No Surprise!

New York State's Off Track Betting is a disaster, on its way to Chapter 11. Chapter 7 would be preferable, but Governor Patterson is incapable of making smart decisions. You can read about the whole sorry mess in today's NYT.

A weird sidebar to this saga of corruption and incompetence is that OTB maintains a large (and unnecessary, if one need edit) fleet of cars for senior "executives." OTB's general counsel apparently spends every work day driving up and down the highway. From the NYT story:

During the audit, OTB officials displayed a knack for numbers unbecoming of a bookmaker. They reported that the director of software development put fewer than 100 miles a year on his car. They said OTB’s general counsel had logged nearly 1 million miles on his 2002 Impala.