During a deposition, Vincent Kelly (DEA Special Agent in the asset forfeiture division covering all of New England) stated that his job is “primarily just mainly looking for property to be forfeited.” And how does he do that “looking?” He trolls the Internet for Registry of Deeds “to find out who owns the property,” and “how much equity is on the property.” Then he contacts local law enforcement – in this case, the Tewksbury Police – to see if any crimes have been reported on the property.

The incentive for locals in this confiscation racket is called “equitable sharing,” which can yield them up to 80 percent of the booty. In the Caswell case, that could mean $1.2 million for the Tewksbury police to spend on new cars, uniforms, hi-tech equipment, junkets to Hawaii. Meanwhile, Caswell and his wife will have been impoverished.

As you’re aware, people will let you down and also be the same door stop that prevents one from going forward….. I think that when others see folks struggling, the first step is the try and help….. Then, for whatever reasons…. When they are succeeding…. People intentionally or unintentionally put stops in the way…… I think Steven Jobs book is a good read…. So I prefer for the most part to fly solo….

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57565927-38/swartz-didnt-face-prison-until-feds-took-over-case-report-says/

“State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.”

Thanks, shano.

Here is a link to the court’s copy.

My own personal angry bottom line (which is what I felt acutely on 9/11/2001 as I drove around to grocery stores to make deliveries of rice and beans to those families I knew who had children) is “GOOD; let the whole country get involved in what it’s like to be attacked and brought down for no reason. GOOD; let’s spread this around a little and see how they like it.”

Just when we think we have the problem covered, bei it Obam’s appointments or whatever, YOU then show us the HORRENDOUS system that must be re-done. And nobody in their right mind dares to suggest a how to do that idea.

It is in our courts the cases are decided, but it also is the laws and bureaucracy that enables the initiative to prosecute.

I won’t touch on such practicalities as availability of lawyers or their payment..

For if that were solved (impossible), then restrictions on court resources would set a stop.

Could we get (in a dream world) an act of Congress, that would stop all non-constitutionas cases and devote resources to processing on big C cases—–Ah, that would be a dream fulfilled.

I wrote you a long missive, and my computer apparently needs “re-formatting after 5 years of use” and the crap ain’t stable and WordPress stuff goes down the drain. The link goes down no visible or audible warning.

Yo, thanks for the Pecora commission.
Try this. Point. Using amendments was slow work so they found the loophole in the tax clause which they have used for everything enacted by Congress since then.

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

I wrote on cynicism and gullibility too, but will get back later on that. But gullible Swedes suit me fine. And JT’s has confirmed my latent cynicism.

Historical cry in some circles. Now it is all of us.

Enough of this formality in referring to our President. Same with doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs.

I am hip to calling the Affordable Care Act as BarryCare.. No Child Left Behind as BushieKids. Military Industrial Complex as Ike’s World.

I’m not saying what Obama did was constitutional. I’m saying our courts stink worse than a campers’ outhouse in a Southern summer and “unconstitutional” defines the normal everyday removal of the fundamental rights of thousands of hapless people ground up in their corrupt masticating jaws and I frankly do not care if an appointment of an official to serve in an obstructionist federal soul-destroying conscience-free clique is kosher or not. I wish somebody would address really important denials of really important constitutional rights — the kind that make it impossible for a 71-year-old man who worked for 52 years and has no pension and no back-up to get dental treatment when he has a tooth-ache. As for the rest of it, let it be unconstitutional. We’re a sociopathic bunch of self-important punks for all we show of either national pride or common responsibility and I am glad — GLAD — GLAD! — that finally nearly everyone in this country is beginning to feel what “UNCONSTITUTIONAL” really means. I wish us nothing more nor less than what we now deserve; I got it long ago and the rest of us need their shares put into big print so they can read it: NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

And this ruling even had the foresight to address the cacophony of expected objections (as we heard here) relating to so-called “needless” “minority” Republican “crazy” “obstructionists” who “flipped Obama the bird” due in part to “race”:

In any event, if some administrative inefficiency results from our construction of the original meaning of the Constitution, that does not empower us to change what the Constitution commands. As the Supreme Court observed in INS v. Chadha, “the fact that a given law or procedure is efficient, convenient, and useful in facilitating functions of government, standing alone, will not save it if it is contrary to the Constitution.” 462 U.S. at 944. It bears emphasis that “[c]onvenience and efficiency are not the primary objectives—or the hallmarks—of democratic government.”

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.
Middlesex County’s district attorney had planned no jail time, “with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner,” the report (alternate link) said. “Tragedy intervened when Ortiz’s office took over the case to send ‘a message.’”
The report is likely to fuel an online campaign against Ortiz, who has been criticized for threatening the 26-year-old with decades in prison for allegedly downloading a large quantity of academic papers. An online petition asking President Obama to remove from office Ortiz — a politically ambitious prosecutor who was talked about as Massachusetts’ next governor as recently as last month.
Ortiz, 57, also came under fire this week for her attempt to seize a family-owned motel in Tewksbury, Mass., for allegedly facilitating drug crimes, despite ample evidence that the owners worked closely with local police. In a stinging rebuke, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein tossed out the case yesterday, siding with the motel owners — represented by the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice — and noting (PDF) that prosecutors had alleged a mere “15 specific drug-related incidents” over a 14-year period during which “the Motel Caswell rented out approximately 196,000 rooms.”
“I don’t think she should have the power she has to pull this stuff on people,” Russ Caswell, owner of the Motel Caswell, told the Boston Herald last night. One reason prosecutors file forfeiture cases is that proceeds from the sale of seized property can be used to fund the budgets of law enforcement agencies. (Other nearby businesses that also experienced infrequent drug-related activity were not, however, targeted by Ortiz.)
The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly report was written by Harvey Silverglate, a prominent Cambridge criminal defense lawyer whose clients have included Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is of counsel to the firm that initially represented Swartz in his attempts to defend himself against 13 felony charges brought by Ortiz’s office. Those charges carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.
Silverglate told CNET today that:
“Continuance without a finding” was the anticipated disposition of the case were the charge to remain in state court, with the Middlesex County District Attorney to prosecute it. Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance (“continued”) without any verdict (“without a finding”). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested for “trespassing at MIT.” But then the feds took over the case, and the rest is tragic history.
Ortiz has defended her actions as appropriate. A representative for Ortiz’s office did not respond to a request this afternoon for comment on this story. A representative for Gerard Leone Jr., Middlesex County’s district attorney, said she did not have an immediate response to questions about Swartz’s prosecution.
‘Aaron’s Law’

• Neelie Kroes, the vice president of the European Commission, wrote in a blog post that: “If our laws, frameworks, and practices stand in the way of us getting all those benefits, then maybe they need to be changed.”
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted additional suggestions for “Aaron’s Law,” an effort to rewrite the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in response to Swartz’s prosecution.
• Harvard professor Larry Lessig said he would give the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership lecture on Feburary 19 on “Aaron’s Law.”
• Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley, wrote that academia “betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz.”
• Open-records pioneer Carl Malamud spoke about “Aaron’s Army” at a memorial service at the Internet Archive yesterday.
Ortiz compared Swartz to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,” Ortiz said at the time. Earlier this month, less than three months before the criminal trial was set to begin, Ortiz’s office formally rejected a deal that would have kept Swartz out of prison. Two days later, Swartz committed suicide.
“He was killed by the government,” Swartz’s father, Robert, said last week at the funeral in Highland Park, Ill., according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.
Swartz was accused of 13 felony counts relating to connecting a computer to MIT’s network without authorization and retrieving over 4 million academic journal articles from the JSTOR database (he was permitted to access JSTOR because of his Harvard affiliation, but not to perform a bulk download). The advocacy group Demand Progress, which Swartz had helped to create and which helped to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act a year ago, likened it to “trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service.
But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatened the free-culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as the week before he killed himself. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, has proposed rewriting those laws.
The Boston U.S. Attorney’s office was looking for “some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron’s case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill,” Elliot Peters, Swartz’s attorney at the Keker & Van Nest law firm, told the Huffington Post. Heymann, Peters says, thought the Swartz case “was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57565927-38/swartz-didnt-face-prison-until-feds-took-over-case-report-says/

6 kids were invited in to play a game in order to win prizes. 30 Mexican kids; 30 American kids, all about 6 years old. They were all paired off by 2′s (15 pairs of American kids, 15 pairs of Mexican kids). They were given a game board that had a bunch of slots in a straight line, and each then had a little stone (one kid white stone, one kid black stone) that started on the square first in front of one kid. They were told the rules:

You can only move one space forward or one space backward, either your own stone or the other guy’s stone, and you cannot move any other way. Whoever gets to the other side first wins a prize and then you both start again. You can either move YOUR piece forward when it’s your turn, or you move the OTHER person’s piece BACKward with that same move, but not both. You can even move your own piece backwards or the other person’s piece FORWARD. Any way you want, but never TWO squares in one move. You take turns for who goes first.

GO!

The Mexican kids all (or nearly all) played the game quickly, winning gobs of prizes, by the method of BOTH KIDS moving one of their pieces in the winning direction, turn by turn. They’d move one’s piece to the other side quickly and then start over and move the other person’s piece to their side quickly, racking up the prizes.

The American kids mostly played a blocking game. As soon as one moved his own piece forward, the other used his turn to move that same piece BACK, leaving it where it was before his turn. They kept doing this and nobody won any prizes.

The Republicans in Congress have played the blocking game. Just keep impeding, preventing, blocking, destabilizing, stopping, and interfering with government. Seeking failure just so they can say the administration failed. They don’t even care if the losses are AMERICA’s losses. Shame on them.

So what do you suggest when the Congress has literally flipped Obama a bird on everything he tries to get done? It seems to me that some members of Congress (McConnell comes to mind) are committing treason when they announce that their entire goal for 4 yrs (and now another 4 yrs) was to get rid of the President.

I’d add, “OR PROVE HE WAS NO GOOD.”

Prove Obama was not worth voting for no matter what happens. Prove we were not wrong; prove we were right about him not being a good president.

He is already rich so no worries, always been rich too.
Hard to buy someone like that who is standing on principal.

BTW, ID707, your ‘gullibility’ as you call it, and some of your talk, reminds me very much of a friend of mine who was born in Sweden but came to the US with his family as a young boy.

Of course we can, agreement is not necessary for that.

But I still use my sour harp and play a dirge to most positive comments.

Did we not recently see how the BATF is in fact circumscribed in re guns to being a non-operative agency by congressional restrictions? What a shock that was to me. And is the BATF alone. Nix.

Previous study shows many other guard dogs not functioning except as a scenery. No industry has any regard for any of them..

So regardless of who is nominated, and it is guaranteed it will be a willing slave, he will operate as a sleight of hand artist in fooling the public and secretly cooperating with the industry to be regulated..

SEC is no exception IMHO.

How would you like it if your students just called you Turley with no Professor in front? Say, they raise their hand in class and say: Yo, Turley!
It is purposeful of course. I do it too when I speak about the war criminals like Bushie and Cheney.

As for the rest, I agree with the second comment above by Magginkat.
Government does not function here when Congress is in session. They are in recess early and often.
Mitch McConnell needs to have his own cartoon show. Or perhaps Sesame Street could put him with Big Bird. He is such a dumb looking sum itchBay. He does it on purpose to cater to his constituents. I came from them parts myself when I was a human in a prior incarnation and we did not talk so dorky. It is all a Con. A republiCon. And Congress is never in Recess, even when they are home for the holidays. And the Supreme Court does not take off work for July, August and September either. No, they are working on Circuit. And doing cert petitions. And sawing logs. And using ScaliaCare to buy oxycotton.

I for pragmatically taking a brick bat to the creeps that have brought down our economy. If Spitzer is the guy, the junk yard dog as it were, let him have at it.

Hope we can still be friends

You are among the people that I highly respect. Were you serious when saying bring in Eliot Spitzer?

My knowledge being zero, I wikied and chose the Prostitution scandal article to read.

On that basis I would not trust him to walk my dog—-if I had one.

He established a reputation using his prosecutorial leeway to prosecute on ring, while ,in likelihood of what was determined happened later by investigations, using the services of a competing ring free of charge.

He, I believe, is one of those who compete in the world of the rich and powerful by showing off how crooked he could be to his competitors.

Surely it was NOT his salary as gov paying for the services. And adding the offshore delivery company just was his way of showing he was a high-roller.

Who the stupid banker who refused to do his hiding of the many transfers is perhaps known. Was it a temporary misstep? Or a man to run for President?

I trust that I have made my point—-likely all too well.

You obviously were kidding the gullible me (most likely) or hoping for a gapflab as we say in Swedish, ie covering our screens with coffee.

All was silence, but for one yea-voice. Clueless me does not know what your intentions were.

To be unpopular with Wall Street, is a pose, Does anybody dare cross them?

Impeach Obama. Show that he is only the lesser of two evils, and does not have our confidence. He is a traitor, and a perjurer of his own oath of office.

Proven each and every day, often with many separate decisions. As he himself said during his 2007 campaign: “A president must be able to juggle many issues at the same time.” And doing the bidding of Wall Street is just one of the many tasks, especially when Wall Street is calling the shots along with the financial sector. So saying yes to them is no strain at all.

He reads the exec papers during his morning squat and slips them under the threshold to the waiting aide, initialled and clear. A certain odor clings to them. Spreading his bacteria to one and all.

Put good ol’ Joe in the Oval with a gun aimed at his head, held by ?????,

The National Labor Relations Board on Friday declared that it remains open for business, despite a court ruling invalidating three of President Obama’s appointees to the board.

“The Board respectfully disagrees with today’s decision and believes that the President’s position in the matter will ultimately be upheld,” NLRB Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce said in a statement.

Pearce asserted that the ruling does not affect the board’s orders outside of the case decided Friday, Noel Canning v. NLRB, and noted that “similar questions have been been raised in more than a dozen cases pending in other courts of appeals.

“In the meantime, the Board has important work to do,” he said. “The parties who come to us seek and expect careful consideration and resolution of their cases, and for that reason, we will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions.”

In January 2012, Obama, with the advice of his Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that “pro forma” sessions were not real sessions, and thus that the Senate was in recess. He appointed three members to the NLRB, which began doing business.

One matter that came before it was a complaint against a soft-drink bottling company in Yakima, Washington, that had allegedly reneged on a written agreement with its union. The union won an order against the company in front of the NLRB itself; the company appealed to the D.C. Circuit, however, arguing that the NLRB didn’t really exist because three of its members had been “recess appointments.” Atlantic

Filibuster, y’know. ” The Atlantic Wire

“Big business orthodoxy against rules and regulations can seep into the bones, including the bones of new policymakers who are charged with protecting consumers and strengthening markets. Industry groupthink and overconfidence can prevent clear and evenhanded analysis of problems. The result can be a group of decision makers who are self-confident in the extreme and who end up clearing the path toward the sort of recklessness and excessive greed that have already broken the economy once.”

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=CAF693CB-DBCB-4F35-8430-BEC7F2DB682F

This just following Matt Taibbi’s piece (linked at 5:00, @ap above) where he references a former hedge fund manager, to wit,

‘ “That move, being a tough prosecutor, then going to work defending scumbags, you can only make that move once,” was his point. “You can’t go back again, you know what I mean?”’

(disclaimer I am not endorsing the words of any pol, even Warren, though what she is saying sounds good on it’s face)

Yep. Particularly what he said there about the N&P Clause being open to abuses. There is a good reason why he’s my favorite President and why he’s widely considered the smartest man to ever hold the job of President. It’s because he was the smartest and most prescient man to ever hold office.

Elaine,

You should know by now that my style is to try to be “moderate” in my pronouncements…….sometimes. I agree the train has left the station and I think it pulled out on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

“Fascism and chaos meet eventually, Mike.”

Gene,

This is quite true. In my thinking when I wrote that I was thinking of chaos in terms of the U.S. breaking down into numerous hostile satraps. Then again that might have always been the case.

“Did anybody ever see a successful sheep rebellion? This isn’t the time of the Reign of Terror in France. Here there are many Bastilles to storm.
And we do not starve yet. We do not organize. For that leads to chopped off heads. I know where my money is going, and it ain’t on chaos.”

ID707,

You have hit at the heart of the problem when it comes to radical change. When the many are moderately comfortable, rebellion becomes improbable. I wonder though since 30 million, or so, American’s are now living in poverty, what is the number that is the “tipping point”.

“When ever I read one of the Federalist Papers, I always get the feeling Madison was trying to convince himself.”

Braun,

It’s my guess that the majority of our Founding Fathers were wise enough to have great reservations about their system actually working. I think they gave it the best shot, which also included their own self-interest and hoped for the best. I personally don’t believe that there was ever a time when the overt ideals of the Revolution, or the operation of the Constitution was ever anywhere near what was hoped for by our founders.

OT – some thoughts on another potential appointment, that of Mary Jo White, current contender for progressive heart throb. Just another Trojan Horse?

—–

Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen House

by Matt Taibbi

POSTED: January 25, 9:00 AM ET

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/choice-of-mary-jo-white-to-head-sec-puts-fox-in-charge-of-hen-house-20130125

Excerpt:

The e-mail was dated September 8, 2005 and addressed to Paul Berger with the subject line, “Debevoise.” The body of the message read, “Mary Jo [White] just called. I mentioned your interest.”

So Berger was passing notes in class to Mary Jo White about wanting to work for Morgan Stanley’s law firm while he was in the middle of quashing an investigation into a major insider trading case involving the C.E.O. of the bank. After the case dies, Berger later gets the multimillion-dollar posting and the circle is closed.

This whole episode highlights everything that’s wrong with modern Wall Street. First of all, everybody’s buddies with each other – cops and robbers, no adversarial system at all. As Bill Murray would say, it’s dogs and cats, living together.

Here, a line investigator gets a good lead, it’s quickly taken out of his hands and the whole thing is negotiated at 50,000 feet by friends and former co-workers of the top regulators now working at hotshot firms.

If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he’s getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it, nominating the woman who helped John Mack get off on the slam-dunkiest insider trading case ever to cross an SEC investigator’s desk.

When I contacted Gary today, his take on it was simple. “Obama is not going to clean up financial corruption,” he said, “by pinning a sheriff’s badge on Wall Street’s protector-in-chief.”

Credit to Matt Taibbi: “As Bill Murray would say, it’s dogs and cats, living together.”

Professor Turley’s testimony before congress:

“I have long favored the original interpretation of the Clause: that it applies only to vacancies occurring during a recess. This interpretation is truer to the Constitution and would avoid many of the controversies of modern times. I readily admit that I am in the minority on that view …”

(from PDF of his testimony in previous post)

What the Constitution says seems to be the minority view more and more.

I am glad Professor Turley advocates what the text says in this case.

(Dredd – Turley Blog Comment). I think it is time that the Constitution is the one they are talking about when they take the oath to uphold it.

I think, in hind sight, the confederation group was probably right. There is too much power concentrated in the federal government. There is no system of checks and balances that could have kept the concentration of wealth and power of the ruling elite from happening. It should have never had a chance to happen. We were warned.

I cant say for sure but I am thinking even Jefferson may have seen the writing on the wall when he was writing the Kentucky Resolution of 1798.