Maybe Glenn Beck isn't a paranoid crybaby after all. With Palin and PelosiCare occupying pundits, it's easy to miss the Frank-Dodd move to "regulate" (i.e. completely control) financial services. You read that right; Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, two politicians most responsible for the mess in which we now find ourselves seeking to regulate that which they themselves created. Dodd's fighting for his political life, with polls showing voters in the Constitution State have had enough. But one more turn of the screw (and I mean it as it sounds) before he heads out the door fits with the tone of his tenure. As for Frank …well, he's just being Frank. If prostitution and pot busts can't bring him down, he figures a little thing like imploding $5 trillion of the domestic real estate market and then "saving" us from having it happen again will go pretty much unremarked. Which it had until our old friend Peter Wallison writing this week in the Wall Street Journal, broke it down for us:
"Both bills are intended to cover more than just companies that are engaged in financial activities. Following the administration's lead, both provide that a company engaged in a financial activity 'in whole or in part, directly or indirectly' could be subject to enhanced regulation and supervision …If the administration's health-care proposal has the potential to nationalize one-sixth of the economy, Messrs. Frank and Dodd are bidding to cover the rest."
