As the primaries drag on, and the candidates make their cases for Nationwide hot button issues that effect their voter sway, a lot of us focus on the financial crisis that stares down on America. Mitt Romney, for example, has a tax plan that so clearly favors the rich, and from that stems the curiousity [...]

In a recent feature story on 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft detailed how many in Congress use their privileged access to information on pending legislation, investigations and regulations to line their own pockets. Much of the piece was based on research of Hoover Institute fellow Peter Schweizer from his book “Throw Them All Out”. Among the surprising revelations in the book – Congress is exempt from prosecution for the same kind of insider trading that would send the rest of us to jail.

White-collar crime is quite an incredible industry – millions of dollars disappear each year to offshore bank accounts, hookers, drugs, and yachts because rich executives (generally rich white guys) aren’t satisfied with their Porsches. White-collar crime finally got some serious attention when corruption single-handedly destroyed the lives of four thousand Enron employees at the start [...]

Our first head of the Department of Homeland Security has written a tell all and it’s more of the same we’ve heard from insiders about the former administration. They politicized nearly everything and made the wrong decision and nearly every turn. From US News: Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was [...]

f there is one lesson that any close political adviser to a sitting president should have learned by now, it is this: It is not necessarily actual conflict of interest or impropriety that bites you in the ass. It is the appearance of conflict of interest and impropriety that is political poison. Axelrod is a very smart guy. He knows how to cover his tracks. He knows how to walk the line. That is why it is so surprising that he still chooses to walk so very very close to the ethical edge.

Early this month, Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge reported on the case of Sergey Aleynikov (pictured above), a former employee of Goldman Sachs who allegedly stole the code that runs their automated high frequency trading software. Well, this could have been the catalyst for the recent focus on high frequency trading and may ultimately lead [...]

Maybe not all of the 7 that Doug proposed, but enough to make me comfortable that we’ll be getting a lot more information about his staff’s contact with the Illinois Governor’s office. Ambinder has more… In a press conference today, President-elect Barack Obama said that he’s “absolutely certain” that no one in his campaign had [...]

Here’s the short version: Blagojevich = Moron. Now for the long version… One interesting thing that Lynn Sweet brought up in that clip was the idea of how little Blagojevich was involved in the Obama campaign. In fact, she said she would have been laughed at if she had asked what role Blagojevich played in [...]

That’s the speculation at this hour… And it looks like Blagojevich was going after everybody for money, even Warren Buffett… In a November 11th conversation with John Harris, his Chief of Staff, Blagojevich said he could start a 501(c)(4) political organization to extract money from the billionaire Sage of Omaha, whom the governor called Obama’s [...]

MSNBC checks out the new Congressman we wrote about yesterday here and here. One thing I want to focus on is how House Minority leader John Boehner characterized this victory… In a memo to colleagues called “The Time is Cao,” Boehner says that Anh “Joseph” Cao’s win over Jefferson in a heavily Democratic district points [...]

Well, looks like he’s going to fight the conviction, but his claim of prosecutorial misconduct seems rather weak. I mean, Ted, the prosecutors didn’t remodel your home and put all that furniture in your house for free. In any event, from Stevens website comes the following statement… “I am obviously disappointed in the verdict but [...]

I found Palin’s response today to one of the biggest ethics scandal in her state to be pretty clear code for “Get lost old man.” Here’s what she said… “The verdict shines a light on the corrupting influence of the big oil service company that was allowed to control too much of our state. It [...]

Hi, this is Danielle Ivory at the American News Project in DC. Thanks to Justin Gardner for allowing us to post story items here! We’ll start doing this regularly next week. Just by way of introduction, the ANP is an independent non-profit video news organization in DC. We produce pieces for the web, but offer [...]

The second TrooperGate investigation gets under way soon. Today is not a good day to be a Palin… The Alaska Personnel Board is conducting the investigation, led by an independent counsel. It will be the first deposition of the Alaska governor, but the second inquiry into the matter. The first investigation by the Alaska state [...]

Her “hometown” paper fires back in one of the more strongly worded editorials I’ve seen this campaign season. Again, I don’t know how she thought she was going to get away with it, but the press is now hammering her for trying to spin her way out of these ethics findings, thus ensuring that the [...]

TODAY has the story… They won’t let her spin her way out of this. My guess is that this is the final nail in the McCain/Palin coffin. If people didn’t trust her before, now they have a real reason not to support her.

The Branchflower report and the McCain camp’s clearly dishonest spin was bad enough, but it looks like the McCain campaign opened up Palin to even more scrutiny when they didn’t even need to. From Newsweek: Some weeks ago, the McCain team devised a plan to have Palin file an ethics complaint against herself with the [...]

Again, I don’t why she thought she was going to get away with this, but maybe she’s not used to reporters asking more follow up questions. From Jake Tapper… One can make the argument, as Palin and her allies have tried to do, that this investigation — launched by a bipartisan Republican-controlled legislative body — [...]

First, the McCain camp and Palin herself are saying that the investigation found no laws were broken or nothing unethical was done. On the first count they’re right. No laws were broken. But do you know why she didn’t break any laws? Because the employment law states she A) could either fire him for any [...]