A Match Made in Heaven; MU Names Sinquefield Shill to Endowed Ken Lay Professorship

It makes perfect sense if you really think about it.  The Associated Press is reporting that, over the objections of many who preferred that the school reject the tainted money, the University of Missouri has finally filled an endowed professorship created by Ken Lay:

The University of Missouri has turned to one of
its own professors to fill a long-vacant endowed chair named for the
late Enron founder Ken Lay.

Joseph Haslag, a faculty member since 2000, is the first person to fill the Kenneth L. Lay Chair in Economics.

Who is Joseph Haslag?  For one, he's the Executive Vice President of the Show-Me Institute, a conservative "think tank" funded by billionaire voucher advocate Rex Sinquefield.  He is also reportedly the husband of another Sinquefield employee, Sara Haslag, who maintains a Show-Me Institute email address and apparently works from the Show-Me Institute's office in downtown Columbia (though some observers claim that Ms. Haslag is also an employee of Pelopidas, a government affairs firm through which some of Sinquefield's voucher money is moved).

Like Ken Lay, Rex Sinquefield earned hundreds of millions of dollars in the field of finance.  Also like Lay, Sinquefield has put his personal wealth to use in efforts to buy elected officials shape policy through political contributions.  In 2000, Lay --a close friend of George W. Bush-- was a Bush "Pioneer" who helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring about the disastrous Bush presidency.  Similarly, Sinquefield has spent hundreds of thousands of his own dollars in this election cycle to elect anti-public schools candidates to state offices.  Sinquefield had even given more than $100,000 to the Matt Blunt before his campaign collapsed under the considerable weight of its own failure. 

So it is hard to imagine a confluence of circumstances more fitting than the one with which we're now faced.  We've got a professorship endowed by a man who spent millions to shape public policy for his own nefarious ends (and who escaped paying the price he owed to society only by the fortunate intervention of his own death) which will now be filled by a man who is bought and paid for by another millionaire who treats government in much the same way.  Ken Lay is the modern day cautionary tale of the evil that can transpire when the richest of the rich twist government to shift fortunes even more in their own favor, and Rex Sinquefield is a man who is bound and determined to follow down the same path.

So in some ways it appears a bitter irony that Sinquefield's man Haslag should fill the Ken Lay chair of economics at MU.  But oddly, one also gets the sense that's the only way it could ever have worked.  Some people, it seems, are simply meant for one another.