Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s battle to ban members of Congress from using private information to enrich themselves scored a stunning victory on Thursday when the U.S. Senate voted 96-3 to pass the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act.

While the bill was widely hailed as an essential first step to begin repairing Congress’s abysmal approval ratings, three senators voted against the measure outlawing congressional insider trading.

One of the dissenters was Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM).  According to Sen. Bingaman, an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) to the STOCK Act would subject 300,000 federal worker to the bill’s 30 day public disclosure reporting requirements for investments.  Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) aides dispute this figure and say the amendment would only apply to 28,000 workers.  Still, according to the New Mexico Democrat:

I can’t support a bill that places unreasonable and burdensome reporting requirements on over 300,000 federal workers.

Also voting against the STOCK Act was Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK).  Sen. Coburn said his opposition to banning members of Congress from engaging in the kinds of insider trading revealed in Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s New York Times bestselling book, Throw Them All Out, and the much-discussed 60 Minutes investigation his book sparked, is that he is not convinced any such instances of insider trading even exist.

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Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s battle against congressional insider trading will enter a critical phase this week as the Senate is set to vote on a bill banning members of Congress from using material, nonpublic information to make private investments.

From USA Today:

Aware that most Americans would like to dump them all, members of Congress hope to regain some sense of trust by subjecting themselves to tougher penalties for insider trading and requiring they disclose stock transactions within 30 days.

A procedural vote Monday would allow the Senate later this week to pass a bill prohibiting members of Congress from using nonpublic information for their own personal benefit or “tipping” others to inside information that they could trade on.

The Senate is considering passage of the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act, which would ban members of Congress and their staffs from engaging in insider trading and would include a 30 day reporting requirement on all investments.  The Senate version of the bill is cosponsored by Sens. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).  Prior to Peter Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out and the 60 Minutes report based on his book, the STOCK Act had only four cosponsors in Congress.   Now, the bill has 230 cosponsors.

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As President Barack Obama prepares for his State of the Union address in Congress, where he will no doubt claim credit for signs of economic recovery, new analyses by economists suggest that growth will slow and unemployment will remain virtually unchanged by year’s end.

According to economists surveyed by USA Today, much of the excitement around December retail sales was “hype,” and the fourth-quarter bounce was largely driven by post-earthquake/tsunami activity in Japan, not domestic policy. (When the economy suffers, the President blamed the earthquake; when it recovers, curiously, no earthquakes merit mention).

No longer buying Obama - in China or at home (Photo: CNN)

There is continued uncertainty in Europe, and even new uncertainty about slower Chinese growth. But the great drag on the economy remains the American housing market, according to economists, even though many of them expect prices to stop falling this year. Government interventions and bailouts under Obama and his predecessor may have deferred some pain but have prevented markets from full correction and recovery, reinforcing deep uncertainty. (more…)

The Chicago Tribune editorial page believes that legislative efforts to ban congressional insider trading, such as the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act, are simply an exercise in “damage control” and “window dressing” to shield Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and others mentioned in a 60 Minutes investigative report, based on Breibart News editor Peter Schweizer’s bestselling book, Throw Them All Out.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The measures under consideration strike us as window dressing. We suspect the push for new rules is about protecting the reputations of Bachus and others spotlighted in the news.It sure does seem that being a member of Congress carries benefits beyond the salary. The New York Times reported this week that the median net worth of the members rose 15 percent from 2004 to 2010, when the median net worth for all Americans dropped 8 percent.

But spare us a phony effort to “reform” the rules. The public won’t buy it. And the public has even greater reason to be disgusted with Congress, starting with a national debt of $15 trillion and climbing.

A Breitbart News exclusive report revealed that Rep. Spencer Bachus’s options trading records during the summer and fall of 2008’s debates over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) were curiously well-timed with market trends.  Specifically, from July to November 2008, Rep. Bachus executed at least 40 options trades that resulted in as much as $50,000 in capital gains.   As Peter Schweizer revealed, Rep. Bachus’s position as the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee gave him access to high-level private meetings and phone conversations with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, as well as other senior financial officials.

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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.

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There’s a bad law on the books that is costing lives every single day.

Cancer patients from around the country have teamed up with a world-famous doctor, a non-profit and the Institute for Justice in a major federal lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General to change that.

This week, we argued before the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  (You can listen to the audio of the argument here.)

As our client Kumud Majumder wrote this Monday in the USA Today:

My 11-year-old son, Arya, was an angel who transformed my life. His death from leukemia last April took away not just my only child, it also took away my very heart and soul, and triggered the collapse of my 23-year marriage.

Arya’s tragedy happened in part because of a lack of bone marrow donors. Each year, as many as 3,000 people in the U.S. die waiting for a bone marrow donor match. A significantly higher number of people die from complications arising from partially matched donors. This is largely avoidable, and the shortage of donors is made worse by a federal law that I and other families of cancer patients are fighting in federal court.

There is chronic shortage of bone marrow donors in the United States.   The sad reality is that cancer patients die every day as a result.  More people would likely donate their bone marrow if we did one simple thing:  compensate them.

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Two weeks ago the U.K. Guardian gleefully reported that the self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, the best-selling writer on the environment, professor, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, had made a serious acquiescence to the global warming climate change global climate disruption movement that could quite possibly change the face of the entire conversation. From the article:

The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN’s climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. “Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” the book concludes.

Lomborg has a unique voice in the climate change debate because while he has always believed in man-made climate change, he doesn’t believe it’s catastrophic nor does he subscribe to the Leonardo DiCaprio/Laurie David school of thought that massive cut backs in carbon emissions is the one and only way to fix the problem. So a “U-turn” from this stance would mean that after years of studying and writing on the matter, he’s all of a sudden become an Inconvenient Truther. Having met Mr. Lomborg just last year and being a fan of his work, this report made me highly… skeptical. (more…)

In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium by and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes. (more…)

USA Today reports that the United States Census Bureau is overhauling its hiring and security procedures following James O’Keefe’s video exposing supervisors encouraging enumerators to falsify time sheets.

From the article:

The Census Bureau has made some changes to its hiring and security procedures after reports that a convicted sex offender was hired to go door-to-door in New Jersey and an undercover video surfaced showing Census supervisors paying workers for hours they did not work.

“No hire will be allowed into the field without passing a fingerprint process,” Census Director Robert Groves said at a briefing Wednesday. “Any name check that discovers a mismatch between name, date of birth, sex, or Social Security number … will stop processing of applicant.”… (more…)

Just how far is the Obama administration willing to go to reward big donors?  In the wake of yesterday’s explosive report regarding “scores of top Democratic donors” being rewarded with “VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings,” it’s a question that’s on the minds of many politically-engaged Americans, and one likely to grab yet more attention, thanks to this article in today’s USA Today.  It notes that: 

“More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.”

 USA Today goes on to report that one top-level fundraiser apparently awarded with a plum job is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski. 

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From the Associated Press:

Circulation at newspapers shrank at an accelerated pace in the past six months, driven in part by stiff price increases imposed by publishers scrambling to offset rapidly eroding advertising sales.

Average daily circulation at 379 U.S. newspapers plunged 10.6 percent in the April-September period from the same six-month stretch last year, according to figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

It’s the largest drop recorded so far during the past decade’s steady decline in paid readership — a span that has coincided with an explosion of online news sources that don’t charge readers for access. Many newspapers also have been reducing delivery to far-flung locales and increasing prices to get more money out of their remaining sales.

The latest decline outstripped a 7.1 percent decrease in the October 2008-March 2009 period and a 4.6 percent decline in last year’s April-September window.

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From the American Spectator:

Here’s the Saturday morning round-up on the Census Bureau story for the formerly mainstream media, checking out their home Web pages:

Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, CBS News, CNN Sucks — story isn’t there. WashPost did run a piece about the Big Government expose’ in DC.

MSNBC, to its credit, posted a link to an AP version of the story near the top of their homepage. Some of the others above have the AP story too, but they don’t headline it on their homepages. This is significant because all the major news organizations have an auto-feed of wire service stories to their sites — MSNBC just took the trouble to link it from their homepage.

Fox News of course has followed the story all along, and the Washington Times ran the AP version.

And kudos to ABC News (top of their homepage) and reporter Jake Tapper. Unlike the other lazy and indifferent bureaus listed above, Tapper stayed on the story doing original reporting, crediting Fox News and Big Government for their scoops, embedded one of James O’Keefe’s YouTube videos in his story, and got a response that no one else did:

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