Here's the essay question for today's exam, class:  Are Members of Congress and their staffers the ultimate insiders, making money off advance economic knowledge?  Discuss.

Stock or commodity trading on "inside information" has been illegal since the early 1960s. Yet there is one group that frequently has access to nonpublic information that can greatly affect stock prices, to the extent of making or breaking a company or even an industry, and these "insiders" are considered exempt from prosecution by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The insiders I refer to are members of Congress and their staffs. They have prior knowledge about which companies or industries will or will not be "bailed out," have their taxes raised or lowered, be subject to costly new regulations or exempted from such regulations, receive government contracts, etc.

However, because the members of Congress and their staffs do not obtain their information from employees of the companies affected, they are not considered insiders.

Several new polls come as a jolt as they reflect the dismal state of mind of the American people.

As USA Today's Susan Page sums up the latest USA Today/Gallup poll: the nation is "more downbeat, more dissatisfied with its political leadership and more concerned about the country's direction than at almost any point in modern times."

New Pew Research Center polling shows a whopping 67 percent saying that most members of Congress should not be re-elected. This compared to 51 percent saying this in October 2010 before the last congressional election.

From what I see, there are serious reasons why Republicans should be worried.  Some conclude this all means that Republicans must water down the conservative message and nominate a moderate.

But Americans crave answers, clarity and leadership. This call will not be answered by ambiguity.

Obama is no moderate. If Democrats can nominate a hard core liberal, why can't Republicans offer a clear conservative alternative?

This was the week Zero changed his middle name from Hussein to Pandora.  And it wasn't due to Trump, as the Cajun Clown James Carville is claiming, but to my buddy Jerry Corsi.

In fact, Jerry was set to write my biography - How We Won The Cold War:  The Greatest Adventure of Modern Times - when Joseph Farah prevailed upon him to write Where's The Birth Certificate? instead.  Go for it, I told Jerry - helping to save America is infinitely more important than telling my story.

Jerry's book zooming to best-seller status the instant its publication was announced on Drudge last week (4/20) is what prompted Zero to release - finally! -  his long form BC exactly one week later (4/27) and becoming Pandora Obama thereby.

Yet here is the real issue with Zero.  It's not where he was born or who his parents were or whether he was adopted in Indonesia, etc.  It's that he's not an American in his soul.  There are millions upon millions of naturalized U.S. citizens far more genuinely American than him.

Zero is Anti-American in a fundamental way, far more deeply than the superficiality of where he was born.  He means us harm, he has already done grave damage to our culture, our economy, our military and national security, our future as a nation.

Thus anything that delegitimizes his presidency in the eyes of voters is a move in the right direction.  He may well be a fraud in the circumstances of his birth, his school accomplishments, his entire curriculum vitae.  Much more importantly, he is a fraud as an American.  That's why he is Not My President, nor is he truly America's.

Treating variables as constants is a sign of a damaged brain.

In the real world, almost any action taken by government is going to cause a behavioral response - and often one that is not intended. Wise people think through what is likely to happen with any given action. Unfortunately, the ongoing lame-duck Congress and the administration are again demonstrating the shortage of wise people.

Many Democrats, including many lame ducks, are still demanding that tax rates for entrepreneurs be increased under the absurd claim that not to do so will "cost" the government "almost $2 trillion over the 2011-20 period" in lost tax revenues.

To believe these bogus numbers that the Joint Tax Committee staff and the administration put out about the revenue loss, one needs to believe these variables are constant:

The anti-capitalist of the "Occupy" movement have a point: capitalism is proving unfair. But I would like to try to persuade them that the reason is because it is not free-market enough.

The market, when allowed to flourish, tears apart monopoly and generates freedom and fairness better than any other human institution. Today's private sector, by contrast, is increasingly dominated by companies that are privileged by government through cozy contract, soft subsidy, convenient regulation, and crony conversation. That is why it is producing such unfair outcomes.

For example, the finance industry upon which the Occupiers focus their fury, are protected from upstart competition by high regulatory barriers to entry, and handles the supply and demand of a good - money - that is priced by government fiat. For doing so, it pockets big bonuses even when arranging the issuance of bonds to pay for the bailing out of itself. It may be called capitalism, but it's not a free market, capitalism for real.

It's Good Friday!  My wife and I always personally celebrate Good Friday, because that was the day we met almost three decades ago.  It sure was a good day for us!

Sunday, of course, is Easter, a celebration of renewal, rebirth, and resurrection.  The Resurrection itself was 1,978 years ago (33 AD).  Today, America is being crucified on a Cross of Debt, and Congress will soon be faced with a choice to resurrect her or let her die.

By the time the House returns from "Spring Recess" on May 2^nd, federal spending will have exceeded the debt ceiling.  Expect to see a tsunami of enemedia scare stories predicting an apocalypse if the House doesn't cave and vote to raise it - such as this one in Politico.

The article encapsulates all the outright lies of the parasite class:  "the full faith and credit of the United States" hangs in the balance, the House GOP will "plunge the nation into default" if it doesn't cave, blah blah.

This is willful lying.  The federal government will continue to have plenty of tax revenue to service its old debt, to pay the military, but not for, say, Planned Parenthood or the EPA.  What really will "send global markets into a tailspin" is if the debt ceiling is raised and Uncle Sam continues his fiscal insanity.

So here we are, the moment has arrived, and it's ironic that it comes at Eastertime.

Was our great financial crisis caused by greedy and reckless bankers and Wall Street players?  Or by a broad range of individuals, financial institutions and governments who became less risk-averse and prudent?  Or by government housing policies that brought on the housing bubble and mismanaged the risks?

Without waiting for the evidence, many in the political class, and particularly those on the left, immediately bought into the argument that the financial crisis was caused by greed. This view of the cause provided much of the political energy behind the passage this year of the Dodd-Frank Act, also known as the financial reform act.

Peter J. Wallison, a former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury and now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has debunked this argument, conclusively showing in a study that Barney Frank's government housing policies caused the crisis.

President Obama deserves credit for authorizing the execution of Osama bin Laden and for significantly intensifying the drone campaign against terrorists. He's largely stopped romanticizing the Palestinians; has recognized that Putin made an ass of him; and has even hinted that he might stand up to China on some issues. 

But even if he turns into a combination of Ike, Reagan and Carl von Clausewitz in the coming months, his administration's foreign-policy record will forever be defined by his disastrous rush to leave Iraq - then brag about it.

Does anybody at the White House look at a map? I realize that, thanks to the left's death-grip on our education system, we've stopped teaching trivial subjects like geography in favor of gender studies, but you don't have to be able to name all 17,000 islands belonging to Indonesia to recognize that simply quitting Iraq opens a terrorist superhighway straight from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon, Hezbollah, northern Israel and the eastern Mediterranean.