Ballance gets last hurrah

Waylon Jennings may have been on to something when he sang, "Ladies love outlaws like babies love stray dogs."

Robin Hood and Jesse James were folk heroes. And some people even cheered when O.J. Simpson went free.

Former congressman Frank Ballance is North Carolina's popular outlaw these days. He checks into a federal pen Friday, where for the next four years he can ruminate about his dizzying fall from grace.

But before the Big House bars slam behind him, his fans want to say goodbye. The invitations to the farewell party they're throwing tonight say checks should be made out to Ballance.

I don't know which is more ludicrous, people giving a disgraced politician even more money before he goes to prison for mishandling state funds or the name of the organization throwing tonight's shindig: "All People Who Love Freedom and Justice."

Is it just me, or has the world gone mad? The whole thing sounds like a bad scene from the movie "The Godfather."

Ballance was a sharecropper's son who went on to become a civil rights lawyer. People who admire him say he fought valiantly for a lot of poor folks who needed a champion.

Then he went into politics and became a Democratic party heavyweight. He was a powerful state senator in Raleigh and had the political juice to put a lot of taxpayer money into the pockets of people and programs he favored.

His ability to deliver votes also gave him the political clout to steer pork barrel funds to his own organization, the John A. Hyman Memorial Youth Foundation, which received $2.3 million between 1994 and 2003.

The money was supposed to go to youth programs. Instead, the feds say, he paid $15,500 to his own law firm, gave $20,000 to his son to buy a Lincoln and $5,000 to his daughter for computer services she did not perform while paying $69,000 in rent to the church where the foundation had its offices.

The feds say there was $325,000 in "questionable spending" that could not be accounted for. Federal prosecutor Dennis Duffy said in court that much of the foundation's funds were little more than "walking around money" that Ballance spent to win re-election.

Compare Ballance's star-studded send-off -- famous comedian Dick Gregory attended a tribute for Ballance on Dec. 3 -- to that afforded Meg Scott Phipps, who took not a cent of public money.

When Phipps, the former state Commissioner of Agriculture, went to prison last year for playing fast and loose with campaign funds and finance laws, the public did everything but shave her head and chase her through the streets. Journalists wore out their thesauruses looking for new ways to write "disgraceful" and "shameful" when describing the deeds of the daughter of Bob Scott, a former governor.

Ballance may have fought many a good fight on his way from a sharecropper shack to the halls of Congress, where he was serving when this scandal exploded in his face. But by treating the public's money as if it were his own, he forever tarnished his hero's crown.

Now he's just another crooked politician who apparently still knows how to fool the trusting folks back home.