The Boston Globe has joined the growing chorus of voices calling for a ban on congressional insider trading.

From the Boston Globe:

WHEN CONGRESS returns to Washington after New Year’s, a bipartisan proposal to ban insider trading by lawmakers should be one of the first items on its agenda. The bill enjoyed a brief spurt of momentum last month after a book accused legislators of using information gleaned from government service to make profits on Wall Street. But the legislation, whose sponsors include Senator Scott Brown, has since stalled amid opposition from some House Republicans. Passing it quickly in the new year would be a important step toward restoring public confidence.

The Globe credited Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s book, Throw Them All Out, as the catalyst for the reform movement.

However, in a show of possible hometown favoritism, the article criticized Schweizer’s revelations involving Sen. John Kerry’s millions of dollars of curiously timed trades as being “far less compelling.”

The accusations of insider trading leveled against Senator John F. Kerry, however, seem far less compelling. According to Schweizer, a trust belonging to Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, traded medical company stocks affected by legislation that the senator was working on. In 2007, for instance, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s trusts sold between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Amgen stock a week before the government publicly announced it would limit the amount Medicare reimbursed patients for taking a drug made by the company. But those trades were arranged by independent trustees, not Kerry.

The Globe’s position on Sen. Kerry’s investments still leaves the door open for a sort of double-standard not applied to CEOs and corporate executives who make expertly-timed trades that trigger investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), whether those trades were made by so-called “independent trustees” or not.

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As reported in the Boston Globe and as seen in the New Hampshire debate video, both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich believe it is perfectly okay for the federal government to mandate that every private sector worker in the United States pay forced-dues to labor unions as a condition of getting or keeping a job. Attention Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich: Right To Work is not a states’ rights issue, it is a freedom issue. The Federal government should not mandate compulsory unionism.

Mitt Romney from the Boston Globe, “Pressed by John Kalb, executive director of New England Citizens for Right to Work, about whether he would actively advocate for a federal law, Romney responded, ‘I’m a Tenth Amendment guy. I’d like the states to be the place we carry out this path.’”

It appears that Forced Unionism is a Big Government idea that Newt & Mitt embrace. In fact, it was the brain child of our Biggest Big Government president, before Obama. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 Wagoner Act used, for the first time, federal powers to force every working man and woman to pay a third party, Big Labor bosses, in order to get or keep a job. It was wrong then, and it is outrageous now. Why would Gingrich and Romney embrace it?

In 1947, the American public had become so exasperated with Big Labor abuses of power that Congress made a half-hearted effort to fix the problem and passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. (Truman’s presidential campaign had been heavily financed by forced-union dues.)

The Act gave states the right to opt out of federal forced-unionism created under the Wagoner Act. But, the platform for federally imposed compulsion remains in-effect today. Essentially 50 states had forced-unionism for twelve years before their citizens had an opportunity to opt out of it.

Americans are forced to fight the forced-union dues financed Big Labor political machine to obtain Right To Work freedom. Though freedom is a Big idea, Big Labor “taxes” employees to create political machines that spent, by their own admission, over $1.1 Billion in the 2010 election cycle to prop-up legislators who support forced unionism.

It’s hardly been a fair fight, but thanks to millions of members of the National Right To Work Committee and others there are currently 22 Right To Work states. (more…)

If you listen to Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) defend his role in the meltdown of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he was just as blindsided as the rest of us when the two government sponsored enterprises collapsed, triggering the financial crisis.

Frank has been peddling this fiction ever since the economy collapsed in September 2008. But as the The Boston Globe notes in a new, devastating article published on October 14, not many people are buying Frank’s lies anymore. And Frank knows it. He’s facing a surprisingly tough reelection fight, so he’s on an apology tour through the media to save his seat. (Judicial Watch does not endorse or oppose candidates for public office.)

Here’s an excerpt from the Globe piece (although I highly recommend you read the article in full):

When US Representative Barney Frank spoke in a packed hearing room on Capitol Hill seven years ago, he did not imagine that his words would eventually haunt a reelection bid.

The issue that day in 2003 was whether mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were fiscally strong. Frank declared with his trademark confidence that they were, accusing critics and regulators of exaggerating threats to Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial integrity. And, the Massachusetts Democrat maintained, “even if there were problems, the federal government doesn’t bail them out.”

Now, it’s clear he was wrong on both points…

Here’s the thing. Frank wasn’t wrong. He was lying.

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We Bostonians fancy ourselves a sophisticated, intelligent type of folk, even if it manifests itself in a quirky local vernacular, foul-mouthed self-righteousness and a self-absorbed elitism built upon the glory days of 1775, back when we ruled the school.

New Englanders, for example, boast t-shirts and bumper stickers which tell us that the “Yankees suck” — despite the 27 World Series rings for the Bronx Bombers and the seven for the Red Sox that would seem to indicate that we, in fact, are the ones who suck.

We also call Boston The Hub, as in the Hub of the Universe. That’s right. Our tiny little city’s got megalomania issues … which probably explains why 90 percent of  diversity-loving voters in Brookline and Cambridge pulled a lever for Obama in November 2008. No Bostonian worth his chowder, by the way, has ever called the city Beantown.

The intellectual elitism is so profound here that the average plumber in Boston — and I come from a long, proud line of Local 12 guys — thinks that he’s wicked smaht, smahtah even than a brain surgeon from Alabama. It’s just the way we’re raised — snobbish old blue-blood Brahminism adopted by everyone from Boston’s nouveau riche to the old Irish-Catholic working class.

So the arrival of Sarah Palin in Boston Wednesday was like a visit by an alien being from the planet of idiots in the eyes of the local so-called intelligentsia.

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Part one of a series

In researching the ever-intensifying Massachusetts Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and her Republican challenger Scott Brown, it only takes a few keystrokes to unearth her ongoing history of questionable judgment and puzzling prosecutorial decisions.  Even though the election has been effectively nationalized, with some polls showing the underdog Brown within two points or so of the colorless Coakley, she remains largely unknown outside New England.

So as a public service to the voters of the Bay State, during the run-up to the special election on Jan. 19, Big Journalism will be offering some of the Martha’s Greatest Hits, so that they can fully make up their minds whether she would make a suitable successor to the late Edward Moore Kennedy – who, as you recall, began his illustrious career by being expelled from Harvard for cheating, went on to drown Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and then turned to a life of drinking and debauchery, including the infamous “waitress sandwich” with soon-to-be-retired Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, before attempting to inflict “universal health care” on the country shortly before his death last year.

You can read all about Ted here in this classic profile of the last and worst of the Kennedy brothers by the late Michael Kelly.  Be sure to read the whole thing, just to get a flavor of the kind of candidate Massachusetts voters seem to like.

Homework done?  Good.  Because Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and thus its top law enforcement officer, is shaping up as a worthy heir to the Lion of the Senate.(more…)