Barney Frank- Mr Conflict of Interest

You gotta hand it to good old Barney Frank, the cantankerous congressman from Massachusetts. The guy really has bad taste in boyfriends. (Come to think of it, so do the boyfriends.) First, the escort-service operator, then the Fannie Mae exec, and now we just get wind of the third, who got busted for pot cultivation in 2007-while Member of Congress Barney was present.

Barney is, of course, well known for his previous choice of partners. Several years back, Barney got slapped on the wrist by his colleagues in Congress because it turned out that his live-in boyfriend at the time was using their apartment as a HQ for an escort service-all while Barney was up on Capitol Hill fixing the resultant parking tickets.

"Don't worry about those parking tickets. Barney'll take care of 'em."

Then in the 1990s, Mr Conflict of Interest himself was rooming with a guy who just happened to be an exec with Fannie Mae-involved in mortgage loans- while Barney was sitting on the committee overseeing Fannie Mae.

Conflict of Interest?

"Uhhhh......yeaaaah."


Now we learn that in 2007, Barney was up in Maine at his latest boyfriend's home and sitting on the front porch when the local gendarmes arrived and busted said boyfriend for growing marijuana plants in his garden. Barney was not charged and denied any knowledge of the plants, maintaining that he is not "an outdoors man" and didn't even know what they looked like.

"Marijuana? I don't see any marijuana."

And now, Barney is trying to get legislation moving that would decriminalize marijuana. (Of course, I'm not making any connection here, folks.)

Of course, we also know that Mr. Conflict of Interest is up to his eyeballs in the stimulus package mess making sure that his friends (like Maxine Waters' husband and the OneUnited Bank up in Massachusetts) get "their fair share" of the loot. But we have already reported on that. As they say in Congress, that's "old news".

Besides, I'd better stop here. Obama has this new guy in Washington named Cass Sunstein who wants to crack down on blogs like mine for saying bad things about their friends.

But I digress.