Politicians blow off about anything and everything with almost no knowledge of what they are talking about: Good sound bites, fluent sounding (Obamaesque) speech, are the desiderata, not competent opinions.

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My writing having been taken up entirely by l'affaire Madoff for almost a year, it is a pleasure to turn to a very short posting on another matter. Here it is: We now live in the United States of Goldman, Sachs.

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Having read the opening briefs filed by the Trustee and by SIPC on the net equity question, I thought to set down a few of what I believe are my most important impressions.

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In reading what little the Trustee has said in the past to justify his cash-in/cash-out position on net equity, a couple of thoughts struck me that, as far as I can recollect, have thus far not been made by opponents. I shall set them forth here.

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In this essay, I shall not attempt to summarize Kotz's 457 page report. What shall be done instead is to discuss a particular perception the report induced in me, plus some points in the report that struck me forcibly and contributed to the perception but often seem not to have generally been picked up elsewhere or to have received only brief or minor mention elsewhere.

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On September 21st, the Government made a motion for forfeiture and remission proceedings in the criminal case against Madoff. The motion plainly would result in serious injury to many victims of Madoff, and seemed to me highly objectionable.

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The SEC -- though it ironically is one of the governmental or quasigovernmental bodies most responsible for allowing Madoff to succeed -- has put together what one thinks the best description to date of the methods used by Madoff to fool victims, agencies, feeder funds, and huge organizations or immensely wealthy individuals who sought to do due diligence, and others.

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If readers do not remember anything else written in this post or in its continuations, I beseech them to remember this: the IRS now appears to have surely admitted, in the letter of August 21st, that its review of Madoff was a paper-only-review -- was a review that was an open invitation for any liar, any Madoff, to receive IRS approval as a non-bank custodian by means of egregious fraudulent misstatements, and to thereby receive aid from the IRS in defrauding victims.

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Let me begin with a matter that leaps off the page. Picard's brief does not so much as mention matters that should be the determinants of net equity:

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I congratulate you on your excellent article on custodians on Saturday, July 25th.

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In this fourth segment, let me discuss an argument made by Harbeck and Picard in support of their cash in/cash out position.

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When David Sheehan attacked Helen Chaitman by a letter of June 12th, he accused her of making statements for which she could have no evidence. She responded, among other ways, by writing on June 16th that she would be able to prove various of her statements from SIPC's own files after discovery. My personal view is that she was right on.

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If readers remember not one other thing of what is written in this four- part posting, I urge them to remember -- and therefore am repeating yet again -- the possibility that Picard's definition of net equity may deprive them not just of $500,000, but also of any share in the estate. This possibility should be cleared up, one way or the other, as quickly as possible.

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This post is being published in four parts. Let me start it with some comments that will surprise a lot of people.

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We are currently in a place (so to speak) where a simply fantastic amount about the Madoff scam remains unknown; more remains unknown than I can ever remember being true at the time of the plea and sentencing of the lead culprit in any other major fraud case.

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On Thursday, June 11th this author posted an article canvassing and presenting many of the criticisms that are raised. I don't want to bore you by repeating the canvas, but nonetheless shall recapitulate some of the criticisms in summary fashion because this is important to a full understanding regarding a demand SIPC made to me that the entire article of June 11th be taken down -- or at least an asserted mistake in it be corrected.

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Time Magazine posted an online article saying that SIPC "Trustees are paid well, receiving personally 3% of anything over $1 million they recover for victims. For example, if $2 billion is ultimately recovered in the Madoff case, Picard stands to make personally $60 million in fees, provided the New York federal judge overseeing the case, the Hon. Louis agrees to it."

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Now that the government is in effect taking over major industries -- is "freely interposing itself in the management culture of industry after industry," said Brooks-- "CEO's are forced to adopt the traits of politicians"

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It seems to me clear beyond peradventure, as they say, that what Obama is doing with regard to torture, the pictures and Afghanistan is that he is temporizing, is playing both ends against the middle, is trying to ward off opposition from the conservative to right wing side of the political spectrum as much as possible.

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It seems obvious that it is illegitimate in the extreme for Picard and Harbeck to use a rigged definition of net equity in order to lessen the amount people receive from SIPC and to create clawbacks where they otherwise would not exist.

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I recently read the 2009 book by Neal Bascomb called Hunting Eichmann. I learned a lot I had not previously known.

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Law Professor John Q. Barrett of St. John's (barrett@stohns.edu) is writing a biography of Justice Robert Jackson, perhaps the greatest writer ever to sit on the Supreme Court and the first American Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg.

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I have read the four memoranda that were recently released by the DOJ and authorized torture. Permit me to invent a similar but short memo that will allow the reader to grasp their style, their character, their techniques, their aims, and inherently and avoidably, the nature of the people who wrote or signed off on them.

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In this connection, though I personally am a direct investor, I am one of those who have never understood the morality or the decency of denying SIPC recovery to those who invested through feeder funds.

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If the possibility raised here turns out to be true, as I suspect will be the case, this would be a disaster for the country. For it would mean that what is perhaps the one agency which above all others must be kept competent and clean as a whistle, was instead a witting or unwitting facilitator of the worst kind of fraud.

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Unless and until the government uncovers and discloses that there was a tie to organized crime, the idea that the Italian, Jewish, Irish, or more lately, Russian Mafia were involved must remain mere speculation, speculation that might be right or wrong. But here are some facts and ideas fueling the speculation.

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Appended below are two documents that were not initially posted on my site (Velvelonnationalaffairs.com) or on OpEd News.

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Forget about tax refunds. Forget about tax deductions. Forget about SIPC. Waive them all. Instead, the government should give all victims government bonds whose principal is payable at the end of ten years, and whose interest rate, payable annually, is either approximately seven percent tax free or approximately ten percent taxable.

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This country may now have arrived at a Robert Welch moment, a moment when it must show it has a sense of decency and must declare itself to be on the side of decent men like Robert Welch or it must show it has no decency and is on the side of bums like Joe McCarthy.

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Last Friday I received a phone call from a friend of 45 years standing. I'll call him Deadeye. Deadeye is a brilliant fellow. He finished first in his class in a significant eastern law school, and has spent 47 years as a tax lawyer. Deadeye wanted to talk. Deadeye's point was tax-profound, albeit simple.

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The 16th Amendment to the Constitution gives Congress power to levy an income tax on all "incomes, from whatever source derived." It turns out that, to the extent that people did not physically withdraw appreciation in their accounts from Madoff, they never had any income from him.

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Let me describe some of Joe Nocera's tricks in last Saturday's article before getting to the meat of his argument. Read the piece yourself and you will see these tricks in full flower.

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Reading the transcript with a lawyer's eye, it seems evident that Judge Chin had made up his mind as to what he was going to do before he walked into the courtroom.

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Just as an orthodox blogger might, I am writing this post on an airplane. Several points will be made, each with relative brevity - at least for me.

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The hearings before Congress on the Madoff scandal on February 4th put one in mind of some pertinent, hopefully salient, ideas.

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I wish to conclude by discussing possible legislative action in congress.

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Two things should be said with regard to potential suits against the SEC.

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They are victims of Madoff. They are not the billionaires, huge international funds, or gigantic banks that the media focuses on. They are plain Americans who worked like dogs all their lives. They are selling their houses to raise money to live, they are trying to unretire and get back into the workforce at a time of depression and high unemployment caused by the barons of Wall Street. They are desperate and in agony.

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The courses of action discussed here previously all have major shortcomings: they leave people very short of money to live on, they harm the innocent, they take way too long, they are uncertain. There is a different course of action, however, which would avoid most of these pitfalls.

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I turn now from preliminary comments to specific courses of action. As you will see, each course of action being generally discussed in the media today will be insufficient, will be too little, too late, especially because the law is not designed to handle a disaster of this magnitude.

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In the final three installments of the posts on the Madoff mess, I will discuss how much was stolen, where did it go, and what can be done for victims.

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In the final three installments of the posts on the Madoff mess, I will discuss how much was stolen, where did it go, and what can be done for victims.

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The SEC's failure to investigate and put an end to Madoff's crime, its announcing in 1992 that there was no problem with Madoff and its failure ever to correct that statement, its consequent sabotaging of thousands of investors with the literal impoverishing of countless numbers and the crippling of many charities, medical research organizations and injury to pension funds, must be one of the greatest regulatory failures in American history, if not the single greatest failure.

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A foremost red flag was that Madoff apparently was not even making the trades of securities shown on the monthly statements. The trades shown on the monthly statements were fictitious, a fact which still seems unbelievable a month after the scandal broke. Experts who checked this got out of Madoff. The expert SEC apparently checked out none of this however, so the average investor was again left completely in the dark.

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I first heard of Bernie Madoff at some point in approximately the early 1990s. I think it must have been sometime around 1992 or 1993 because one of the points that made a big impression when I heard of him was that the SEC had investigated and had publicly said it found nothing wrong with what Madoff was doing.

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An extensive complaint seeking federal prosecution of American officials who ordered, authorized, approved or committed war crimes is currently being prepared. While the complaint is in preparation, the Steering Committee of the Justice Robert H. Jackson Conference is issuing this preliminary memorandum setting forth several of the points to be presented more extensively in the complaint itself.

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The year started bad, it stayed bad, it had a temporary uptick because of Obama's victory, but it ended bad. Bad, bad, good, bad. On balance that's bad.

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Given that the crookedness Blagojevich is accused of has been an everyday matter in American politics for scores upon scores of years, why did Fitzgerald bring a case?

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Under this one-off exception, (1) evidence obtained against the prior terrorists by illegal torture or abuse would be admitted if it appears reliable, while (2) further illegal obtaining of evidence via torture and abuse is deterred by bringing prosecutions against, and in the case of prisoners who were innocent, allowing civil suits against the persons responsible for the torture.

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If Obama were to fight a war in Afghanistan, his presidency would be as good as over.

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The Remark is directed at the fact that Michigan may have made the mistake of a lifetime, so to speak, when it hired Rich Rodriguez as coach to replace the underachieving Lloyd Carr.

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The first requisite of economic recovery is to give money to those who will spend it because they are in need. they will spend the money not hoard it, and their expenditures will help revival.

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Today we are paying the price for a Wall Street system, a market system, a credit system, a housing system, that was (were?) on a shooting star trajectory -- which has now collapsed in what is likely a regression to the mean.

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Moderators should not ask questions which candidates (dishonestly) will not answer and will instead use merely as springboards to their talking points. Instead, moderators should simply say such things as, "Senator, tell us for two mnutes whatever you wish about the war in Iraq"

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Does Alan Dershowitz arrive at positions and then find or invent alleged reasons in support later?

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Does Alan Dershowitz arrive at positions and then find or invent alleged reasons in support later?

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Does Alan Dershowitz arrive at positions and then find or invent alleged reasons in support later?

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Today there is a crisis on Wall Street. It involves enormous losses. It threatens the economy. One reason it is of such magnitude is that the institutions of Wall Street were allowed to become so huge. They are so big that their mistakes and their failures threaten all of us.

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Based on fairly extensive readings from about 2002-2003 until today, it seems pretty clear that people who were responsible for or committed torture were well aware from the get - go that what they were doing constituted crimes. That realization is why CIA officials, from 2002 to 2006 or 2007 demanded memoranda, from the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, falsely claiming that the abuse and torture were not criminal acts. The officials wanted these OLC memos so that they could later avoid or defeat prosecutions by claiming that the decision making office of the DOJ had approved the legality of what they were doing. The officials wanted a “golden shield,� a “get out of jail free card.�

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If you had to choose, for an important position requiring brains, between a person who was among the best in his class at the Harvard Law School and a person who was near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, you would obviously choose, since the position does require brains, the person who was among the best at Harvard Law, right? Well, maybe wrong, if the position is President of the U.S. (an office held since 2001 by a brainless one) and if the chooser is, as in 2000 and 2004, the American electorate.

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.... my deep concern for Israel and for Jews as a people lead me to revile those bastards because not only have they been a disaster for the United States itself, but they also seem to have gone far toward achieving the very opposite of what they wanted to achieve in behalf of Israel. By leading the U.S. down a terribly wrong path, they have caused many Americans -- with whom I agree about most other things -- to revile Israel, they have caused Arabs to hate Israel even more, and they have lessened, not increased, Israel’s security. Nice work, guys...

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... Never have I seen (Tom Brokaw) so obviously angry, so obviously antagonistic, as when interviewing Obama...

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What do we need to do to ensure that the price the price of oil is not at some artificially high level set by a speculative futures market on which some financiers make killings while hundreds of millions of ordinary people get screwed at the gas pump?

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Obama .. seems to be drinking the same Kool Aid that was drunk by, and destroyed the presidencies of, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. He is spouting apocalyptic visions combined with a possible need for unilateral warmaking....If Obama, as President, were to really follow the prescriptions he gave CBS News, it would destroy his Presidency almost as surely as Nam and Iraq destroyed Johnson’s, Nixon’s and Bush II’s. Britain and Russia, both at the height of empire, met disaster in Afghanistan, and so would Obama in all probability...

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Surrounded by friends, allies and well wishers who, being politicians, are inevitably likely to press one bad idea after another on him, Obama’s ability to think, to resist the bad, will be tested. It probably would serve him well... to find... a corps of people to turn to for advice who...are capable of high level thinking instead of merely the thoughtless, unperceptive reactions which...are the hallmark of most politicians and which many of his allies will press upon him.

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... today we not only have a years-long unwinnable war, but also torture, kidnappings and renderings to foreign countries for torture, many years of detention without trial of people who are innocent, the use of massive private armies to help carry out Executive policies, electronic spying on anyone and everyone the Executive wishes, suppression of the media far beyond anything experienced during Viet Nam, reducing Congress to an impotency exceeding that of Viet Nam, the use of Executive Branch lawyers to write professionally incompetent, secret memoranda giving clearance to awful policies, and the use of retired generals who are making a fortune from the Pentagon to spread its gospel on the mainstream media...
..what assurance is there that five or ten or twenty or thirty years down the road, when some militarists or reactionaries might again come to power, we will not get Iraq redux, just as Iraq was Viet Nam redux?...
Because domestic politics are obviously useless for holding the guilty accountable, we must try to do what was done in the 1940s to the leaders of nations who committed evil; we must try to do what was done to the German and Japanese leaders from top Nazis and Tojo right down to lawyers and judges. We must try to have them held accountable in courts of law. And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top Germans and Japanese....

It is for all these reasons that I have called a conference to be held in Andover, MA on September 13 and 14, 2008. The conference is entitled Planning For The Prosecution Of High Level American War Criminals. The Conference is not intended to be only a discussion of violations of law that have occurred. Although discussions of ideas and facts showing violations of law will take place, library stacks and the internet are, as said, already bulging with materials showing violations (although in the last analysis decisions on violations will be made by judges if leaders are brought to justice). The Conference, rather, is intended to also be a planning conference, one at which plans will be laid, and necessary organizational structures will be set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and to the ends of the earth in order to bring them before the bar of justice. The underlying law and facts will be discussed in the context of laying plans to pursue the guilty in courtrooms so that in future there may be no more Viet Nams, no more Iraqs...Both experts and the public are invited to the Conference.nyone who wants to attend the conference should contact my special assistant, Jeff Demers, at demers@mslaw.edu or at (978) 681-0800...

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...We know that thousands of people have been killed or injured because of defective and dangerous drugs and devices or inadequate warnings on labels. Unless everything the Times has written is a lie, we know that this disaster is in part due to the F.D.A.’s incompetence and its insufficient staff and money. We know that drug companies take advantage of the F.D.A.’s inadequacies to put defective products on the market, or products with insufficient warnings on their labels, and thereby also cause the deaths and injuries...

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Eric Lichtblau’s Unpersuasive Defense Of The New York Times’ Failure To Print His Story On The NSA’s Illegal Electronic Spying In October 2004

...The Times plainly failed the duty of the free press...to prevent the people from being sent to die from foreign shot and shell because of governmental misconduct...one is not happy to think that the newspaper that the country depends upon not only bears responsibility for facilitating the launching of the war, but also for facilitating the reelection of the disastrous people who launched and continued that disastrous policy and many others besides...

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...Most of the press was nothing but the tool of Chamberlain: it printed what he wanted it to say, did not print what the Government told it not to print, would not print articles or editorials that allegedly might inflame Hitler, in an English reprint of Mein Kampf, left out much -- apparently most -- of the most inflammatory things said by Hitler in that book, refused to say what Hitler was doing to the Jews, and, in general, acted as Chamberlain’s lapdog... Those of us who are Americans old enough to have lived through Viet Nam as adults, and now Iraq, have seen many of the same phenomena at work in the United States...

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...one would hope that the continuous scandals over executive misdeeds might cause even right wingers like Roberts, Thomas and Scalia to see the light. One could hope, but one doesn’t expect. ...

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...Congress enacts laws that most or even all legislators have not read, that Congresspeople and their staffs did not write (the laws were written by the executive or by private lobbyists), that have sometimes been procedurally manipulated in Congress so that legislators will not even have a chance to read them, let alone absorb and consider what they say. The Patriot Act exemplified this..

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....The real truth is that torture was ordered from the top and the torture memos were meant to give legal cover to -- were meant to preclude criminal actions against -- the Bushes, Cheneys, Rices, Tenets, Rumsfelds, Ashcrofts, Addingtons, Haynes and Feiths who were committing serious crimes that could be punished by execution.... American officials have committed moral treason, if not legal treason. Legally, they are certainly guilty of crimes so serious that execution is a possible penalty...

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... One of the reasons supposedly charitable, supposedly nonprofit hospitals are amassing huge sums and paying CEOs amounts of compensation like three, four or five million per year or even more, is that the hospitals receive tax exemptions because they are providing charitable care -- free care or deeply discounted care -- for those who can’t pay. The problem, though, is that there’re not providing very much charitable care...But the percentage of charitable care Northwestern provides -- are you ready for this -- is “less than 2% of its revenues".,,

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But when Michelle Obama -- who, as an African American, has even more to be angry about than even the Jews of my generation -- uttered this truth by saying that her husband’s candidacy and its reception were the first time she had ever been proud of America, she caught hell in the media and elsewhere.... Michelle Obama’s problem is that she told it straight, told it as she feels about it, as she feels about it with much justification. America’s problem is that it does not want to discuss whether there is truth in what someone says, but instead wants to hear only bullshit that makes people thoughtlessly think well of what we do. Well, I say good for Michelle Obama.

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...This is a country which perpetrates, condones, and/or ignores the most awful conduct. We are fighting wars and killing people by the gross, but nobody with power gives enough of a damn to put an end to it... it is sometimes claimed the public cares less and less, and even left wingers profess that we cannot leave Iraq lest matters get worse ... The Republican candidate, McCain, would continue fighting for a hundred years -- of him it was recently said he never saw a country he did not want to bomb or invade, and that (being third generation Navy) he thinks war the natural state of affairs -- as, evilly, do so many of my generation. Nor do many stop to realize that war, about which people care so little because it is not them that go to it, contributes mightily to the horrendous economic situation that it is said they do care about...

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...what we have here is a Supreme Court decision that once again screws over the small man; does so without any basis in Congressional history or purpose, but, rather, contrary to that history and purpose; and screws him over on the basis of unsupported assumptions of what juries might do and with no regard for the recognized fact that the federal agency that is supposed to protect the small guy is incompetent and, apparently, is in the hip pocket of the big drug and device makers...

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...this is the story of Bush. His amiable, good old boy persona reflects a certain kind of interpersonal intelligence, sometimes in high degree. But he is totally lacking in the kind of analytical, logical, thoughtful intelligence needed by a leader, much less a President. Americans, often being fools who vote for the more personally attractive guy, elected Bush twice. They have learned to rue the day they did so...

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Calling all the Washington sports teams “The Morons� would be superbly representative of the major “industries� of the city. It’s just so perfect, isn’t it...

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as for the McCain campaign’s high-flown-language response about serving the country, never violating the public trust and never doing favors for special interests or lobbyists ..this response is just more ... of the political style obnoxiousness of using fancy talk to evade, secrete, hide or lie.

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...This is the angriest book -- by far the angriest book -- that one has ever read. If Thomas were not a Justice, his book would be called a polemic, or a screed. To have written such a book sixteen years into the continuing honor of being a Justice of the Supreme Court is more than the word “amazing� can signify. There are, roughly speaking, about one million lawyers in this country. Nine of them, or one in about every 111,000 are on the Supreme Court. That’s less than one one-thousandth of one percent of them, if my arithmetic is right. There are 300 million people in this country, and only the same nine of them are Supreme Court Justices. That’s less than one three hundred thousandths of one percent, if my arithmetic is right. With an accomplishment like this, Thomas is angry? One thinks there must be something fundamentally wrong with this guy....

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This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
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Programs to clean up the environment are often resisted because they would be an expense, a very large one. But wouldn’t they simultaneously be a fantastic investment opportunity that would work wonders for employment, incomes, return on capital, the economy in general?

...Now, with an endowment of 22.5 billion dollars, Yale can spend 80 million dollars per year on student aid though it couldn’t afford this with a puny endowment of 10, or 12 or 14 or 17 billion. Now that is funny.

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Our entire method of campaigning is insane, and has zero to do with showing the ability or wisdom to govern wisely...we are in need of a third party devoted to doing the right thing in the right way. It seems at least possible that Michael Bloomberg might be the person to lead that charge...

...The constant, sometimes even continuous, failure of moral courage ...is a hallmark of American life.... There was a continuous failure of moral courage regarding civil rights during the 1940s, 1950s and up until the mid 1960s. A failure of moral courage caused us to get deeper and deeper into the disaster of Viet Nam, as the Democrats refused to act against “their� President, Lyndon Johnson, even though so many of them knew that we were in fact neck deep in disaster... A failure of moral courage has rendered the Democratic Party a nullity from the beginning in regard to Gulf II. It causes legislators, executive officials and judges to let big business get away with... the destruction of democracy as we once thought we knew it...

...The ignoring of intelligence, the doctoring of truth, the lies, were one of those things we’ve seen repeatedly from 1950 onwards: the Gulf of Tonkin in Viet Nam, body counts there, denials of escalation there, hiding of secret wars in Southeast Asia, WMDs in Iraq, denials of torture - - you name it, we’ve had it. (General) MacArthur set the stage, if not the pattern....

Michael Mukasey.. does not know if waterboarding is torture? The son of a (expletive) cannot bring himself to say that a technique used in a Spanish war against his own people, a technique considered torture for 500 years, is torture?... I cannot grasp it even if one were to say Mukasey has acted out of ambition to become Attorney General. It seems to me like a desertion of the most basic human values that a Jewish guy from New York City, and from a religious prep school no less, must have been exposed to all the time.

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...A few nights ago, I heard Lou Dobbs say on TV... that Americans do not want to vote for any of the people who currently are running for president. One thinks Dobbs right, and when you read Novak’s book you might also think that, in a system which is comprised so extensively, even almost exclusively, of the kinds of despicables whom Novak finds everywhere in Washington and the state capitols, such a horrible choice as we now have is only to be expected...

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...The Times contributed greatly to getting us into the Iraq disaster in the first place by its credulous reporting on WMDs...and it then helped keep us in that disaster via contributing to Bush’s 2004 victory by kowtowing to Administration claims and withholding the story of the NSA spying...

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Weep for Harvard. Weep for the academic world. Weep for an America where immoral fraudulence is so de rigueur that reports of it don’t even raise an eyebrow among the powerful, but are instead regarded by them as simply the way everyday business is done.

Jacob Hale Russell's article A Million Little Authors, written for the November/December 2007 issue of Harvard's alumni magazine, 02138, is appended.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education's annual Executive Compensation issue is out and boy do those president's make a lot of jack...though not compared to those invaluable football coaches don't you know...

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...one has seen the transition from a society whose culture favored equality to a society whose culture favors truly vast inequality -- a country where it is regarded as appropriate for CEOs to make 300 and 400 times what the average workers in their companies make and for hedge fund managers to make 1.7 billion dollars a year and pay tax at only a 15 percent rate, a country where the salary of the average guy hasn’t improved much, if at all, in constant dollars for 30 years, a country where all our politicians are owned by the rich as in the first Gilded Age and where the mass media is in thrall to the rich and powerful...

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There are.. some problems with Goldsmith’s little mea non culpa. What the CIA had been doing is torture pure and simple, and nothing that Levin said, or George Bush says, can change that fact. You can call the sky a floor if you want, but that won’t make it one, and you can call waterboarding a friendly gesture if you want, but that won’t make it something other than torture.

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... to not know that prisoners were being transferred for torture, Goldsmith would have had to be living under a rock during his time at DOD and must have completely failed to read pertinent OLC torture memos ...None of this seemed plausible and now, thanks to Goldsmith’s own book, we know he read and was horrified by torture memos after he was put in charge of OLC and long before he wrote the transfer memo.

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any lawyer in private practice who tortured law or ignored fact to give support and cover to a client’s gravely illegal conduct would be subject to disbarment, subject to criminal prosecution, and disqualified from being on any respectable law school faculty. How or why it should be different for lawyers who did such things to facilitate the gravest governmental misconduct, conduct which involved torture and sometimes murder, is something that escapes me.

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It is also obvious that Bush is going to leave to his successor the awful question of what to do with terrorists whom we’ve tortured, held incommunicado, detained indefinitely. These people can’t be convicted in civilian courts...Then too it is again obvious that the Democrats aren’t going to force Bush to bring home the troops by cutting off funds for the war. They have neither the brains nor the guts to cut our losses (the way a smart business cuts its losses).

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Michigan has joined Harvard as the victims of what likely are the two greatest upsets in college football history. And now Michigan, as a fellow victim, has finally achieved its many, many decades’ old desire to be the Harvard of the West.

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Yesterday a posting here said we need a new kind of candidate instead of the typical amicable mediocrities who go from door to door or state to state for months or years on end in order to be elected...Today, by freak fortuity, I turned on CSpan II for a few minutes, and saw Bloomberg making a speech at Brookings on efforts to reduce poverty. To my personal amazement, he seemed to be the kind of person who met the vision offered in yesterday’s posting.

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It does not seem likely to me that one can comfortably rely on either of the current two major parties to overthrow the ultimately-disaster-producing national security state. ...Only a new party dedicated to fundamentally different ideas about America and the world will, in reality, be able to end the national security state. (Or do you really expect the Democrats to do it, if elected?)

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...secrecy, and the dishonesty it spawns, do little but create disaster...virtually every societal and economic disaster has gestated in secrecy. The Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam, the bombing of Cambodia, and Laos, the savings and loan debacle, the Enron debacle and the associated economic disaster -- all of these were hatched in secrecy and associated lies. For practical purposes, so was the current war in Iraq.

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Can the government stop someone who has no other options from trying to save his or her own life? According to a recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the answer is no.

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This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
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This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

Maybe electing Joe Biden would be a very good thing.... A third party could support Biden as its candidate too if he were to win the Democratic nomination.

and... a follow up observation about Jean Edward Smith and stacking the court...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

Is a huge misdeed,
Yet not momentous
Nor portentous.
For it�s only the latest in the line
Of serial crime
That has victimized men
When they�re home again
From the wars....

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.msl.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

It is often said that truth is dead
When the guns begin to shoot....

...Who must shoot and wound and maybe kill
Arabs -- who pay the butchers bill;
Or bomb a village --
Which we would never, never pillage;
And may lose an arm, a leg, or more,
Or leave bits of brain on an Iraqi floor. ...