You economy meets Scylla and Charybdis, may not fare well

by Smitty

Chris Dodd is pushing a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

My Senator, Mark Warner, is pushing a "Systemic Risk Council".

Last words never sounded so famous as this Warner speech. The mummy is faring poorly, but the government feels a few more bandages can make everything stable.

I don't pretend to understand all of the nuances of the Dodd's CFPA or Warner's SRC. The behavior pattern of the 111th Congress is such that one doubts that they do, either. Americans: are we going to just say fuggedaboudit and all get sucked into the Brave New Federal Borg, or are we going to admit that capitalism is great, and these cheap collectivist knockoffs not so much?

Particularly poignant is Warner's cheap invocation of the Founding Fathers. As I was literally two blocks from Gadsby's Tavern, protesting the Amnesty legislation at Jim Moran's office, it's disgusting to consider how the Federal government has become the type of tyrannical beast against which those original patriots fought.

Update: Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary Magazine

Now it has unfolded. We know what Obamaism looks like. On the domestic side, it is liberal statism: higher taxes, mammoth bureaucracies, and a vortex of government regulation that sucks up private enterprise and transforms business decisions into political ones. It comes with an ungracious and sneering contempt for opposition. On the international scene, we have the intersection of incompetence and folly, with a strong element of cynicism. The Obami have deployed aggressive and losing gambits (Honduras and the Middle East), betrayed friends (Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic), snubbed allies (the Churchill bust goes home), thrown ourselves at the feet of adversaries (Russia, Iran), jettisoned human rights and the defense of democracy (Burma, Sudan, Iran), projected angst-ridden indecision (Afghanistan-war formulation), damaged our fighting ability (defense cuts and missile-defense withdrawal), and shown deference to debased institutions (the UN). Most alarmingly, Obama and his attorney general have scarred and scared our intelligence community and placed Lefty pie-in-the-sky moralizing above the safety of Americans (trying KSM, closing Guantanamo, and halting enhanced interrogations).

And so what should conservatives be doing? Well now it’s obvious — oppose, obstruct, warn, and cajole. There aren’t many weapons at conservatives’ disposal, but there are some. And the greatest is to be found in the reservoir of common sense and decency of the America people, who, when stirred, have risen up to oppose pernicious legislation and those whom they mistakenly trusted to behave in a responsible fashion. As Kristol points out, three years is a long time, but the congressional elections are approaching and the argument has begun. And now conservatives know precisely what must be done: as best they are able, slow and stop Obamaism until reinforcements arrive and the voters can render their verdict.

Let's take that a bit further, Jennifer. The ship of state has had about left 5˚ rudder on since 1913, and BHO threw the helm over hard left.

In the long term, we need a come-to-beavis meeting where we decide whether to roll over and take it like good socialists, or unwind the stack of centralization legislation. Delegate these unsustainable programs and their costs to the States. If Virgnia can't fund Social Security for her citizens, then how about some honesty about the viability of the program? Reverse chronological order would be a good going-in position, but any number of other possibilites are also workable.