Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and proprietor of LewRockwell.com, discusses how voting propagates the myth of a representative participatory democracy, the virtue of not voting, the continuation of election fraud from ballot stuffing to computerized tampering, voting as sacrament to the state religion, why imposing higher thresholds of voting eligibility would be an improvement and how Ron Paul’s prescience about the economy and his widely heard public criticism of the Federal Reserve has more than compensated for the blame free markets, and by extension libertarianism, are getting for the financial crisis.

MP3 here. (37:19)

Lew Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California, and publisher of the political Web site LewRockwell.com. He served as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff between 1978 and 1982. Check out his new podcast show here.

Daphne Eviatar, lawyer and journalist for the Washington Independent, discusses the Bush Administration’s semantic games that are redefining torture, how John Yoo’s justification of waterboarding conveniently ignored numerous contradictory court precedents, the familiar refrain of fitting legal opinions around the policy, why the Hamdan ruling doesn’t help detainees outside of Guantanamo and how the growing Bagram prison and other “black” detention facilities remain outside the law and hidden from scrutiny.

MP3 here. (33:03)

Daphne Eviatar is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Legal Affairs, Mother Jones, the Washington Independent and many others. She is a Senior Reporter at The American Lawyer and was an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow in 2005 and a Pew International Journalism fellow in 2002.