The U. S. Senate race in Minnesota has attracted two Democrats that have each reached the highest levels of success in their respective careers. Mike Ciresi is a respected trial lawyer that beat big tobacco in Minnesota. Al Franken is a St. Louis Park guy whose fame followed his wit and irreverent humor. .

My high school classmate and Roosevelt High School Sub-Standard co-editor, Nobel Prize winning Dr. Peter Agre has chosen not to run this time. Not enough cash, I suspect. Too bad as Peter would have been an incredible Senator.

How then does the trial lawyer and the comedian stand up against Norm Coleman? I personally think each is going to have a very difficult time with Mr. Coleman. He was a high end lawyer himself before entering the political arena. He has shown himself to be adroit at maximizing political opportunities. He has been featured in a Senatorial light following the 35W bridge collapse.

More importantly, I think that a trial lawyer will be attacked for being greedy and self interested. The comedian will be postured as someone that the electorate will not take seriously. Each theme is superficial and substantively false. What scares me is the fact that the Swift Boat thing worked pretty well.

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This Sunday, the Associated Press reports that Navy Veteran Donald Vance was imprisoned for blowing the whistle on illegal arms sales by an Iraqi owned company. This company was selling guns, land mines and rockets for cash to Iraqi insurgents, U.S. soldiers, State Department workers and Iraq government employees. The irony is that he was imprisoned by the U.S. military. It was solitary confinement.

We have previously reported about Bunny Greenhouse on false-claims-act.com. Bunny was the highest ranking civilian contracting officer of the Army Corps of Engineers. In 2005 she testified concerning a widespread fraud in awarding government contracts to a subsidiary of Halliburton. As thanks for her vigilance, she was demoted to a position with no authority.

Really scary was a decision of our federal court that overturned a jury verdict in favor of a whistleblower that brought to public attention a millions of dollars scandal being perpetrated by Custer Battles, a contractor stealing from our government under the guise of doing reconstruction work in Iraq. Although the fraud was proven, the conduct was implicitly sanctioned by the federal district court ruling that the whistle blower could not win because the entity that was being defrauded was not the U.S. government, but rather the Coalition Provisional Authority.

It is real tough to foster change. There is incredible power that is protecting large corporations. We must continue the fight.

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I will add my reflections on the enormous tragedy suffered here in Minnesota with the collapse of the I-35W Bridge across the Mississippi River.

Bridges in America Should not Fall!!!!!! There is no excuse -none- for this avoidable, horrific catastrophe. The inspectors knew about it, warned about it and the politicos did nothing and people died. This is the type of gutless leadership that we continue to elect. People that wait for the shoe to fall and then say they are praying.

I pray for responsible government.

Bridges in Minnesota Should Not Fall!!!!

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The federal judge presiding over the whistleblower qui tam case brought by Bobby Maxwell has thrown out a 7.6 million dollar jury verdict in his favor on the basis that in oder for him to properly bring the case he must have “voluntarily” disclosed the fraud. In determining that Mr. Maxwell, as a government auditor, had a duty to disclose the fraud to his superiors at the Department of the Interior the court ruled that he could not be both a required reporter and a “voluntary” reporter at the same time.

This decision will no doubt be appealed and may find its way to the Supreme Court. The judge did not challenge the fact that Mr. Maxwell had only sued as a private citizen after the government had ordered him to abandon his findings that Kerr-McGee was cheating the government out of millions of dollars in oil and gas royalties it owed for resources it was pumping from public coastal waters.

This court’s decision will have a chilling effect on efforts to uncover government fraud. It should come to no one’s surprise that our government is oftentimes too close to the industries it is regulating. Indeed, in recent years we have learned that many regulatory agencies are run and staffed not by regulators but industry profiteers that continue to have deep seated interests with the companies they are regulating.

If the lower court decision in Bobby Maxwell’s case stands, it will be another blow to the efforts of citizens of this country to hold corporate wrongdoers accountable.

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Ask an American what makes his/her country great.  What does the American tell you?

“It is our standard of living.” “It is our democracy.”  “It is our educational system.”  “It is our freedom of religion.”  “It is our right to travel without fear within our borders.”  “It is our right to due process.”  ” It is our charitable nature”.  “It is our military.”

All of these answers are correct—and here is the reason.  They all depend on the People of the United States to make it happen.

Today, I am in New Orleans attending a seminar on taking better depositions in an era of tremendous juror bias against Plaintiff attorneys and the people we represent. You would think that after 32 years of practicing law and taking hundreds of depositions I wouldn’t need the training.  That is a whole other story for another time–suffice it to say an old dog must and should learn new and better ways to help his client win.

Our country is great because we  have loving hearts and generous souls.  When you look into the eyes of the residents of New Orleans I have no idea of the pain, the suffering or the individual stories.

But we connect with our eyes, with our soul and with our common pride in our country.  The surviving New Orleans eyes are more experienced today than they were before Katrina.  But they are laughing eyes.  They are welcoming eyes.  They are the window to the soul which is the strength of America.

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