and any attempts to regulate it meaningfully, I give you Elizabeth Warren. She'll probably get iced like "Dawn Johnson".

Of course the powers that be (media and banking/finance/equity market blood funnelers) will, as Glenn points out, go to the tried and true playbook and fearmonger, smear, character assassinate, and label it all so so so very unserious. They'll even pull out some stops and find an NYU dean to do it by proxie.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a.DEiDrOr.ms&pos=10

Warren nomination would tell banks that Obama is determined to force reduced checking-account fees and limit lender claims in mortgage advertising, among other measures the industry opposes, said Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“She is an ideological crusader,” Cooley said in an interview. “She is a person who will stir up a lot of trouble.” In a column in Forbes magazine, Cooley accused her of “waging a self-righteous holy war.”

[snip]

The $700 billion bailout hasn’t stopped the “culture of excessive risk-taking” that led to the financial crisis, Warren said today during an oversight panel hearing. TARP has “injected an unprecedented level of pricing distortions and moral hazard into the marketplace,” she said.

Back to the playbook. Let's run RedDawg 27 Right On 2. Ready break.

The agency’s opponents, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable, contend another layer of regulation would bury small community banks and rob consumers of freedom of choice in making basic financial decisions.

“It is positively Orwellian that, through this legislation, Democrats will empower an unelected bureaucrat to tell their fellow citizens whether or not they can fly on an airplane, take a vacation or purchase a home,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican on Warren’s TARP panel, said Oct. 22. He declined through his spokesman, George Rasley, to be interviewed for this story.

This can't be right. Mr. Blankfein and his buddies are doing "God's work." Except now Blankfein says maybe "some misakes were made" and doles out a paltry $500 million in charity to small businesses (paltry 2.5% of the the value of bonuses GS will dole out---"Ooooooh the pain of giving").

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/79188.html

Apparently GS according Blankfein was "not responsible, before it was responsible".

Matt Taibbi's charicature is spot on "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

And Eliot Spitzer would probably agree if he wasn't afraid of having more of his skeletons come leaking out of the closet when he's trying to rehabilitate his reputation.

http://www.businessinsider.com/spitzer-on-goldman-taibbi-and-the-vampire-squid-2009-7

The desire to achieve convictions at all costs is simply not an acceptable basis for the creation of an alternative legal system. The reason that the military commissions failed, indeed, the primary mistake of the entire “War on Terror” was the pervasive abandonment of the rule of law by the prior administration. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past and continue to cut corners. We must remember that this war is ultimately a war about ideas and values. True American values guarantee justice and fairness for all, even for the vilified and unpopular. If there are terrorists and war criminals to be tried, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, in a fair fight in a real court with untainted evidence. America is better than the last eight years. It is time to prove it to the world, and to ourselves. Thank you.

http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Frakt090730.pdf

Why, with the entire resources of the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the national intelligence apparatus at their disposal, were the military commissions such an abysmal failure? The answer is simple: the military commissions were built on a foundation of legal distortions and outright illegality. The rules, procedures and substantive law created for the commissions were the product of, or were necessitated by, the wholesale abandonment of the rule of law by the Bush Administration in the months after 9/11. In the United States of America, any such legal scheme is ultimately doomed to fail.

We squawked and squawked and squawked that this was going to happen and what did we get for it: we got labeled unAmerican traitors to our country all because we knew that the rule of law IS the foundation of America and that to abandon it would doom us, and the victims and families of 9-11 from holding the culpable parties accountable and jeopardize their chances at seeing meaningful justice done.

You can thank the Bush administration and the cowards in Congress. Don't blame the people that warned you.

the Power to do a thing and the Legal Right to do a thing.

It may be true that the US in WWII took the battle to where the Germans, Japanese and the Italians were but that doesn't means we had a Constitutionally enumerated or inferred Right to "liberate" anybody. We declared "war" on the nation-states of Germany, Japan and Italy and by extension their militaries whereever they had spread to all over the globe. Lots of nation-states gave us limited permission by agreement to station troops or materials in their sovereign lands.

That is wholly different than what is going on here and now since the AUMF.