Barney Frank
(originally posted on The Will and the Wallet
For thirty-five years, the Egyptian people believed the myth and lived in fear, fear of the security forces and fear of the chaos and instability that might exist without a strong ruler. They have just overcome that fear and created hope. That collective psychic shift was the key to making the change they needed to bring about.
Over at The Caucus blog at the New York Times, Carl Hulse yesterday posted about a letter from Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Norm Dicks (D-WA) to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking him "to explain the military impact of putting the government into default," that is, what would happen if Republicans in Congress refuse to increase the federal debt ceiling when it's reached later this year. Here's the money quote from Hulse's post:
More specifically, they asked the secretary what the effect would be on combat operations and military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq “if Congress were to fail to raise the debt limit and a government shutdown occurred.”
“Would the troops in the field be imperiled if we reached a point where for however long the Pentagon was unable to spend money?” they wrote.
I was on the road and essentially off-line all day yesterday, so forgive me for being late to comment on Senator Chris Dodd’s newest and most bizarre proposal for some kind of consumer financial protection agency.
In his third bid in as many days to win over a few token Republicans, the Senate Banking chairman is now proposing to create an enfeebled new consumer regulator inside the Federal Reserve.
Say what???? This is the same Chris Dodd who, four months ago, accused the Fed of being “an abysmal failure” as a regulator and unveiled a bill that would have stripped it of virtually all its supervisory powers.
"Over the last number of years when [the Fed] took on consumer-protection responsibility and regulation of bank holding companies, it was an abysmal failure," Dodd declared at a press conference in November 9.
