After the week-end news of a naked legislator, a deadly wolf attack, Son of Ron Paul, and a vampire space cowboy bomber, today things got back to normal.

Senator Chris Dodd D- Conn. has a banking reform bill that he would like to send out this week from the banking committee he chairs. He has watered down his original proposals to gain approval of the Republican committee members, none of whom will vote for it.

Banking and securities regulation has supposedly been a priority of Congress and the Obama Administration since the Wall Street induced near meltdown of the world economy in late 2008.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volker, head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has called for a break-up of the largest banks, and regulations prohibiting deposit taking institutions from engaging in risky trading and investments.

Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, head of the Congressional Oversight Panel investigating the U.S. bank bailout, said today
“Since bringing our economy to the brink of collapse, Wall Street has spent more than a year and hundreds of millions of dollars in an all-out effort to block financial reform. Despite the banks’ ferocious lobbying for business as usual, Chairman Dodd took an important step today by advancing new laws to prevent the next crisis. We’re now heading toward a series of votes in which the choice will be clear: families or banks.”

So soon the Senate will consider a compromise bill, stripped significantly of the proposed consumer protection agency that was to stem abusive practices in credit card, auto, and mortgage lending. Senate Democrats are expected to struggle to pass even this measure with their fifty-nine seat minority. Chris Dodd is retiring after this year, he has nothing to lose. Barney Frank has done his part leading the House Banking Committee, and Wall Street and the banking industry are widely vilified by the public and in the media. Last week it was revealed that Lehman Brothers was cooking their books before they went under in a “repo” scheme that spun-off toxic assets at accounting time only to take them back afterwards. (Enron did this too)

The time is ripe for reform that would restore safeguards that kept our economy from major implosions since the great depression. I wonder how the Democrats will manage to screw this up?