On Thursday, the Senate voted 96-3 to ensure that the same insider trading laws that apply to citizens also extend  to members of Congress.

But as the Associated Press points out, elected officials enjoy at least seven legal exemptions that the rest of us do not:

Poor Planning Makes For Poor Attendance at Southern Republican Leadership Conference

Earlier today The Associated Press ran with this headline: “Gingrich cancels campaign event, poor attendance.”

But the lack of attendance isn’t because Gingrich isn’t popular, it’s because the event cost too much and the attendance is way too low, with the lowest tickets fetching a $1,000 a head. Sponsors who spoke with our team in the field said that promoters had misled them as to the number of tickets sold, telling them on the phone that more than 2,000 tickets had been. The event, in other words, was a total flop. There were barely a few dozen people in the huge College of Charleston arena.

Part of the problem was the organization for the event. A source we spoke to told us that the promoters didn’t even have an agenda until the event was underway and that nobody was there to greet people. “There wasn’t even anyone there to tell us whether to go to have our events,” the source said. “I would be ashamed if my name were associated with it.”

Below the sponsors pack it up because of lack of interest.

(more…)

The hacking collective known as Anonymous has allegedly targeted the Iowa caucus’s voting machines.

According to the Associated Press, there are two tools that the “hacktivists” could use to create some chaos. The first is a “denial of service” request, which sends thousands of requests to a website server and makes it useless. The second is a SQL injection, which inserts a code into a website’s software, thereby exploiting its vulnerabilities and forcing it to execute the hacker’s code.

It wouldn’t be the first time that SQL insertions were used to try to rock the vote. In Sweden’s elections in 2010 a voter tried to insert an SQL insertion in the vote by hand-writing. Presumably a hacker could try something similar at the Iowa caucus.

There are other worse examples of SQL insertions being dangerous. In 2010, Washington D.C. conducted a pilot project to allow overseas and military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the website. The city made the system open to the public for only three days, but that was just enough time for J. Alex Halderman, a professor in computer science at the Univesity of Michigan, to expose some of the systems flaws. Within 36 hours of the system going live, our team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters’ secret ballots,” Halderman wrote.

Alas, were such an attack carried out in the Iowa caucus, it wouldn’t be the first time an SQL inserted caused great harm. The Royal Navy’s website was attacked in that manner by a Romanian hacker.

(more…)

Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.

You’d never know it, though, because the mainstream media has been perpetuating one myth after another about Brazilian Blowout while ignoring the facts.   Last time, I wrote about a hatchet job made to appear as a legitimate study by Oregon OSHA [Note to Editor: Please link to Part 1] that was covered ad-nauseum by the media.

Yet, when a respected scientific association issued a balanced statement regarding Brazilian Blowout, the media spun it to make it appear that the company was fighting regulatory sampling of the product.  To wit: The American Chemistry Council, which actually manufactures formaldehyde, released a statement ten days before Oregon OSHA unveiled its biased “report”.

“We encourage the company that makes the Brazilian Blowout to cooperate fully with government officials to ensure that the product meets federal and state standards for formaldehyde use”.

Brazilian Blowout fully cooperated and, as thanks, was subjected to a biased and editorialized government report from Liberal environmentalists at Oregon OSHA.  Yet Time Magazine would have you believe that “The chemical industry is actually sort of coming down on the side of regulators and activist groups on the issue”, while quoting hack anti-capitalist enviro-wackos like Siobhan O’Connor.  The company’s side of the story, however, was omitted.

So, with the house already stacking the odds against Brazilian Blowout, Federal OSHA entered the fray.

(more…)

There are certain “types” of people who are just not allowed to be conservative. You know what I’m talking about. For example, a certain African American Supreme Court Justice will always be the subject of bilious contempt because he holds legal and constitutional views that differ from what a black public servant is expected to hold.

We saw this dynamic play out recently in the Washington Post’s vicious and sloppy attack on Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio is, of course, a quickly rising star in the Republican Party; one with broad – even national – appeal. Clearly the left knows the threat Sen. Rubio presents to its grip on Hispanic voters, so they felt it necessary to muddy him up with a shoddy news story questioning his family story.

Now come the attacks on New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez. The attacks on Martinez are much subtler than those on Sen. Rubio, but no less dangerous if left unanswered. They come in the form of a pervasive rumor about her family origins; a rumor that has been reported uncritically by the mainstream media, including the New York Times.

Here we have a popular and successful Latina politician with a bold, conservative agenda in an important swing state. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, there has to be a catch.

“Ms. Martinez, who grew up along the border, is also Mexican-American, with news reports since her election revealing that her paternal grandfather came to the United States as an illegal immigrant,” wrote Marc Lacey in a New York Times profile three months ago.

“…The New Mexican’s Sandra Baltazar Martínez reported recently, at least two of the governor’s grandparents also were [undocumented immigrants],” wrote the Santa Fe New Mexican in a recent editorial.

Lest you be under any illusions about the nature and motives of these news items, bear in mind that Gov. Martinez wants to roll back certain of her predecessor’s policies regarding illegal immigration in New Mexico, most notably, a policy that allows illegal immigrants to secure drivers licenses. “The governor’s opponents have pointed to her immigrant grandparents as an example of why New Mexico should welcome illegal immigrants and continue to allow them to get a driver’s license,” reports the Associated Press.

Obviously, the stage is set for the media and her political rivals to paint Gov. Martinez as a hypocrite and a traitor to her people.

There’s only one problem: The story about Martinez’s grandparents is junk. The Governor’s grandparents were not U.S. citizens, but they were most certainly not illegal immigrants.

(more…)

In a labor law system created by the National Labor Relations Act and overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), hardworking employees are typically the pawns in battles between Big Labor and management. It is rare when the livelihoods of individual employees are even considered by the NLRB, and its recent action of attempting to close Boeing’s South Carolina expansion is no exception to the harm that the NLRB has been known to cause employees.

But, three people have stood up to the NLRB and demanded to be heard by the NLRB with regard to its wrongheaded actions against Boeing’s South Carolina workers. Dennis Murray, Cynthia Ramaker and Meredith Going, Sr. with the legal assistance of the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation (Foundation) have filed as interveners in the NLRB’s Boeing case. (click here to download their motion).

Finally, as with the Chris Mosquera v. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, individual Americans tired of waiting for others have begun to grasp for liberty in attempt pull it back from the clutches of President Obama’s Big Labor controlled Administration.

Will there be more legal challenges to this Administration’s assaults on individual liberty and worker rights? You betcha.

(more…)

As we have been chronicling in our Pigford coverage this week, the amount of evidence suggesting massive fraud is staggering and will continue to build and build.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack came out last week to say there have only been three cases of fraud out of the 20,000 claims.

Well Mr. Vilsack, why don’t you try this on for size?  And by the way, we will be bringing more crime rings your way very soon.

All excerpts from the Mississippi Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi:

Suspect admits she OK’d slaying

Date:  Jan 13, 2006

By Jimmie Gates

Two days after she denied knowing that federal witness Clovis Reed would be killed, Levon Edmond admitted Thursday that she agreed to the slaying and alleged one of her accomplices had killed another woman earlier.

The second woman’s body is buried in the same area where Reed’s headless and handless corpse was found in Simpson County in 2003, Edmond told U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate.

(more…)

WASHINGTON (AP) – American Indians and black farmers will be paid $4.6 billion to address claims of government mistreatment over many decades under landmark legislation President Barack Obama signed Wednesday.

The legislation “closes a long and unfortunate chapter in our history,” Obama said. “It’s finally time to make things right.”

At a signing ceremony at the White House the president declared that approval of the long-delayed legislation “isn’t simply a matter of making amends, it’s about reaffirming our values on which this nation was founded: the principles of fairness and equality and opportunity.”

Obama promised during his campaign to work toward resolving disputes over the government’s past discrimination against minorities. The measure he signed settles a pair of long-standing class-action lawsuits. The measure also settles four long-standing disputes over Native American water rights in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana. (more…)

One key to understanding the Pigford travesty is realizing how Barack Obama came to the point where today he is giving away billions in taxpayer dollars for potentially fraudulent Pigford-related claims. What may have begun as a legitimate 100 million dollar effort to repair genuine damages caused by alleged USDA discrimination evolved into what amounted to a pay-for-play scam with two linked goals – to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primary, then get Barack Obama elected president. The Hill, not Big Government, let that cat out of the bag back in April of 2009:

Supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign argued the then-Illinois senator’s move to resolve late Pigford claims would endear him to Southern black voters during the tough Democratic primary race against former Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). At the time of the bill’s introduction in 2007, Obama was finding his footing as a candidate and polls suggested he was struggling to attract black voters. He later won almost unanimously among this group against Clinton and then in the general election against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Now Obama may have to face off with several of his own campaign supporters over how best to compensate discrimination claims by black farmers. Clay, Davis and Thompson endorsed Obama during the presidential primaries.

Just as Obama is today caving to Republicans on a a tax deal, instead of standing up for American taxpayers regarding potential Pigford-related fraud, Obama is also opting to write a check for billions American taxpayers can ill afford – all to satisfy what can rightfully be called a campaign debt. (more…)

From a USDA employee with close to 30 years experience:

Pigford was a nightmare. There was lots of money to be made—most of it by the trial lawyers. There were legitimate claims. It happens that people do sometimes discriminate and those people should be compensated. But really everyone was put in the crosshairs. They were indicting the entire USDA.

Lawyers were churning applications. My name starts turning up on documents as someone who denied someone services. Trouble was those people were hundreds of miles away. I think there was something like 700 forms filed with my name on them—it was outrageous. I had never heard of any of them. I discovered that my name had been put on leaflets, which charges that I was a racist, and people just put my name on Pigford applications. I finally had to get black farmers to vouch for me. They all said I treated everyone fairly, which is what I tried to do. (more…)

In our report, we document two organizations, the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association and the National Black Farmers Association.  These two groups round up tens of thousands of Pigford litigants and then lobby politicians with promises of votes and campaign cash in exchange for championing and funding their causes such as Pigford.

These two groups, and the Pigfored issue, hold huge sway over the rural black vote, and as you can see from this letter from the President of the BFAA John Boyd, Boyd is eager to get rewarded for helping to put President Obama into office.

Boyd’s reward comes today as President Obama signs Pigford II funding into law, and the circle of quid pro quo is complete.

The Dept. of Agriculture has claimed that there were only three cases of fraudulent claims filed for Pigford settlement money. Jimmy Dismuke, one of the original farmers who brought suit against the USDA, told Big Government that he was personally aware of many more cases that the FBI investigated and documented in Arkansas, but for political purposes they have not been made public.

From an anonymous source in the capitol:

These are redacted Pigford applications that are all done by the same lawyer.  All of the claimants come from Arkansas (two are related) and the stories they write on the application are clearly boilerplate, probably done by the same paralegal.  Some of the words are even misspelled consistently through the documents.

We don’t know the outcome of these apps but if they were successful claims it shows how little the claimants actually had to provide to get $50K.  This is the kind of information that we can’t wait to subpoena.

*** (more…)

Although the Pigford settlement story is a complex one that has major political implications, at the heart of it is a very simple question: does the settlement contain a significant amount of fraud?

If the Obama administration is telling the truth and there are only three cases of fraud out of 15,000 settled claims, then there’s no story here. If the fraud does exists, the attempt to silence people like Rep. Steve King or Andrew Breitbart aren’t just wrong but are a clear sign that some people will say anything to keep the truth about Pigford from coming out.

But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.  Eventhough the mainstream media has been silent on this story, there are witnesses. One brave whistleblower is Arkansas farmer Jimmy Dismuke, who recently sat down for an extensive, exclusive interview about Pigford. That entire interview will be made available on BigGovernment in the near future but today’s clip is powerful testimony about how simple it was for people — and by extension, their lawyers — to collect those $50,000 Pigford payments.

The following is based on an interview with a current employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

I’ve worked with the USDA for more than 25 years.  The situation with Pigford has been horrible.  There were cases of discrimination.  Perhaps 100 cases in the whole state of [redacted].  But the federal government paid out thousands of claims, a lot of them churned by attorneys who made a lot of money.

Attorneys caught on to the fact that the federal government doesn’t keep records.  They either don’t keep them well in terms of who they are meeting with or they are destroyed after a couple of years.  Attorneys recognized this and exploited it in Pigford.

My name started to appear on Pigford claims as someone who had discriminated against applicants.  I had to develop a chronology listing where I worked when, because almost all of the claims just didn’t make sense because I didn’t even work in those areas.  Names got out that you were a USDA employee and lawyers would just have people put them on an application. (more…)

In the pantheon of civic behavior, ex-politicians leaving DC to become lobbyists to advocate on behalf of private interests against taxpayer interests is right up there among the most undesirable.

What’s even worse?  When a former Secretary of Agriculture – who is African-American – leaves his post and now spends his time trolling for and representing litigants suing the USDA citing discrimination against African-Americans during the time he was in charge of the agency.

Why isn’t he suing himself, and paying the claims out of his own pocket? Instead, the USDA has admitted “no wrongdoing” (i.e. no one has been fired for the wholesale discrimination) and the taxpayer is completely and exclusively on the hook.

As Big Government will continue to show over the next few weeks, Pigford is a universe of its own filled with crooked politicians, cover-ups, greedy attorneys, and crime rings. And one of the brightest stars in the Pigford universe is Mike Espy:

MIKE ESPY (Alphonso Michael Espy) is the former Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture, and a former U.S. Representative from the 2nd District of Mississippi. He currently works as a private sector attorney, counselor, and agricultural advisor, having his own law and consulting firms: Mike Espy, PLLC, and AE Agritrade, Inc.

Prior to his appointment as USDA Secretary, Mike Espy served for seven years as a Member of Congress. While there, he served his bi-racial district as a member of the Budget and Agriculture Committees.

Before his election to Congress, Mike worked as a trial lawyer and served as Assistant Attorney General.

In 1997, Espy was indicted on 30 criminal charges of receiving gifts from food companies. Tyson Foods, the largest poultry producer in the U.S., was found guilty of paying Espy more than $12,000 in illegal gifts and was fined $6 million for the transgression. In another case, Sun Diamond was fined $1.5 million for giving Espy $6,000 in illegal gifts. (more…)

This is a copy of a three-page letter between Michael Sitcov, Chief of the DOJ Federal Programs Branch, who is defending the government against the Pigford suit, and class action Pigford lawyer Al Pires. This letter shows Sitcov’s obvious anger at the shenanigans of Pires, and the fact that a well-running mediation, that would have saved taxpayers billions, has been sabotaged.

We also print the mediation letter dated a few months earlier that shows that Pires and the government were close to a relatively inexpensive solution to a large portion of the Pigford suit.

The following is based on an interview with a current US Department of Agriculture employee who has worked for more than 20 years for the USDA:

It’s been ten years and I’ve really dealt with Pigford. It was a hard time. Frankly, I don’t like to talk about it anymore.

There was a lot of fraud. People collected money who had never stepped in the door of a USDA office. They had to prove they had been discriminated against to get their money so to get around that fact they would say they were never given an application. That’s how they got around the fact that there was no evidence of them having visited the USDA.

The burden of proof in Pigford was basically on us, the USDA, to prove that we didn’t discriminate against someone. How do you prove a negative like that? It’s really impossible.

I was assigned to Washington for a while to process Pigford claims. We saw claims come in from affluent areas. There were claims from Palm Beach and Palm Springs, and they said they were black farmers. One applicant said they were discriminated against by the Department of Agriculture’s Chicago office. There is no USDA office in Chicago. They got paid anyway. (more…)

While we certainly hope the possibility of multi-billion dollar fraud was enough to pique your outrage, what may be the most frightening revelation from our research is that Pigford may be the proverbial tip of the farmer scam iceberg.  Fox News published this report suggesting as much:

The congressional approval of a whopping $4.6 billion settlement for black and Native American farmers who claimed they were discriminated against has cleared the way for a similar pair of costly lawsuits — drawing complaints that the government may be buckling to pressure and rewarding dubious claims.

The so-called “Pigford” case involving black farmers who allege the Agriculture Department cheated them for decades drew to a close Tuesday when the House joined the Senate in approving the second settlement in the case to date. But the lawsuits don’t end there. Though Pigford has attracted the most attention, a separate set of cases filed by Hispanic and female farmers has been working its way through the courts since shortly after Pigford was filed more than a decade ago.

Those cases are set for a hearing in federal District Court in the nation’s capital on Friday, and once again a large pot of taxpayer money is on the line. The farmers were offered a $1.3 billion settlement back in May, but the plaintiffs have since then pushed for more. Some Democratic lawmakers argue they deserve it. (more…)

On April 14. 1999, Judge Paul Friedman signed a Consent Decree in the class action law suit PIGFORD, BREWINGTON v GLICKMAN and the US Department of Agriculture.

Following is a portion of the opinion written by Judge Friedman:

Forty acres and a mule. As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land. Some African Americans took advantage of these programs and either bought or leased parcels of land. During Reconstruction, however, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to enlarge the powers and activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he reversed many of the policies of the Bureau. Much of the promised land that had been leased to African American farmers was taken away and returned to Confederate loyalists. For most African Americans, the promise of forty acres and a mule was never kept. Despite the government’s failure to live up to its promise, African American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920, there were 925,000 African American farms in the United States.

…

Most fundamentally, these objections result from a well-founded and deep-seated mistrust of the USDA. A mistrust borne of a long history of racial discrimination. A mistrust that is well-deserved. As Mr. Chestnut put it, these objections reflect “fear which reaches all the way back to slavery. . . . That objection, you heard it from many today, it really asks you to retain jurisdiction, over this case in perpetuity. Otherwise they say USDA will default, ignore the lawful mandates of this Court, and in time march home scot-free while blacks are left holding the empty bag again.” Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999 at 172, The Court cannot guarantee class members that they will never experience discrimination at the hands of the USDA again, and the Consent Decree does not purport to make such a guarantee. But the Consent Decree and the Court do provide certain assurances. (more…)