Senator Chris Dodd

     I’ve been plowing through Senator Chris Dodd’s 1,300-page bill to overhaul financial regulation, and I’m surprised. At first glance, it is tougher and better than I had expected.

      Readers beware: it’s not a pretty piece of work.  Kids! Do not read this at home. It makes the prospectus for a subprime mortgage-backed security look like a model of clarity.

     The bill is full of murky exclusions, exceptions and hair-splitting -- usually a red flag that our elected representatives have capitulated to big-money interests and disguised the bombshells behind eye-glazing boilerplate.

    But there are a lot of genuinely tough changes, and the bill is a lot less ugly than it first appears. 

    The big banks and Wall Street firms are already howling in protest. Front groups like the U.S.