House weakens Dodd-Frank twice in one month amid lobbying blitz

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 0 Comment
Former Mass. Sen. Scott Brown now works for Peabody Nixon in "business and government affairs."

Former Mass. Sen. Scott Brown now works for Peabody Nixon in “business and government affairs.”

The Dodd-Frank Act is not quite five years old, but it has already become an intolerable obstacle to the American economy finance industry. Don’t worry: the finance, insurance and real estate industry spent $74 million on 704 registered lobbyists in the first three quarters of 2014. That’s a 2.5 percent increase in a year where every other industry’s lobbying expenditures went down. It was money well spent. Since mid-December, the House has voted to impose stricter cost-benefit analyses and judicial reviews on all enforcement agencies; today, it is expected to postpone enforcement of Dodd-Frank provisions and weaken related regulations on financial services. You didn’t think the finance industry would invest $74 million unwisely. I mean, what is this, 2008?

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Friday links! Dignity of office edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment
Montana State House Representative Champ Edmunds (R–Missoula)

Montana State House Representative Champ Edmunds (R–Missoula)

Yeats said that poets were the invisible legislators of the world. It is not totally clear what he meant; he definitely preferred the poets, but it’s hard to know whether it was because they performed a more vital function than the visible legislators or simply because he didn’t have to look at them. There is also the old adage about seeing how sausage is made. Have you ever looked at a person who makes sausage, though? Way more gross, especially once you get to thinking about it. Today is Friday, and the men and women we have elected to represent us are repellent to us. Probably that’s because they are such irresponsible scoundrels—it couldn’t be because they are an accurate reflection of the people who voted for them. Won’t you seize on the most comforting answer with me?

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An extremely exciting day in the history of boring stuff

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment
The US Senate looks the same every time.

The US Senate looks the same every time.

I still remember the day that I, a boy-child of 14, encountered Robert’s Rules of Order. Oh, I though to myself. Here is finally the thing I like least in the world. As a set of rules for meetings, parliamentary procedure is boring squared. Even in the most interesting kinds of meetings—the Machiavellian ones where everyone pretends not to hate one another’s goals—procedure is at best a synopsis of a plot. It is therefore maybe hard to get psyched about the possibility of today’s Senate changing the rules of the filibuster, an instrument that the world’s greatest deliberative body abuses now more than ever.

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Usman Raja and “dismantling that perception”

By Dan Brooks in Fighting 0 Comment

Some guys just don’t get cauliflower ear.

CNN has a fantastic article about Usman Raja, the former British MMA fighter and respected trainer whose Unity Project uses fight training to rehabilitate convicted terrorists. You read that right: Raja’s plan is to make terrorists better at hand-to-hand combat. Anyone who came back for two day two of muay thai class knows how it feels to start learning a practical fighting system. It feels bad. The sensation of being a tough guy who can’t get the hang of a check-and-counter drill—or of being a talented striker who’s getting guillotined over and over the first month of jiu jitsu—is immensely humbling. That seems to be the operating principle of Raja’s approach. “Any idea you’ve got of yourself will be challenged as soon as you come in here,” he told CNN. “Once that idea of yourself is challenged and that opening happens we are able to go in and start dismantling that perception.”

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Return of son of bride of health care

By Dan Brooks in health care 1 Comment

"I know this is a bad time, but they're saying the adenoids are a pre-existing condition."

Let me head off your objections right now: son of bride of health care is not just son of health care, because Mrs. Health Care subsequently remarried and lives in Ohio. Father of son of former bride of health care is John Boehner, and even though he pretends to be friendly, he keeps subtly insulting health care by saying things like, “I understand where you’re coming from; when I was younger, I had to eke out a living sweeping somebody else’s floors, myself.” Basically, new husband of ex-wife of health care is a dick, and every time he claims to do health care a favor he only humiliates it further. Last week, for example, he organized a purely symbolic overturn of last year’s reforms with the Repealing the Job-Crushing Health Care Law Act, which really puts certain other phrases from this paragraph in perspective. It was a pretty cynical move, incorporating as it did both a purported desire to improve the law and a sure exemption from having to do so. Anyone could see what spray-tanned second husband of health care was doing except those closest to him, and so the duty to say something fell to former coworker of both health care and father of son of former bride of health care, David Frum.

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