Our legislators are at it again. This yearly earnings report they have to fill out has just been chock full of eye openers. In this case we have one senator, Dick Durbin. Informed by Bernake and Paulson the legislators were told days before that the banks were in critical need of financial aid. They basically warned of the coming failure of the institutions and the coming stock market crisis. This was days before it was leaked to the news. Senator Durbin, somehow managed to sell off all his stocks in these troubled institutions, to the tune of $115,000. He immediately re-invested this into Berkshire hathaway, the warren Buffett company. So, how much would senator Durbin have lost if he had not had this knowledge? Anybody's guess, as the companys he held in were not made public. But if he's like the rest of America, he would have lost a lot. Any charges filed against the senator? Nope. Any investigations by the ethics comittee? Nope. Any negatives attached to it at all? None that he would care about. We can call them crooks til the cows come home, but if we keep re-electing them, what's the point? It's actually as if we expect them to use whatever info is at their disposal to enrich themselves. And my guess is that's because the vast majority of Americans today would do the same thing. Someday, someone is going to be accused of a crime in the legislature, and they will have to call in an outsider to explain to them what that is. The word isn't in their vocabulary.