Conrad Black is Back (Online)

Convicted lord barks back on blog from prison

Updated 11:45 AM CST, Tue, Jan 13, 2009

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If you're a media mogul, regardless of whether you're in prison for having ripped off your company to the tune of millions, you still need your platform. Media is your life, right?

So, the fallen Lord Conrad Black (a member of the House of Lords, no less) -- convicted in 2007 of defrauding Hollinger International, his highly succesful newspaper publishing company -- has taken to the blogosphere like a fish to water, and has been writing from the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex near Orlando for the Web site The Daily Beast.

Not surprisingly, Black writes that he finds the accommodations at the prison to be "spartan." Not what he's used to, no doubt.

In a recent post, Black addressed the Blagojevich scandal, saying, "the Illinois Governor has engaged the colorful Eddie Genson, who was one of my counsel when the tyranny of Patrick Fitzgerald assaulted me two years ago."

He goes on to attack U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, obviously not one of his favorite people.

Black described Fitzgerald as being "experienced at bulldozing juries, after dismembering his victims in the media first, and then throwing enough spaghetti at the wall in his scores of charges to bury the defense and muddle the unsolomonic jurors."

If you can make your way through the lord's verbage, it's likely you'll find -- as did Rex W. Huppke in a Chicago Tribune commentary -- that Black's incarceration has done nothing to thwart his infamous sense of self.

"It's clear Black's cramped confines are incapable of containing his ego, much less squeezing him for an ounce of contrition," Huppke wrote.

Further, Huppke sites a number of endless sentences in Black's blog posts "as proof of Black's inability to find the period key on the prison keyboard."

So, if you thought you'd seen the last of Lord Black, think again.