodations in places like San Francisco and New York. By the way, the last time I looked Vegas and Hawaii are in the United States so it is not like the money is going overseas.
On another front we just witnessed two prosecutions that probably should not have happened. While there is no doubt that John Edwards is at best a scoundrel and probably worse, spending millions of our tax dollars attempting to find him guilty of criminal activity based principally on the testimony of a liar was destined to fail. Similarly, pursuing Roger Clemens twice – the prosecution screwed up the first trial by disobeying the judge’s order – then tried again. The second trial covered 8 weeks and 48 witnesses before the jury returned an acquittal on all accounts. Here again the prosecution’s case hinged on the testimony of one person. All for what? Was whatever Roger Clemens might or might not have done worthy of spending millions of our tax dollars? I think not principally because who cares. What national interest was in play here? Some would say that you can’t lie to the Senate but before embarking on something on this scale one would hope there would be a little more substance.
The amount of money spent on these boondoggles makes what was spent on the GSA Vegas jaunt and the upcoming 9th Feds trip to Hawaii something less than rounding errors and look at the amount of press and the level of accusations these produced. I will leave it to you to speculate as to why things like this happen. For certain it is not because someone is concerned about how our tax dollars are spent. Unfortunately I doubt that it is to see that justice is done.
Loren Berg's Blog 
Perhaps a problem lies in the politicalization of the legal system. High profile, media-darling cases mean huge publicity. In some of these cases literally millions and millions of our dollars are spent to the benefit of legal defence teams and the profile of DA’s up for re-election.
I sometimes ponder on the money that could be saved if we quit trying to incarcerate the perpetrators of high profile white collar crime where the victims are usually investors with some portfolio losses. Better, I believe, to institute extremely punitive and far reaching monetary punishment including but not limited to garnisheeing all income streams, asset freezes and property confiscation but no high cost “country club” imprisonment. The humiliation resulting from serious monetary losses could be a major deterrent as well. Enron comes to mind and I wonder that if the total costs were in fact in the hundreds of millions then perhaps we taxpayers were the real victims of judicial/legal zealousness. It’s not the indictment per se but rather the process that attempts to be all things to all people in all circumstances always.
Bob