The Colonel's Forum

Today, the new Treasury Secretary (Tim Geithner) announced his proposal for implementing some new regulations in the financial markets. In short, he has come up with a system of checks and balances to ensure that things like hedge funds, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that have remained largely unregulated start getting some oversight. There are a lot of people out there who will say "this is awful, the government should stay out of the markets," or "the government can't do anything right, they'll ruin capitalism." Republicans and conservatives will argue that this is just a massive expansion of government that's going to cost the taxpayers billions. Newsflash - it's the absence of regulation that got us into this mess. People (let's call them idiots) theorized that the investment banks would self-regulate in a free market. Now, we're spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail them out and avoid the complete coll

Found this on the L.A. Times political blog today and decided to post it in its entirety: President Obama today signed a document countermanding some documents signed by his predecessor and saying he won't sign so many other documents like that called signing documents. This is another one of those little-known nifty Washington gadgets that cause the Real World out here to stare and go, "Say what?" A signing document is basically an addendum that a president signs after signing legislation saying, in effect, yes, I know I signed this legislation but I really don't like/disagree with/suspect are unconstitutional/or all of the above the following parts. This is basically his instructions/permission to the vast D.C. bureaucracy to ignore the disputed parts, even though the people's elected representatives passed it and the nation's chief executive officially signed it allegedly into law -- albeit with a Washington wink. No, really. Like signing and init