On Saturday, just a week after the suicide in SoHo of Mark Madoff, Vail’s Sonnenalp Hotel will host a “Bernie Madoff Auction of fine art, jewelry, rugs, bronzes and more due to losses causes by” the infamous Ponzi schemer now serving 150 years in prison.

Bernie Madoff’s son Mark, 46, a father of four, reportedly hung himself with a dog leash outside his sleeping toddler’s room in his family’s SoHo apartment Saturday, two years to the day since his reviled dad’s arrest in 2008. The New York Post speculates he was despondent about “the fallout of his dad’s scam — and the possibility authorities were going to go after him and his brother, Andrew.”

The New York tabloid also reported Mark Madoff’s family won’t hold a funeral service and that Bernie Madoff, also despised by his remaining family for his multi-billion-dollar swindle, would not have attended anyway.

Saturday’s auction in the posh ski resort of Vail will feature paintings by Marc Chagall, Henry Matisse, Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Peter Max, according to a mailer sent to Vail residents. It also promises “armed security on site.”

The mailer indicates the artwork, jewelry and sculptures include “Bernie Madoff personal property purchased at Madoff auctions together with merchandise bought directly from victims of the Ponzi scheme, general order merchandise which constitutes the majority and seized assets obtained from various government auctions.”

Madoff victimized dozens of wealthy Coloradans, reportedly including Josh Lautenberg, a Vail real estate agent and ski instructor who’s the son of New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg. Josh Lautenberg is a co-owner of Sonnenalp Real Estate.

Vail developer Peter Knobel, who recently completed the ultra-luxe Solaris at Vail project, also is among Madoff’s victims, as are 30 foundations and individuals in Aspen.

More prominently, former Republican congressman turned American Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo lost a reported $1 million in Madoff’s scam and last year said an appropriate punishment would be publicly beating Madoff with a baseball bat and selling tickets.

“I think I probably would’ve sold tickets and let the highest bidder come beat him up with a baseball bat and then divide up the money among all the people that he stung,” Tancredo said “with a laugh,” according to 9News.

Conservative talk radio host Mike Rosen, another Colorado victim of Madoff, had another idea.

“I would have handled the sentence a little differently, such as waterboarding him in order to have him divulge where the money’s hidden. In exchange for that, they cut his sentence from 150 years to 100 years,” Rosen said.

The “Bernie Madoff Auction” at the Sonnenalp Resort in Vail will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, with a preview at 10:30 a.m. Call (800) 431-7948 for more information.

And who was leading the frenzy, calling for the firing of Churchill after, and in some cased before, it was determined he committed plagiarism? Denver’s top-rated talk show hosts. Those guys.

KHOW’s duo of Caplis and Silverman was out in front of the pack.

On July 27, 2007, the Rocky Mountain News reported that Dan Caplis cut a vacation short to broadcast the Churchill firing. Caplis told the Rocky at the time: “This is the people’s victory, and talk radio played a part in it. But that’s what we’re here for. We shouldn’t be bragging about it – we just did our job. If we don’t do our job, bad guys like Churchill win.”

Asked Tuesday whether he thought gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis should withdraw from the race after allegations of the former congressman’s plagiarism first appeared in the Denver Post, Caplis responded:

“Fair question. The same standard should apply to a candidate for any higher office as applies university professor. Plagiarism is extremely serious. Now we just have to see what the facts are. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to talk to Scott on the show today. Absolutely the same standards should apply to a candidate as a university professor.”

Caplis is an arch conservative who considered a gubernatorial run himself. For a talk-show host like Caplis, who openly supports McInnis and opposed Churchill, you might say, if you were Ward Churchill, that the chickens have come home to roost.

I asked his co-host, centrist Craig Silverman, if he thought McInnis should withdraw. Silverman first questioned McInnis about what he did for the Hasan Family Foundation after the job was mentioned in the Denver Post, eliciting the response from McInnis that a “series of in-depth articles on water” were written.

Like Caplis, Silverman called for Churchill’s firing, but strictly due to the plagiarism issue, not because of his inflammatory essays.

“I have lots of thoughts on the subject,” he told me. “I’m going to formulate them and let them spill forth on my radio show [KHOW, 630 AM] between 3 p.m. and 6. We are going to be talking about it big time, as Dick Cheney would say.”

Silverman added: “I definitely made the Ward Churchill connection before you brought it up. So I’ll talk about it.”

KOA talk show host Mike Rosen was also on the Churchill war path, saying over and over and over that the case against Churchill had nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with plagiarism, an act of unforgivable academic misconduct.

In an Aug. 3, 2007 column in the Rocky, Rosen wrote: ” The party line of Churchill apologists is that he was really fired for expressing his beliefs and that the findings of CU faculty panels that investigated his serial academic fraud were merely a ruse. Nonsense. Churchill is a proven liar and cheat.”

Via email, I asked Rosen if he thought, in light of his previous criticism of Churchill, that McInnis should step aside. “No,” he answered. “Not comparable. Churchill’s behavior was far more serious.”

You might think that KHOW talk-show host Peter Boyles, who polluted the air with the Jon Bonet Ramsey case, would have been one of the anti-Churchill leaders, but he was more restrained at the time.

Today, when I asked him if McInnis should go the way of Churchill, he told me, “That’s a great question. You know, I read Crummy’s piece, and I’m not trying to dodge ya, I don’t know enough about it other than what I read in Crummy’s piece. Nobody’s better than Crummy.”

He went on to say, “The worst campaign I ever saw was Bruce Benson, until I saw Pete Coors, until I saw Bob Beauprez, and this one is the icing on the cake.”

The Denver Post reports that Arbitron, the Nielson ratings of radio, has come up with a new computerized device said to more accurately reflect the listening habits of sample groups. Arbitron’s Portable People Meter or PPM is quickly sketching a new topography of listenership in the Denver area.

According to Arbitron’s new numbers, KOA-850 conservative talk show host Mike Rosen is playing to only half the number of listeners his advertisers were led to believe he drew every day. KHOW-630, which hosts “anti- illegal immigration” host Peter Boyles and Denver’s own Hannity and Colmes, Caplis and Silverman, fell from number 15 to somewhere below the top 20.

How does the meter work? Essentially, it is a small receiver that picks up embedded signals in the audio waves of each station. The Arbitron volunteer, who is paid to wear the pager-sized receiver on their waist, then simply listens to whatever they want and the meter records and sends this information to Arbitron.

The new computerized system replaces an old monitoring system where participants were asked to log their radio listening hours throughout the day. Arbitron felt this method created inaccuracies because people would forget what they were listening to. In addition, the old system reported on quarterly basis whereas Arbitron has now decided to begin creating reports on a weekly basis.

While there are some questions regarding the methodology of the week-old program, it is clear that a number of paychecks could see some tapering if, come Oct. 9, when Colorado officially starts using the numbers from the new system, hate doesn’t translate into advertising dollars.

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• Colorado government will grind to a virtual halt the day after Labor Day, according to news released Tuesday by Gov. Bill Ritter’s office, the Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover reports. Sept. 8 will be the first of four planned furlough days designed to ease a mounting budget crisis facing the state. Previously, the governor’s office hadn’t said whether executive branch employees would scatter their furlough days or take them on the same day. Public safety workers, including state troopers, won’t face furloughs but might see pay cuts, the AP’s Colleen Slevin reports. State agencies familiar to the public — drivers license bureaus, for instance — will be closed. The state hasn’t said when additional furlough days might be scheduled.

• State workers could face up to two weeks worth of furloughs, Ritter said on his monthly appearance with KOA 850 AM radio talk show host Mike Rosen, Denver Post reporter Tim Hoover notes at Politics West. In the face of a projected $384 million shortfall for the fiscal year just started, why aren’t state employees facing pay cuts, Rosen asked the governor. “A furlough day is a pay cut,” Ritter replied, noting that the four planned furlough days amount to nearly a week’s pay. “It could become two weeks’ pay or certainly something more than four days,” Ritter told the talk show host.

• That $384 million shortfall in the Colorado budget could be wishful thinking, the Gazette’s Dean Toda reports. Ritter’s budget director, Todd Saliman, told state agencies to find $437 million to slice from this year’s budget in a memo released Tuesday. The memo specified cuts of $145 million at the Department of Health Care Policy, $90 million at Human Services and $69 million for higher ed. The state agency responsible for unemployment benefits won’t have to make cuts this year. Neither will CDOT or the state agency that funds K-12 education, but the schools department could be facing $200 million in cuts next year.

• Why all the red ink? Colorado and other Western states had 43 percent fewer job openings at the end of May compared with a year ago, the Denver Business Journal’s Mark Harden reports. That’s according to a U.S. Department of Labor report posted Tuesday. Last year, there were 996,000 jobs available on the last day of May in the 13 Western states, but this year there were only 567,000. Read the entire monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report here (PDF). Nationwide, the construction industry had the smallest percentage of jobs open.

• Turning our attention to an industry that hasn’t recently been known for a high percentage of job openings, the Early Bird Special notes The Colorado Independent is hiring two reporter-bloggers.

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(VictoryNH, Flickr)

“I think I probably would’ve sold tickets and let the highest bidder come beat him up with a baseball bat and then divide up the money among all the people that he stung,” Tancredo said Monday “with a laugh,” 9News reports.

Tancredo was among dozens of Colorado residents, foundations and pension plans wiped clean when Madoff’s scheme collapsed late last year. The Littleton Republican, who retired from Congress in 2008 after a failed presidential bid, told Fox31′s Eli Stokels he was unmoved by Madoff’s courtroom admission he “made a terrible mistake” and “left a legacy of shame.”

“Well, he got what he deserves, that’s one reaction,” Tancredo said. “But the other is that I just wish I didn’t have to think about this anymore. A good day is the day I don’t have to think about Bernie Madoff or the fact that I lost almost our entire life’s savings.”

Tancredo, whose losses total an estimated $1 million, applauded a move by U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Golden Democrat, to change IRS rules so indirect investors can write off losses.

“I think there’s liability there — I mean, how many times did the SEC ignore warnings?” Tancredo told The Denver Post’s Miles Moffeit.

Like many caught in Madoff’s scheme, Tancredo didn’t invest directly with the New York-based fund manager. After earning steady returns for years with the Boulder-based Agile Group, Tancredo and others were surprised last fall to learn the investment firm had thrown in with Madoff and lost everything.

Conservative radio talker Mike Rosen, another Agile investor and Madoff victim, had other plans for the Ponzi schemer. The 850 KOA host, who regularly promoted the Agile Group for the “serious, demanding investor” (listen here), earlier this year compared Madoff’s crimes to murder. After Madoff’s sentencing, The Denver Post reported:

Said KOA radio talk-show host Mike Rosen, another victim: “I would have handled the sentence a little differently, such as waterboarding him in order to have him divulge where the money’s hidden. In exchange for that, they cut his sentence from 150 years to 100 years.”

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Despite Rosen’s pretense the Electoral College was a result of the perfection of a republic by our founding fathers, it was a rough-and-tumble political compromise at the time of the birth of our nation. Its establishment at that time does not make it inviolable, just as the legality of slavery or the disenfranchisement of women did not mean those conditions, too, should be immune to change.

Rosen objects to modifying the current system because he is a partisan Republican who admits the Electoral College disproportionately favors small Republican states. However, his argument a national popular vote would diminish importance of Colorado has little basis in fact.

The equivalent of a national popular vote actually may increase the attention Colorado gets primarily because Coloradans are open-minded and often split their tickets — voting for Democrats and Republicans based on citizens’ evaluations of each candidate. This kind of “swing” voter is exactly the kind which campaigns target — and is one of the reasons why Colorado has received extensive attention in recent presidential campaigns.

Admittedly, the Electoral College amplifies Colorado’s attractiveness because our state (and 47 others) is a “winner-take-all” participant. Hence, winning a small majority or even a plurality in Colorado gets the winner all nine of its Electoral College votes. But attractiveness is relative and it is possible a popular vote election could make Colorado a more popular place to campaign.

It also helps that Colorado has proved to be a solid source of fundraising for many candidates — hence, attracting them to the State for non-electoral reasons. Once they are here, most candidates tend to campaign. And our geographic position makes it easy for candidates to stop while en route to wealthier and more populous states such as California or Texas.

Rosen’s argument candidates would only go to big states is too general. If big states had large citizen blocks which always voted lockstep for one party (e.g., California for Democrats, Utah for Republicans), candidates would go to states where they had a better prospect of winning new votes.

Candidates also would focus resources in geographic areas which offer better media access to swing voters. Colorado offers both opportunities — a concentrated major media market in the Denver metropolitan area (the 18th largest media market in the nation — out of more than 400 markets) and a high percentage of swing voters.

As Rosen points out, indeed the United States of America is a republic, but to conclude the founding fathers would be aghast at the idea the nation’s President ultimately would be chosen via a popular vote is silly. Given the configuration of the country today — quite different than that of the 13 colonies 233 years ago — it is entirely possible the founding fathers would be in favor of the direct election of the President while preserving the republican nature of the legislative branch. Of course, if the founding fathers saw the country today, they might have a number of other suggestions for “improvements…”

Aaron Harber hosts “The Aaron Harber Show” seen Tuesdays at 8:00 pm and Wednesdays at 5:00 pm on PBS Station KBDI-TV Channel 12 and viewable 24/7. Send e-mail to Aaron@HarberTV.com. © Copyright 2009 by Aaron Harber and USA Talk Network, Inc. All rights reserved.

More from the governor’s office:

President Obama is trying to clean up bad decisions and failed policies left behind by President Bush, and Colorado’s GOP lawmakers are still trying to fight Bush’s old fights.

Memo to Republican lawmakers: “The election is over, and your guy lost. Time to move on.”

They’re trying to turn a hypothetical into a partisan football instead of focusing on the biggest issue facing this state: the economy.

From our friends at Colorado Media Matters, Newsradio 850 KOA talker Mike Rosen’s gone off a polar ice cap once again when it comes to global warming.

From the Dec. 18 broadcast of The Mike Rosen Show discussing a Denver Post opinion piece citing the human causes of global warming by Waleed Abdalati, head of NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Branch at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md.:

ROSEN: And the argument, of course, is wholly problematic as to how much of human activity contributes to global warming, and I find much more credible the arguments of qualified scientists who say “pooh-pooh” to that. That we’re a flea — that is, all of human activity on this planet as compared to the influence of the sun and other factors completely outside of our control through the history of this planet long before there were humans walking the Earth and before they were driving around in SUVs, the climate was changing by huge increments over time, so I just don’t buy it.

So who are these credible scientists who claim — against hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies — that global warming is not man-made?

Try conservative policy think tanks funded by the fossil fuel-based energy sector:

* Christopher C. Horner: Rosen hosted this senior fellow from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute on his Nov. 11 broadcast, during which Horner falsely claimed, regarding a British judge’s 2007 ruling on the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that “not one statement in the movie was supported by the U.K. high court.” The judge did rule that the film contained nine inaccuracies, but Rosen and Horner failed to point out that the ruling also stated the film, featuring former Vice President Al Gore, is “substantially founded upon scientific research and fact.”

* Lawrence Solomon: The executive director of the Urban Renaissance Institute appeared on Rosen’s April 22 program. Solomon responded to a caller’s question regarding global warming in light of a National Geographic article “about how the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is disappearing” by stating that in Antarctica some regions experience melting, and claiming, “The satellite data shows that, on balance, Antarctica is gaining ice.” After allowing Solomon to evade the caller’s question about ice melt in the Arctic, Rosen claimed that “global-warming alarmists” provide “selective presentation of ice melting” and “ignore ice-cap expansion someplace else because it doesn’t suit their agenda.”

* Maureen Martin: Rosen on April 15 hosted Martin, whom he introduced as a “senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute,” but did not disclose the think tank’s “free-market ” agenda, its president’s description of the scientific consensus on global warming as a “mass delusion,” or its past funding from ExxonMobil Corp., as Colorado Media Matters has noted.

* Paul Chesser: Rosen featured Chesser, director of Climate Strategies Watch, on his Feb. 12 program. As Colorado Media Matters pointed out, Chesser appeared from late January through mid-February on a variety of public and media platforms in Colorado for his organization, which criticizes global-warming “alarmists” and is a “joint project” of the conservative John Locke Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the Better Government Project. On the Feb. 14 broadcast of public television KBDI’s Independent Thinking, Independence Institute president Jon Caldara and Chesser attacked the Center for Climate Strategies, which supported and facilitated the work of the Colorado Climate Action Panel, whose report became the basis of the Colorado Climate Action Plan. Further, neither acknowledged that the Heartland Institute received funding from the fossil-fuel industry.

* Patrick J. Michaels: This University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the conservative Cato Institute appeared on Rosen’s March 30, 2007, broadcast, during which Rosen inaccurately described him as “the Virginia state climatologist,” a title that the current Virginia governor’s office asked Michaels to stop using, according to an Aug. 19, 2006, Associated Press article. Rosen also failed to mention that Michaels is funded by the fossil-fuel industry, as Media Matters for America has noted. Further, Rosen and Michaels dispensed several falsehoods about global warming during the broadcast and labeled Gore’s views on climate change “extreme.”

* Lee Gerhard: The principal geologist of the Kansas Geological Survey appeared on Rosen’s January 30, 2007, program, during which Rosen identified him as someone who “once operated an independent petroleum exploration company” and “co-chaired the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, their Climate Change Issues Committee.” During the interview, Gerhard repeated a number of global-warming falsehoods that Rosen failed to correct, including the inaccurate claim that “humans are not the culprit … solar is the culprit” on global warming.

There following are just a few Colorado-specific guilt-by-association efforts that the media watchdog group has documented, listening to such radio luminaries as the Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara and Amy Oliver, Mike Rosen and “Gunny” Bob Newman since the scandal involving the Illinois governor broke.

• On his December 10 Newsradio 850 KOA broadcast, “Gunny” Bob Newman dubbed the Blagojevich scandal “BlagoRezkObama,” in reference to purported unsavory connections among the three and Rezko’s campaign fundraising for both politicians.

• KOA’s Mike Rosen, on his December 10 program, admitted, “Now, I haven’t seen anything that directly connects Barack Obama to anything that would be illegal, dishonest, fraudulent, or felonious” in the scandal. He then added, “But nonetheless, he just doesn’t want to be tied too closely to Blagojevich. It seems, however, that he and his people are tied more closely to Blagojevich than he would have you believe.”

• Another KOA host, Independence Institute President Jon Caldara, during his December 9 broadcast interviewed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Tillman of the “free market” Illinois Policy Institute, asking him: “Is it possible for a man to become a state senator and then a United States senator from Illinois without somehow playing ball, being complicit, understanding, knowing the rules and playing by those rules of such a corrupt system?” Tillman responded by repeating the false claim that Obama “paid under market value” for his Chicago home. As Colorado Media Matters has noted, Bloomberg News reported, “The couple who sold Barack Obama his Chicago home said the Illinois senator’s $1.65 million bid ‘was the best offer’ and they didn’t cut their asking price because a campaign donor bought their adjacent land, according to e-mails between Obama’s presidential campaign and the seller.”

• Another Independence Institute senior staff member, 1310 KFKA’s Amy Oliver, stated on her December 10 program: “But I gotta tell you, you know what? There are so many relationships around Barack Obama that are questionable. Tony — what is it? — Rezko, [former Weather Underground member] William Ayers, Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright [Jr.], Blagojevich. These are guys that are all around him.” Oliver continued: “And, by the way, Barack Obama worked closely to get, or worked very hard and was one of Blagojevich’s, I guess was part of his inner circle when he was in the governor’s, when he tried, or, his first run for governor, and Barack Obama’s in the statehouse, and he was an adviser to the governor. Am I saying he’s involved? No.”

Apparently, the right-wing radio heads just can’t help it. Read more of Colorado Media Matters’ findings.