Came across this on the BusinessDay website today:

“(Bernard) Madoff was charged in December with securities fraud but freed after posting bail of $10 million. He remained free after Monday's hearing, pending a ruling by magistrate Ronald Ellis of the US District Court in Manhattan.”

Yes, we all know the story, but let’s just let it sink in for a moment. Bernard Madoff is home tonight. He’s home at his palatial Manhattan townhouse, in the exact same cushy environment he’s been in for many of the years that he was perpetrating what may well be the biggest property crime ever by a single human being. There’s something very, very wrong with this picture.

John Travolta poses with his son Jett. (Associated Press Photo)

For obvious reasons, this is very difficult topic to take up at this moment. A child has died, and I don’t care if it’s the child of a movie star or a bank teller or a candlestick maker, it’s the saddest thing that can happen. But the fact is, the death of 16-year-old Jett Travolta as he vacationed with his family in the Bahamas last week has caused a huge uproar in what is often referred to as the “autism community.” (a sampling of autism blogs here, here, and here)

As the father of an 11-year-old autistic boy, I write this post tonight, not to make any judgments about Jett’s life or the type of care he received, but to help sort out the reactions that are coming in from around the world about Jett Travolta and the possibility he was autistic.

I’m back from a nice week off, ready to fire up the ol’ blog as we kick off 2009. Regular readers have no doubt already noticed that Kaity, once again, “stepped in” for me, and wrote another post. On my blog. The reason I put “stepped in” in quotes is that unlike the first time she did this, I wasn’t “told” she’d be doing it “again” and was therefore very “surprised” when I went to “my” blog during my vacation and discovered “Kaity” had gone all “rogue” on me. “Again.” (If you actually make air quotes with your fingers each time, you’ll find that reads quite well).

And what she wrote! Here I am, brave enough to say in those promos for our newscast that she was my “best friend.” Me, a man, showing my feelings. Isn’t that what women want? And what do I get for my trouble? Mocked, that’s what! Again I say, mocked! Sure, she has a point when she writes that I have no other friends, but there’s no need to rub it in. Anyway, I taped those promos before I got a Facebook page, and now, “Kaity,” if that’s even your real name, I have 89 friends! 89! I have not personally met many of these people, but still.

Speaking of which, I am now findable on Facebook, for those of you who also don’t feel the need to actually know your friends. If you search for “Jim Watkins” with “Tribune,” my smiling, slightly grainy face should come up. So find me, friend me, and we’ll teach Ms. Tong a thing or two about true, meaningful friendship in the digital age.

Kaity Tong PIX News At Ten Guest Blogger

AHA! My dear co-anchor has gone on vacation, leaving his blog unprotected. I feel a compulsion to once again HIJACK his blog. This is turning out to be kinda fun.

I just read Jim's recent musings on joining Facebook. (refer to "Social Networking? Me????")

As much as I hate to admit it, Jim and I are scarily similar. I, too, have known in the deepest recesses of my heart, that I would never ever run in the NYC marathon or climb Mt. Everest. Or ever want to. I am probably the most unathletic person you could hope to meet. So why would I want to inconvenience those poor sherpas who would end up carrying me up the mountain...and back... with all my gear. Sherpas must have better things to do. Like texting and blogging.

Here on this eve of Christmas 2008, I find myself thinking about a particular movie. Not a Christmas movie, per se, but “The Matrix,” the sci-fi masterpiece starring Keanu Reaves that came out in 1999. It’s about a hero, named Neo, who with the help of a shaman named Morpheus, saves humanity from enslavement to a digital dream world created by machines with artificial intelligence.

A Jim Watkins Christmas, starring Jim Watkins.

My wife and twin sons just left PIX after a visit to daddy at the office. It harkens back to what was something of a holiday family tradition when I was a little boy. Each year, a few days before Christmas, my mom, brother, and I would drive to downtown Cincinnati where my Dad’s office was. (There’s something very thrilling for little kids to see the place where their mom or dad work. I saw it in my boys’ eyes tonight. I wonder what the psychology on that one is.) We’d then go to Shillito’s, the big department store in Cincinnati during those years, where we saw Santa. Come to think of it, it’s almost exactly like the pre-Christmas department store scene in “A Christmas Story,” which maybe you’ll be seeing during one of its 47-showings on television during the next few days. It was fun. A good Christmas memory.

There are a handful of things I’ve always felt comfortable predicting I will never, ever do in my life, and will never want to do. Running in the New York City Marathon is one of them. Climbing Mount Everest is another. (Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about people who try to climb Mount Everest? One word: Ceaseless misery. Okay, that’s two words.)

First of all today, thanks to my lovely and talented co-anchor and office wife Kaity, who did a bang-up job guest blogging last Friday. I thought it was very funny the way she acted as if she isn’t 100-percent supportive of my new blogging habit, calling me, among other things, a “fool” who appears “unhinged” by it. She is a character, isn’t she? I don’t know how her husband Maury puts up with all that kidding around.

Kaity Tong PIX News At Ten Guest Blogger

WHAT is this obsession with blogging? I am telling you, I DON’T GET IT!

So why, perhaps you are asking yourself, are you now writing one? Because of THE PRESSURE!

I am not kidding. First, there’s my co-anchor, Jim, who is a blogging fool. And he has managed to make me feel inadequate, simply by blogging CONSTANTLY. Our offices are right next door to each other, so even when his door is closed, I can see him through a window that runs the length of the door from ceiling to floor. And I can tell you, it is troubling. If not downright disturbing, to see my colleague staring at the computer screen, with a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, eyes glazed, a rictus of concentration around his lips.This is one handsome guy we are talking about here, but when he’s blogging, not so much.

Sometimes, I even catch him chuckling to himself, as if he’s penned an especially witty line, and is really happy with himself. Or, frowning at his computer screen, his mouth set, his fingers flying over the keyboard. MUST BE A DIATRIBE OF SOME KIND!!

It concerns me because frankly, at times he appears slightly unhinged. And I say to myself, THAT WILL NEVER BE ME!

When we last chatted (yesterday), I was looking into the ways people might be getting down on themselves for being caught flat-footed by the economic crisis. I put this self-blame, at least the kind that I’m experiencing, into two categories; first, for not being on top of changes in your chosen field, changes that would eventually, perhaps now, be putting your job and career at risk. My personal example was the way I didn’t realize how the explosion of channels and viewing options on television since I started working in TV would endanger the traditional broadcasting business model. Lesson? Don’t let changes in your industry sneak up on you. Don’t be a casualty of new business paradigms and technologies in your profession.

Or, I should say, don’t be an unwitting casualty. If you’re going to get run over, at least try and see the bus coming. How various occupations evolve (or devolve), when you get down to it, is mostly out of your control, and that’s where it’s different from self-blame category number two: the failure to get your personal and family finances under control BEFORE this bad moon started rising.

Here’s an interesting exercise: Google the phrase “economic crisis blame” and read a handful of the nearly three million results (talk about enough blame to go around). You’ll find the finger pointed at the usual suspects: greedy hedge fund managers, Alan Greenspan, the nearly nonexistent government oversight of the markets, etc. But I didn’t really find what I was specifically looking for on the “blame” question (although I still have at least 2,900,000 results to go through). I’m interested in exploring how much regular people are blaming themselves for the panicky feeling that’s keeping them awake at night and putting a knot in their stomachs during the day.

Dear Caroline:

Well, it sounds like you’ve made up your mind that you want to be New York’s next junior Senator. After some rather clumsy leaking to “democratic officials” and confirmation by Governor Paterson Monday that you were interested in succeeding Hillary (I somehow doubt Paterson, the sole “decider” on who fills the seat, would have mentioned it publicly without explicit permission from you to do so) you’ve moved immediately to the top of the list of possible replacements. But just in case you’re not totally positive you want to take this life-changing, potentially image-shattering step, I’ve put together a list of pros and cons to help you decide.

Governor David Paterson’s icy reaction to a sketch satirizing his blindness on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend is: a) adding quite a bit of attention to a bit that was only modestly funny b) raising the age-old issue of when it is that satire crosses the line into negativity and meanness.

Here’s a link to the sketch, which was featured on the “Weekend Update” segment. To quickly summarize, Fred Armisen depicts (some publications are using the word “mocks”) the New York governor as disoriented and bumbling, with frequent references to his admitted cocaine use and philandering in the past. At one point he holds a chart upside down, and after the segment, when co-anchor Amy Poehler was announcing her goodbye from SNL, Armisen-as-Paterson wandered back out in front of the camera as he talked on the phone. Because he’s blind. Get it?

It certainly seems like the scandal involving Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is setting a new standard for brazen, in-your-face political corruption, at least at the gubernatorial level. So brazen, in fact, the speculation in the Illinois media and on the blogosphere today is that the man is clinically insane. People will tend to think that about a person, who, knowing he’s under federal investigation, shouts, “I want money!” into a telephone he must have suspected was tapped. One psychiatrist interviewed by a Chicago TV station said Blagojevich exhibits sociopathic traits, but that he might not be a full-blown sociopath, which is actually the nicest thing anybody has said about him since this thing broke.

Back from a few days off. As I prepare to resume blogging (It’s time to ask: is that REALLY the best term we can come up with for this now-common practice? It’s a nasty-sounding word: blog, short for “web log.” Say it out loud. SAY IT! See? It sounds like one of those words that sounds just as yucky as the thing it’s meant to describe.. like “pus,” or “nausea”; “Don’t think I can make it today, darling, I have a touch of the blog, and haven’t been off the commode for more than five minutes all day.” I’ll tell you just how wrong the term “blog” is: it’s literally WRONG! Every time I write “blog” here in my Microsoft Outlook program, the spell checker rejects it with an ugly red zig zaggy underline that I find distracting and which no doubt sidetracks my creative thinking. Oh, sure, I’m certain later editions of Outlook (I think this one is an earlier version, maybe from… well, when did Outlook first come out? There’s your answer.) don’t put the red mark of shame under “blog” or “blogging,” but that only means it’s become more accepted, and will be that much more difficult to erase from the public lexicon. Perhaps it’s too late already. Should I even bother to propose alternatives? I suppose it’s something about which I could blog.. D’OH! There’s that damn red squiggly line again!).

The awful news of a Wal-Mart employee dying in a stampede of holiday shoppers last Friday on Long Island brought to my mind another similar event, one that killed many more people, and stunned the nation: the December 3rd, 1979 concert by The Who in Cincinnati, where eleven people died in a crush to get inside the city’s Riverfront Coliseum. It happened 29-years-ago today, and I was there.

The Who Concert Tragedy made the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine in its January 24, 1980 issue. (Rolling Stone Magazine/January 24, 1980)

But I wasn’t part of the stampede, and I watched the entire concert not knowing anything had happened. So this is really a story, not about my witnessing first-hand rock music’s greatest tragedy, but about how there can be evidence of something unimaginable right in front of your eyes, without you being able to grasp until later what had taken place.

New York Giants' Plaxico Burress, right, arrives at Manhattan Supreme Court for arraignment with an unidentified man on Monday, Dec. 1, 2008 in New York. Burress accidentally shot himself at a Manhattan nightclub Friday evening and was treated at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was released Saturday. (AP Photo / December 1, 2008)

There’s something about the Plaxico Burress saga that’s not being told, or maybe can’t be told. I’m not just talking about the beyond-bizarre incident last weekend when the troubled Giants’ receiver had a gun accidentally go off in his pants at a crowded midtown nightclub. That’s just the latest chapter in what has been a slow-developing implosion of this extremely talented young athlete. As we said on PIX News last night, the gun incident came a mere ten months after Burress had caught the touchdown pass that won the Super Bowl for the Giants, an accomplishment that, by all rights, should gained him a measure of immortality in the minds of New York sports fans for generations to come. And, you’d figure, in his own mind.

How strange life can be. One day, you’re a low-profile lieutenant governor of New York, little known beyond Albany. Then the next day, the governor himself gets caught up in a prostitution scandal, you become chief executive, your state’s superstar junior U.S Senator is chosen to become the next Secretary of State and YOU get to name her replacement with the whole world watching. Whew!

Well, all that didn’t actually happen on one day, but I sort of telescoped things for dramatic purposes. Not that Governor David Paterson needs any more drama on this succession question. If you’ve been following the news, you know it’s up to him and him alone to name Hillary Clinton’s replacement after she moves to the State Department next month. Naming a U.S. Senator: that’s quite a responsibility, considering it’s a call made with no oversight by either voters or other elected officials. But what oversight there is, in a manner of speaking, comes from the complex web of political considerations that will go into Paterson’s choice. Who does he want to please with his selection? Who does he NEED to please? What are the considerations for his own political future? What pressures is he feeling from the national democratic party and the U.S. Senate leadership?

My household, like so many across the country, is going to be making some changes to deal with the economic crisis, and the scary future it portends. Luckily, it appears that I’m pretty much on the same page as our incoming (but sort of already) President, Barack Obama. In fact, I’m going to take ALMOST verbatim comments from his news conference statement Tuesday, and make slight tweaks so they resonate effectively with my family, and our household economy. Obama’s words come first, my customized changes will be in parenthesis.

I had a terrific time today, delivering one of the speeches at a major autism conference in New Jersey. It was held at Kean University, and had well over a thousand people in attendance. The title of the conference was “Autism: Putting the Pieces Together" I spoke as a parent of an autistic child, and was tremendously gratified by the warm welcome and attention I received from the audience. And Kean U. was even nice enough to videotape it and give me a DVD!

So my speech will be my post tonight. I hope you get something out of it, whether you’re in the “autism community” or not. In the middle of the speech, I show a clip from the documentary directed by my wife, Lauren, called “Autism Every Day.” Then I come back and talk some more, because let’s face it, that’s what I do. I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses in the comments section. Speech can be viewed after the jump.