Free Republic

Members of Congress already get better health insurance and retirement benefits than other Americans. They are about to get better insider trading laws as well. Several academic studies show that the investment portfolios of congressmen and senators consistently outperform stock indices like the Dow and the S&P 500, as well as the portfolios of virtually all professional investors. Congressmen do better to an extent that is statistically significant, according to studies including a 2004 article about "abnormal" Senate returns by Alan J. Ziobrowski, Ping Cheng, James W. Boyd and Brigitte J. Ziobrowski in the Journal of Financial and Qualitative Analysis....

Attorney General Holder being questioned.

The Broward Teacher's Union has a new administrator, amidst a financial investigation. John Tarka has been appointed by the American Federation of Teachers to be the head of the BTU. "Our primary concern with the American Federation of Teachers is to make sure that our children are doing well...

Just like clockwork, the Obama administration never misses an opportunity to unload thousands of records it hopes no one will ever bother sifting through during the holidays. On Black Friday, the White House released more visitor log info — trumpeting disclosures it has fought tooth and nail. I’ve started looking through the data. And you can, too, right here:

Guys like Bill Cellini don't get indicted in Illinois. And the puppet masters don't sit at the defense table in federal court, tapping their fingers, waiting for the jury to pronounce judgment. *snip* They're Democrats, they're Republicans. They're the bosses of the Combine. *snip* All involved should know that their ((prosecutors)) work is appreciated, by every taxpayer in this thoroughly corrupt state who've wondered how the puppet masters of the Combine keep getting away with it. On Tuesday, they didn't get away with it. And Bill Cellini went down.

Hundreds of Long Island Rail Road employees may have cheated their way to big pensions through a $1 billion fraud by paying off doctors to say they were unable to work, authorities said

Well they finally did it to themselves. At least now, and at least in one state, Democrat politicians are starting to feel the effects of the type of accounting fraud they committed on the country for the last three years.  As the Obama “It’s-not-my-fault” Reelection Tour rumbles westward spewing diesel-powered and politically enhanced particulate matter, charges of fraud are overhanging the Democrats’ fall campaign in California. But the charges aren’t the familiar “I see dead people voting” scams that usually accompany left-leaning races. Instead they are fraud charges of the Madoff kind.California Democrat uber-finance guru, Kinde Durkee, apparently has been...

Former Gov. Joe Kernan says a signature on a petition to place Barack Obama's name on Indiana's 2008 primary ballot isn't his, putting him among dozens of dubious signatures found in a newspaper's investigation. Kernan, a Democrat who campaigned for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary, told the South Bend Tribune that he didn't sign the Obama document. "No, not at all," the former South Bend mayor said when asked whether the signature next to his name on the Obama petition looked like his own. "Nor does the printing look like mine." The Tribune reported Wednesday that it has talked...

Breaking on Fox ...

An audit of the Federal Reserve has revealed that the privately owned Federal Reserve secretly doled out more than $16 trillion in zero interest loans to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world. The non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress also determined that the Fed acted illegally. In fact, according to the report, the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to its employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans. The report is evidence that reveals major securities fraud...

Three Wake County, North Carolina, Democrats have admitted to voter fraud charges, according to local news reports.Kierra Fontae Leache, Shelia Romona Hodges and Brandon Earl Mclean each admitted to casting two ballots in recent elections. Local reports indicate all three voted for President Barack Obama twice in 2008.According to ABC News Channel 11 in Raleigh-Durham, authorities have placed the three on $10,000 bonds.The North Carolina Republican Party says this kind of fraudulent voter behavior is why the state needs a voter ID law. In July, Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue vetoed state Republicans’ latest attempt at instituting such a law, calling...

Senate Democrats are charging taxpayers for a trip to Hawaii, The Daily Caller has learned. The entire press staff of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is in Maui, even though a field hearing there won’t happen until next Wednesday. The committee’s oversight field hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday at 9 a.m. at the Maui Beach Hotel, will focus on “Strengthening Self-Sufficiency: Overcoming Barriers to Economic Development in Native Communities.” Rick Manning from Americans for Limited Government, which first discovered the hearing, told TheDC it’s unbelievable that Hill staffers talking about fiscal responsibility would waste money on a trip to Maui....

The appearance of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at the Lied Center last week was a reminder of the fluidity in American society that allows talent and drive — not birthright and connection — to earn power and wealth. Although both men came from comfortable backgrounds, neither was born to that old wealth stratum of American society that sometimes seems to be tantamount to an aristocracy. Dressed casually, they sat on a couple of stools, cracking jokes, speaking plainly, fielding unscripted questions. “They seemed like ordinary people, very normal, very knowledgeable and funny,” observed Yong Zhao, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln...

As Wisconsin heads toward lifting a ban on carrying concealed weapons, researchers at the University of California-Davis have turned up some unsettling information about those who may take advantage of the law. In a study using 15-year-old data -- the most recent available -- published online in the journal Injury Prevention, the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program says those who carried concealed weapons or who had confronted someone with a gun were twice as likely to be heavy drinkers than non-gun owners. Gun owners who drove with loaded weapons were four times more likely to hop behind the wheel...

Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated Gov. Scott Walker's plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.

When the world didn't end on May 21, many people who had given up their earthly possessions were left with nothing. But one believer never lived to see the day. She left nearly her entire estate - around $300,000 - to the group behind the failed prediction, leaving some family members out in the cold. Eileen Heuwetter was shocked to find out that her aunt left the majority of her estate to Family Radio, the group responsible for the doomsday warnings that the world would end on May 21. She and her sister were each left $25,000 from their aunt's...

<p>Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Friday that it has hired former U.S. Senator Judd Gregg as an international adviser.</p> <p>Gregg, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, joins a group of 17 international advisers to the New York-based investment bank and its clients, and will assist in business development initiatives.</p>

More than 100 employees of the Internal Revenue Service cheated the government by fraudulently claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages, according to federal investigators. The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, in several reports over the past few years, has identified a total of 128 IRS employees who claimed the credit but who also made other claims that showed they either weren’t first-time buyers or bought their homes outside the eligibility period for the credit, which was worth up to $8,000. Meanwhile, one other IRS employee has been charged with...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is in trouble again. Still reading? If you are, you must be a Goldman employee, regulator, class-action lawyer, financial journalist or trolling the Internet for news about Steve Jobs. (See how I dropped the name to make this column more Google-friendly?) No one seems to care much about Goldman's latest troubles, and many Americans seem numb to more allegations of wrongdoing related to the financial crisis. Yet they keep coming, especially at Goldman. One of the biggest was last week's disclosure that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's staff has "orally advised" the company that it "intends...

EL PASO, Texas -- Luther Jones and Gilbert Sanchez were taken into custody Wednesday afternoon after a jury found them guilty of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Twelve jurors agreed Jones and Sanchez devised a scheme to make money and defraud the citizens of El Paso County of honest services by rigging a multi-million dollar contract to digitize records in the district clerk’s office in 2004. The jury reached the guilty verdict around 1:30 p.m. after deliberating for roughly seven hours over two days. Jones and Sanchez showed little visible reaction to the verdict,...