Key members of the Senate Banking Committee, after months of negotiations, are expected to unveil their proposal within the next week, people familiar with the negotiations said. While the sources cautioned that no agreement has been reached, the lawmakers, led by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., are considering a new plan to entrust the Federal Reserve with protecting consumers from abusive financial industry practices. . . .
The latest proposal to house the consumer protection unit within the Federal Reserve came days after Dodd suggested putting it in the Treasury Department under the name of a “Bureau of Financial Protection.”
It remains to be seen what will win the support of Republican senators such as Richard Shelby of Alabama and Bob Corker of Tennessee . . .
Yeah, well if Shelby and Corker support Dodd’s plan they’re dead men walking, politically. The Federal Reserve is deeply implicated in the housing bubble, the Wall Street bailout and the current recession, and Dodd’s as crooked as a snake.
As with health-care “reform,” the appropriate response to Democrats’ financial “reform” is very simple: VOTE NO!
UPDATE: Ron Howard has produced a video, predictably pushing for enactment of CFPA, but kind of funny anyway:
Gov. Rick Perry won a decisive victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Texas GOP primary for governor Tuesday night, bringing a bruising fight between two of the state’s most popular Republicans to an anticlimactic conclusion.
Perry said his win should send a message to Washington.
“Quit spending all the money, stop trying to take over our lives and our businesses,” he said in a speech that seemed aimed as much as the Obama White House as his Democratic opponent Bill White. . . .
With 73 percent of all precincts reporting, Perry had a 51 percent to 31 percent lead over the three-term senior senator. Debra Medina, a favorite of Tea Party activists, was holding steady at 18 percent.
A Hutchison aide conceded that in the unlikely event Perry’s vote share dropped below the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff, there was “no realistic path to victory.”
Via Memeorandum. Anybody think Perry will have trouble beating Houston’s mayor in November? No? I didn’t think so.
It isn’t clear at the moment whether he’s gone or his opponents are just applying pressure.
From the standpoint of those who care about the country, here’s Rush offering One Little Victory:
The video quality is sad, but Wikipedia has a clip in .ogg
A certain measure of innocence
Willing to appear naive
A certain degree of imagination
A measure of make-believe
A certain degree of surrender
To the forces of light and heat
A shot of satisfaction
In a willingness to risk defeat
Celebrate the moment
As it turns into one more
Another chance at victory
Another chance to score
The measure of the moment
In a difference of degree
Just one little victory
A spirit breaking free
One little victory
The greatest act can be
One little victory
A certain measure of righteousness
A certain amount of force
A certain degree of determination
Daring on a different course
A certain amount of resistance
To the forces of the light and love
A certain measure of tolerance
A willingness to rise above
Dangerous extremist militias taking over America? The Southern Poverty Law Center reports “an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) – a 244% jump” from 2008.
OK, so let’s ask a question: How does the SPLC get these numbers? Do a “find” search on the their list of “Patriot” groups and you discover:
37 listings of the John Birch Society;
48 listings of We the People;
49 listings of Oath Keepers; and
50 listings of the Constitution Party.
According to the SPLC’s math, then, state-by-state representation of these four organizations count as 184 “Patriot groups” — 36 percent of the SPLC’s total. Let’s ask a few more questions:
“We the People” appears to be generally libertarian in orientation: 2004 Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik addressed the group’s 2009 “Constitutional Convention,” and [founder Robert] Schultz himself was a guest (along with libertarian figures like Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie and Rep. Ron Paul) on an August 2009 broadcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Fox News TV program.
After finding the Web site of the Alabama chapter of “We the People,” I phoned Huntsville resident Lesha Martin, one of the members listed on the site. Is “We the People” some kind of violent militia-type outfit?
“Good heavens, no,” said Ms. Martin, an admirer of Ron Paul who described herself as devoted to individual freedom and “resurrecting the Constitution.”
How many peaceful citizens like Lesha Martin are lumped together to create the “grim and alarming portrait . . . of extremist organizations” presented by the SPLC?
Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that some of these groups are unwittingly harboring wannabe terrorists — short-wave wackos building pipe-bombs or stockpiling AK-47 ammo in their garages — but the claim of an “astonishing” increase in dangerous extremism looks very much like the kind of irresponsible exaggeration we’ve come to expect from The Church of Morris Dees. And of course, MSNBC books the SPLC’s Mark Potok, who gleefully uses this report to smear the Tea Party movement:
I don’t deny that there are kooks in America or that some of those kooks are dangerous, but the SPLC purposely hypes this kind of hysteria — using dubious statistics to inflate the numbers — for their own lucrative aggrandizement.
The Southern Poverty Law Center . . .would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise money . . . To illustrate how dangerous these groups are, the Center cites some recent arrests of right-wing figures for planning or carrying out violent attacks. But it doesn’t demonstrate that any of the arrestees were a part of the Patriot milieu, and indeed it includes some cases involving racist skinheads, who are another movement entirely.
As far as the SPLC is concerned . . . skinheads and Birchers and Glenn Beck fans are all tied together in one big ball of scary. The group delights in finding tenuous ties between the tendencies it tracks, then describing its discoveries in as ominous a tone as possible.
A fool and his money are soon parted. Morris Dees was finance director of the George McGovern 1972 presidential campaign and figured out that hyping the “right-wing extremist” threat was a surefire strategy for separating those particular fools from their money.
For nearly 30 years, Dees and his crew have been working the same formula: Send scary letters to rich liberals, suggesting that if they don’t send the SPLC a check today, the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street tomorrow.
In February 2009, Crist embraced, both figuratively and literally, President Barack Obama when Obama came to Florida to tout the economic stimulus package that had not yet become law.
At the time, both Obama’s and Crist’s favorability ratings were high in Florida. . . .
Crist’s opponents have seized on every opportunity to remind voters of The Hug, and Obama’s and Crist’s poll ratings in the state have declined almost in lockstep — in part because the state’s residents see little evidence that the stimulus has worked. Florida’s unemployment rate is much higher than the national average, at almost 12 percent . . . .
At the rally with Obama, Crist said: “We know that it’s important that we pass a stimulus package.” By last November, he was telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I didn’t endorse it … I didn’t even have a vote on the darned thing.”
Some see the price Crist has paid for his Obama embrace as a fitting reward for a man whose career has been defined by political expediency.
“He miscalculated a changing political environment in Florida,” Rick Wilson says. “Charlie has always had a nose for the populist issue of the moment, and has been able to chase those things with success. This time, his instincts failed him.”
They didn’t even bother to mention the closet-gay rumors about Charlie. You know a Republican is completely hopeless when a liberal reporter passes up such a juicy smear.
Fishersville Mike, fellow Virginian and backronym fetishist, starts the festivities, and has quite a serviceable outing.
My offering is slightly less charitable: Can Only Find Festivity in Effete Emuluation
I can’t add much to Legal Insurrection and American Power’s floggings of the Coffee Party. It rather makes sense that the slack-jawed left would complement the Tea Party through emulation. They, like Imperial Japan, have every reason to wet themselves with dread at the thought of the sleeping giant that has awakened, after a century of political slumber, to the Progressive threat.
Bring it on, all y’all crypto-Marxist mike foxtrots: We The People shall grind you and your morally bankrupt ideology right down.
If those on the right are the Teabaggers, then surely we can dub the mentally roasted members of the Coffee party “the Beaners”, can we not?
The UC San Diego student reportedly responsible for hanging a noose last week in a campus library issued a public, but anonymous, apology Monday and said she had no racist motivation.
The noose’s discovery set off protests at a school that is already tense from recent racially charged episodes and triggered condemnations from UC leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In a letter published Monday on the front page of the UC San Diego student newspaper, the Guardian, the student wrote that the incident was “a mindless act and stupid mistake” and was not meant to recall the lynching of blacks.
“As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by the recent issues on campus, I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain,” the student wrote. She was suspended Friday and remains under investigation for a possible hate crime.
Notice that both the university administration and the student newspaper are protecting the hoaxer’s identity. The “recent issues on campus” meme is always a favorite excuse for these campus fake-hate stunts, with the perpetrators claiming that their intention was to call attention to the racist/sexist/homophobic oppression at their (predictably liberal) universities.
As a general rule, the self-indulgent sense ofentitled victimhood is directly proportional to the intensity of political correctness on campus. Thus, it was at ultra-PC Harvard that tenured professors (i.e., the most privileged and protected creatures in the campus hierarchy) claimed to have been victimized by a few inconvenient comments by Larry Summers.
A former New York Times “strategy analyst” attempts to create a left-wing clone of the Tea Party movement and — surprise! — gets gushy write-ups from both the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Remind me of this the next time Nancy Pelosi starts slinging around her “Astroturf” accusations. You can bet Annabel Park will never be smeared by Frank Rich.
