The other day as I was checking out various online news sites, I came across an article from Bloomberg via Yahoo titled Paulson to Discover Fate of his $500 Million Fortune.

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a $500 million man when he entered office, said he’s about to discover how much of his fortune remains after two years of financial market turmoil.

“I’ve got to find out where my money has been invested,” Paulson, 62, said today after a speech, drawing laughter from the Washington Economic Club.

The former chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. sold his 3.23 million shares of the investment firm before he was sworn in as Treasury secretary in July 2006. As a government worker, he’s bound by ethics rules that require him to put his wealth in a blind trust and in assets that don’t present conflicts of interest.

Now this got me to thinking about how some of the so-called "blind trusts" used by politicians turned out to be not-so-blind after all. While trading emails, a friend reminded me of 1988, when Poppy Bush pointed out that Bob Dole and Liddy Dole’s Trust might not have been so blind:

A day after Vice President Bush challenged Senator Bob Dole to make his tax returns public, the Bush campaign began sending reporters copies of an article in a small Kansas newspaper that raised questions about a real estate transaction by a blind trust belonging to the Senator’s wife, Elizabeth Hanford

(Note: I don’t recall any complaints from the right about Liddy going by her maiden name at the time, but that’s another diary for another time.)

Then in more recent times, I recall that Senator Bill Frist’s "Blind Trust" wasn’t so blind either:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was given considerable information about his stake in his family’s hospital company, according to records that are at odds with his past statements that he did not know what was in his stock holdings.

Managers of the trusts that Frist once described as "totally blind," regularly informed him when they added new shares of HCA Inc. or other assets to his holdings, according to the documents.

So now we have Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his blind trust. I raise the point because of the name of one of the trusts involved:

According to disclosure filings he signed in May 2008 that list his financial assets in ranges, more than $50 million of Paulson’s money was in the HMP Qualified Blind Trust.

Why does this bother me? Because the word "Qualified" has multiple meanings. From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

1 a: fitted (as by training or experience) for a given purpose : competent b: having complied with the specific requirements or precedent conditions (as for an office or employment) : eligible

2: limited or modified in some way

Now the definition that most folks would accept is 1b, that is, the trust complies with the specific requirements. My concern is that it can also be 2, which would make it maybe not-so-blind.

With the billions of dollars that Paulson has been shoveling out the Treasury to bail out his Wall Street compadres these last few months, this may be much ado about nothing.

But because of those billions of dollars used to bail out his compadres (including his former firm, Goldman Sachs) it seems quite irresponsible not to speculate