From The Hill:

A Senate committee easily cleared legislation explicitly prohibiting members from profiting by trading on inside information, despite objections from some GOP lawmakers who called it unnecessary and politically motivated.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 7-2 Tuesday. GOP Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) dissented, calling the bill unnecessary and rife with potential unintended consequences. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also opposed the bill, but was absent from the vote.

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When asked about the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in October, Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren praised it to the hilt. “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she told the Daily Beast. Yet when pressed in November on the OWS adherents’ increasingly violent tactics, she told a Boston TV interviewer: “Everybody has to follow the law. There’s no exception on that.”

But Warren’s apparent disavowal of the tactics of OWS and like-minded community organizers may not be shared by Richard Cordray, President Obama’s nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren designed. Cordray has long supported ESOP, formerly known as the East Side Organizing Project, an Ohio housing advocacy group that has distinguished itself by storming into banks and launching plastic “shark attacks” on the lawns of private homes. ESOP’s leaders brag about what they call their “organized hits” on banks and other targets, which have included the home of the late Congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp.

As Ohio treasurer and attorney general, Cordray lobbied for state and federal funding for ESOP and publicly praised funders of the group as “the real heroes.” And in a highly unusual move for a nominee awaiting confirmation, Cordray returned to Ohio in October to be the keynote speaker at the group’s gala dinner.

Since his nomination in July to head the bureau created by the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, Republicans have held fast against confirmation. But largely, they haven’t made Cordray’s state record an issue. They have focused instead on structural defects in the agency’s design, such as the massive new powers the bureau will have to ban financial products it deems “abusive” and its lack of accountability to Congress.

These criticisms are valid, but they may not be enough to hold Senate Republicans together without criticism of the nominee’s merits. Just before Thanksgiving, Scott Brown (R-Mass.), facing a tough reelection challenge from Warren, became the first GOPer to commit to voting for Cordray. The Democrat-controlled Senate plans to hold a vote on his confirmation this week, possibly as early as Tuesday. Human Events‘ Neil McCabe reports that in addition to Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, other GOP targets for Cordray supporters include Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Tennessee’s Bob Corker, and Cordray’s home state Senator Rob Portman of Ohio (though Portman seemed to reaffirm his opposition in a statement to Human Events last week).

But Cordray’s support of ESOP needs further scrutiny, particularly since as head of the bureau, he will have the power to help funnel federal support to ESOP and like-minded community organizers with virtually no oversight by Congress. And a report by Bloomberg News suggests that Cordray specifically blessed ESOP’s “organized hits” on banks and homes.

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When Scott Brown upset the Massachusetts Democratic establishment by winning the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for a generation, he ran as a Republican. This cycle, facing the “founder” of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Elizabeth Warren, he appears to be running away from conservative principles.

Brown’s most recent capitulation is his support for a floor vote for President Obama’s nominee for the uber-regulatory agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Brown’s announcement undercuts not only his Republican colleagues who are fighting to limit the power of this new government agency but of the principles of limited government he professes to support.

Unfortunately, Brown may not be alone. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) is purportedly seeking a deal with the White House to get fellow Ohioan Cordray confirmed despite ethical questions about his behavior as the state’s Attorney General. Insiders are always concerned about the Maine Senators and Alaskan Lisa Murkowski. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, Portman, Collins, Snowe and Murkowski need to buck up and support their colleagues.

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No matter what happens on November 2^nd, 2010 will be the year that conservatives won.  Patriotic conservatives of all flavors, have risen up in extraordinary ways, in every corner of the country.  It appears all but certain that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be dethroned. Dick Morris even predicts as many as 100 new Republican Congressmen giving many people really high expectations for the new Congress.

Others fear that for all their trouble from organizing, holding rallies and knocking on doors, they will only replace the leftist Democrats with RINO Republicans who will squander the victory.  Will we get Speaker Boehner, or a fresh new conservative leader who will truly take a big stick to big government.   A closer look at the numbers should give conservatives reason to be really excited and also a cause for continued resolve.

If you want a conservative Congress, you have to ask yourself just what kind of conservative are you after.  Drew Kurlowski, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri who studies voting behavior and partisanship, referred me to a dataset popular with political science academics called DW-Nominate.  It is a tremendous resource that meticulously compiles the voting records of the Congress going back to the 1st Congress.  If you want to know who George Washington’s favorite conservative was, this is your site.  Moreover, they settled on a definition of “conservative” that is tremendously useful.  Move over “fiscal conservative” and “social conservative” and make room for (limited) “government intervention in the economy”.  Let’s call it L’GIE.  So who are the liggies?

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From CNSNews “It is called the Golden Rule,” said Graham. “‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ That is probably one of the most powerful statements ever made. It is divine in its orientation, and it is probably something that would serve us all well if we thought about it at moments such as this.”

Graham also said Kagan “meets the test” the Framers envisioned for a Supreme Court Justice.

“I am going to vote for Elena Kagan because I believe constitutionally she meets the test the Framers envisioned for someone to serve on the Court,” said Graham. “I don’t think the Framers ever envisioned Lindsey Graham from South Carolina voting no because President Obama picked someone who is clearly different than I would have chosen.” (more…)

On Wednesday, if all goes as planned, President Barack Obama will sign the financial-reform bill crafted by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, sponsored by the Democratic Party in both houses, and supported by three Republican Senators – Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine. When the bill is signed, we will be told, as we have repeatedly been told in the last few months, that the measures included within it will prevent future financial crises of the sort that we have suffered from over the last two years.

By now, of course, most Americans have become skeptical of such claims. We were to told that the so-called “stimulus” bill would bring unemployment down, and we learned that its main function was to reward constituencies favoring the party in power. It increased dramatically the salaries of those within the federal civil service, it expanded that civil service massively, and it enabled the state governments and the localities to continue to pay those who worked within the public sector at those levels. Similar lies were told during the healthcare debate. We were told that no one would lose his coverage, that no one would be forced to acquire health insurance, that the cost curve would be bent downward. It is proper to ask whether we are being lied to now and whether Senators Brown, Collins, and Snowe have sold us down the river.

The answer depends – to a considerable degree – on what were the causes of the recent financial crisis. Was it caused by a market failure? If so, is it likely that governmental regulation will prevent such failures in the future? These are the claims advanced by Paul Krugman and the like; these are the claims put forward by President Obama, Senator Dodd, and Congressman Frank. And, on the face of it, they would appear to be true. There was, after all, a bubble in the real estate market. Goldman Sachs and the like marketed junk bonds, made up of mortgages, on a gigantic scale and managed to get for them a triple-A rating from S&P and from Moody’s, and insurance against default was purchased from outfits like AIG that had no idea of the risks involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve could and should have intervened.

But one must be cautious about calling what happened “a case of market failure,” for the real-estate market was not a free market. One could, of course, reply that no market is a genuinely free market. The “free market” is an ideal type. It does not exist in reality. The government interferes and gives shape to virtually every market through taxation, regulation, and laws detailing how contracts are to be enforced.

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Yesterday, Scott Brown caved, and the Senate passed its “financial reform.” That story is at the top of every news web site.

But what the establishment media didn’t tell you – unless you waded through the details in a select few news articles or saw this fairly balanced short article in the Washington Post – is that Wednesday evening,  hours after the first cloture vote failed and hours after  I informed BigGovernment.com readers about an effort by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), to narrow the scope of what I have been calling the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s A Bank Bill, Democrats blinked and Vitter’s amendment passed without objection by voice vote.

Vitter’s amendment to the so-called “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” gives a precise meaning to the term “financial company” – changing the definition from Dodd’s original language of “substantially engaged in activities in the United States that are financial in nature” to that of the much stricter “predominantly engaged.” And his amendment precisely defines “predominantly engaged” as a business that makes no less than 85 percent of its revenue from financial activities.

As a result of Vitter’s measure that passed during the brief 24-hour period of most of the GOP standing together in opposition (along with Democrats Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold for their own reasons), a very important change was made.

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I’ve been joking recently that the political climate was moving into territory where it would be impossible for even the GOP to screw up the November elections. I was wrong. Tuesday’s special election to replace the deceased Rep. John Murtha, where a credible GOP candidate lost by almost ten points, proves that we should never underestimate the GOP’s ability to squander its advantages and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

First, lets dismiss with a few of the challenges the GOP faced in the special election. The district, Pennsylvania 12, is a gerrymandered mess, designed to elect a Democrat. There are twice as many registered Democrats in the district as Republicans. Although the Presidential election in 2008 was close, in prior years the Democrat candidate won the district in a walk.

The special election was scheduled on the same day as a hotly-contested Democrat primary, guaranteeing a boost in the party’s turnout. There was a gadfly “tea party” candidate auditioning for the role of spoiler and a somewhat complicated voting process where supporters of the GOP candidate, Tim Burns, had to vote twice; once in the GOP primary and again in the actual special election. And, the Democrat candidate had the full support of the left’s political machine and an army of supporters from Big Labor, in one of the few remaining districts where that matters.

All of these dynamics pointed to a close race. They do not, however, add up to the blowout suffered by Burns on Tuesday. Remember, Burns’ opponent, Mark Critz, was a former staffer for John Murtha. He actually campaigned that he was the economic development director for the former Congressman. He negotiated the earmark deals that cast an ethical cloud above the Congressman and filled a grand jury docket. He said he was a pro-life Democrat, as if that means anything in a post-Stupak world. Oh, and he said he opposed ObamaCare but wouldn’t vote to repeal it. It seems he was against it before he was for it.

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Attorney General Eric Holder testified the other day before the House Judiciary Committee.   Republican congressman Lamar Smith asked him what seemed to be a pretty simple question.

Regarding the perpetrators in the last three terror attacks (two, thank God, unsuccessful) on our homeland (Fort Hood, the Christmas day bomber, and the Times Square bomber), Smith asked our Attorney General “Do you feel these individuals…might have been incited to take the actions they did because of radical Islam?”

Holder feigned to not understand.   “ Because of…?”

Smith:  “Because of radical Islam.”

Holder: “There are a variety of reasons people do these things.”

Smith re-worded the same question and re-asked it six times, with Holder refusing to acknowledge what is as obvious as the fact that I am typing these words and you are reading them.  That every major incident of terror of recent years has been performed by Muslims and that all of them associate their particular theology with their acts of terror.

The real question today is who is governing America and what exactly is the agenda of those who sit in the seat of power of our own country?

It is no wonder that most Americans are squirming around with the most profound sense of uneasiness.  When the chief law enforcement officer of the United States refuses to acknowledge what is clear and true – that those perpetrating terror today are uniformly Muslim and motivated by Islamic theology of one form or another – how in the world can we possibly feel safe?

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As Democrats continue to up the volume on their deceptive campaign to pass a new government takeover and bailout bill for bit Wall Street Banks, apparently there is some nervousness about the pressure Democrats are directing at the two Republican Senators from Maine. The mystery group Committee for Truth in Politics is back up on the air in the Pine Tree State with an ad opposing the Big Bank Bailout.

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Conservative talk radio in Memphis is calling for the firing of the staff member of Sen. Bob Corker who demeaned and belittled Tea Party activists in the Volunteer State calling them “sad” and “creepy” when they visited the office protesting Corker’s support for establishing a permanent bailout fund for companies “too big to fail.”

Corker is leading the charge for a “bipartisan” deal on so-called financial reform legislation that will create bailouts as far as the eyes can see, create a new regulators for small businesses (that had nothing to do with creating the crisis) and empowering big labor with shareholder proxy provisions aimed at undermining private company policy decisions. The House passed version of the bill authorizes the Federal Reserve to spend up to $4 trillion for bailouts. The Senate version is a blank check.

Attitudes are set at the top of the organization.

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Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) understands that the Dodd Financial Reform bill they are trying to ram through the Senate is a bailout.  She has publically opposed the legislation.  But that hasn’t stopped the Administration from pressuring her to change her mind.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be meeting with Sen. Collins to try to get her to see a different version of reality.

But, the American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison says that not only is the bill a bailout but it would benefit Goldman Sachs”  “That act—paying off the creditors when the government takes over a failing firm—is a bailout. It doesn’t matter that the management lose their jobs, or that the shareholders get nothing. When the creditors are aware that they will get a better deal with the failure of a large company than they will get with a small one that goes the ordinary route to bankruptcy, that is a bailout.”

To top it off, the fees for the Dodd bill’s resolution fund that would pay off a failing firm’s creditors would come not just from banks but from a broad array of Main Street businesses. Stable life, auto and home insurance companies would have to pay into this fund to subsidize the failure of the next high-roller, and the fees they pay would likely be passed on in the premiums their policy holders pay. And the bill’s definition of  “nonbank financial company” is so broad that it could cover manufacturers only tangentially involved in extending credit, such as those that lease equipment to their customers. This would raise prices and cost Main Street jobs.

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Liberal pundit Michael Kinsley once defined a political gaffe as an instance of a politician accidentally telling the truth. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., recently made a gaffe that fits Kinsley’s definition to a tee.

In a debate with Ralph Nader on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” in which Nader was accusing Frank of being too timid on the financial regulation bill then moving through the House, Frank responded, “We are trying in every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.”  Conservative blogs took note of Frank’s use of the word “every front”, as did Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and earned a brusque “tsk- tsk” from The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait.

This is an example of “the conservative misinformation feedback loop in action,” Chait exclaimed. Frank was only talking about banking, Chait claimed, and “not confessing to a plan to expand government in every area.”

Actually, in prefacing his comments, Frank moved the topic from Nader’s point about derivatives to the broader issue of how “the right wing took control of government and ruined it” and how it is supposedly benefitting from its “own incompetence.”  But if one still doesn’t want to take this as Frank’s confession of wanting to increase government intervention “in every front,” one need look no further than the bill by Frank that passed the House in December and Chris Dodd’s Senate “financial reform” bill that Democrats are trying to ram through the Senate.

In the debate, Democrats never tire of accusing Republicans of siding with “Wall Street banks.”  But last week Republicans made headway when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out that the bill $50 billion resolution fund would institutionalize bailouts for big banks, whether these banks failed themselves or acted as creditors to too-big-to-fail institutions.  Even an editorial in the Washington Post stated that “Mr. McConnell is partly right” and that “creditors might fund systemically important firms on artificially advantageous terms, thus enabling them to grow bigger and riskier.”

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Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil fraud charges against Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs. The charges arise from the bank marketing collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to customers without disclosing that a major hedge fund investor, and Goldman client, John Paulson had made a series of bets against the securities. (The SEC did not announce any charges against Mr. Paulson.)

The announcement of the charges comes at a volatile time for the financial industry. With the Senate set to take up its version of a sweeping revamp of the financial services industry, the allegations against Goldman are certain to have a prominent place in the debate.

Appearing this afternoon on Chicago’s WLS radio station, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin seemed downright excited about the allegations:

The timing was perfect. We’re about to take up the financial regulatory reform bill. The banks are saying Oh, this is totally unnecessary. We have everything worked out. Now we find out the Securities and Exchange Commission has stepped up and charged Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest, with involvement in some trading that really turns out to be very suspicious.

Ah yes, the “timing was perfect.”

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As long as the Democrats continue to control Congress, we’ll have to endure an endless procession of initiatives for the federal government to take over industry after industry. Health insurance and college loans went under federal hegemony with passage of a single bill, known as “ObamaCare.”

Now, a new bill, referred to by the name of its chief sponsor, the ethically challenged Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, aims to consolidate a federal takeover of the nation’s entire network of financial institutions.

As Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute notes:

Does the bill, as [Republican Senate leader Mitch] McConnell said, “institutionalize too big to fail?” Of course. There can’t be any reasonable doubt about this. The bill authorizes the Fed to regulate all non-bank financial institutions that are “systemically important” or might cause instability in the U.S. financial system if they failed. . . .

The market will see immediately that the government has created Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs in every sector of the financial system where these large companies are designated for Fed regulation, including insurance companies, hedge funds, finance companies, bank holding companies, securities firms, and any other kind of financial institution the government wants to regulate. Since these firms will be too big to fail, they will be seen in the market—as Fannie and Freddie were seen—as ultimately backed by the government and thus safer firms to lend to than small firms that are not government backed. This will permanently distort the financial market, favoring large companies over small ones, and eventually force a consolidation of each market where these firms exist into a few large competitors operating under the benign supervision of the government.

In other words, this is another huge step toward fascistic corporatism, completing a de facto government takeover of today’s nominally “private” financial firms. These corporations would be reduced to the status of politically managed public utilities.

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Despite efforts by some weak sisters like Sen. “Bailout” Bob Corker (R-TN) to cut a deal with “Countrywide” Chris Dodd (D-CT) on legislation to create a Blank Check Bailout Bill and lots of loud speculation from Senate Democrats about peeling off a Republican, Senate Republicans are currently holding firm against intimidation tactics to ram the bill through the Senate a la Health Care Reform.

Sources on Capitol Hill report that Sen. Shelby recently briefed Senate Republicans about the bill and got unanimous support for his efforts to block the Democrats latest government takeover scheme.  Unanimous support means that even the Senators from Maine — Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are holding the line against future bailouts despite ongoing White House efforts to jam the bill. According to our sources, Collins even went so far as to make an explicit commitment to Shelby to oppose the bill saying she has many problems with it.

And with good reason too. As readers recall, the so-called “Financial Reform” legislation contains a number of key provisions – none of them good–that creates more bureaucracies, more fees and taxes, more Washington red tape and makes bailouts the permanent policy of the US Government.  But while offering permanent bailouts and a government takeover of the rest of our economy the legislation of course does nothing to address the root causes of the crisis including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the consumer lending laws that pushed mortgages to people who could never afford to pay them back.

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Good evening, and thank you for joining me.  Many of you in this room are my friends.  Some of you are members of “Organizing For America,” formerly called “Obama For America,” and before that “Operation PUSH.”

Many of you know me.  You have cheered for me.  I miss those days.  I just want to say to each of you, simply and directly, that I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behavior.

I was unfaithful.  I consorted with Republicans.  I engaged in bipartisanship.  What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame.

As you know, I am trying to get a health care reform bill through Congress.  In so doing, I made a reach-around across the aisle.  I avoided talk of a single-payer system.  I watered down and then removed the public option.  I took out the death panels, benefits to undocumented immigrants, and federal funding for abortion that our critics so callously and falsely observed were in the bill.

I know I have bitterly disappointed all of you.  I have made you question who I am and how I could have done the things I did.  I am embarrassed that I have put you in this position.

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Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama — who began his Presidency, as nearly all new first-term Presidents do, high in the polls. At that time, Obama’s approval ratings were, in fact, in the stratosphere. In the last twelve months, however, they have fallen further and faster than those of any President since polling began; and, and, as developments in Massachusetts suggest, his party is now in danger of suffering in November an historic defeat — which is likely to rival its fate in 1938, 1966, and 1994 if the Democrats do not, as I believe they may, do even worse. In a poll released on Thursday, the National Journal reports that half of the adults sampled responded that, if new Presidential elections were held right now, they would vote against Barack Obama, and less than a quarter of those questioned indicated that they would vote to re-elect the President. It is an appropriate time in which to pose this question: Why have Obama and his supporters fallen so far and so fast?

We must, I think, begin before the beginning. The Obama campaign was predicated on a fraud. With a skill that was breathtaking, Barack Obama managed during that campaign to signal to the left within the Democratic Party with a wink and a nod that he was their man and that he meant business — that he really intended to “transform” America. To those in the middle and on the right who are ashamed of the nation’s historic sins in matters of race, he offered absolution, and he promised that the penance that they would have to perform after leaving the confessional would not be harsh. He was not, he said, a tax-and-spend liberal.

I was not taken in. Late in 2008, after reviewing the page proofs of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, I persuaded my editor to allow me to add the following to the book:

Once again, as in the 1920s, rational administration has failed us. As on that other occasion, the Federal Reserve Board and the Department of the Treasury pursued over an extended period under more than one administration an easy-money policy bound in the end to give rise to “irrational exuberance” in the markets and to a bubble followed by a catastrophic decline in prices and a collapse of the credit markets. And, to make matters worse, we responded to this set of circumstances precisely as we did on that earlier occasion — by electing a president and choosing a Congress intent on dramatically increasing the scale and scope of the administrative state.

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On Thursday, the United States House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution funding the Federal Government through December 18^th.  The continuing resolution was passed as part of the behemoth Interior-Environment Appropriations conference report.

A continuing resolution is a stop-gap provision which allows the government to continue its operations until Congress can determine the next year’s appropriations.  The actions taken today merely extended the expiration date of the resolution which went into effect on October 1^st.

By extending the existing continuing resolution Congress has continued to deprive ACORN and its affiliates of federal funds until December 18^th.

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