From The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman — Originally published Wednesday, Jan. 7

To the list of spectacular and disastrous government failures under the administration of President George W. Bush … add another: the Securities and Exchange Commission. Change at the top is coming soon with a new administration, and not a minute too soon.

In the Bernard Madoff scandal, the SEC … has its own Hurricane Katrina …

There may be thousands of victims, and they aren’t limited to fat-cat investors who should have known better. They include many charitable organizations …

The SEC was warned several times over the past decade or so that there was something fishy about Madoff’s business. The SEC never did much about it. Madoff was highly respected, and over the last eight years the Bush administration was not one to push financial regulators to enforce the law.

The scale of the SEC’s failure in this case is so staggering that even its outgoing chairman, Christopher Cox, a former Republican congressman from California appointed by Bush, called for an internal probe into why his agency had failed to investigate what he called “credible and specific allegations” about Madoff dating back to 1999. …