Something happened in Hampton last night and Mad Dog is hung over this morning trying to figure out what.
The ghost of Alexander Hamilton hung out as 25 citizens gathered in a living room to listen to one of 10 candidates for the United States Congress seat in the New Hampshire first discuss important issues of the day.
There were no TV ads with piano music wafting in the background.
No slogans.
No music at all, unless you count the music of the soul which wafted about the room.
They listened to Terence O'Rourke, a lawyer from Rochester, NH, talk about Healthcare, and they asked him questions, asked each other questions, just talked.
Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, there was little disagreement about healthcare--even when, or especially when O'Rourke said we had to take the profit motive out of American healthcare. Hardly a voice demurred when he discussed immigration and dismissed the Louie Gohmert exhortations about the impending apocalypse building on our southern border. O'Rourke, who has prosecuted MS-13 types said when illegal aliens violate the law, our legal system can handle that.
But then came Dodd-Frank.
Mad Dog had expected an eruption over this because O'Rourke has been going around saying the voters, the citizens of our state have been betrayed by our two Democratic senators and by one of our Representatives, who sold their votes, selling out the citizens of Main Street to pay off the debts they incurred when they took money from Wall Street.
A lot of people in that room worked hard to get Senators Hassan and Shaheen elected. And this being New Hampshire, they had drunk coffee, sailed around Portsmouth harbor with these senators.
So the stage was set for an eruption.
But O'Rourke set about explaining why the new Republican bill gutting Dodd Frank was such a manifestly bad idea. He took his time and Mad Dog was looking at his watch and looking at poster board showing we had 5 more issues after Dodd Frank to cover and calculating we might not finish until midnight if we took too long on Dodd Frank.
But O'Rourke was not deterred or rushed. He started with the Great Depression and how greed and recklessness on Wall Street had brought the country down, and how Congress eventually responded with Glass-Steagall which separated out banking from speculative finance and how that had protected us until people forgot all about the Depression in the roaring 1990's and repealed that law. And he took us through, step by step what happened as a result, when the reins and leashes on the wild horses of wall street were broken and how greed and heedlessness sent banks off the cliff and with the banks, our economy which was still tangled up with strong ropes to these banks, almost got pulled off the cliff with these financial miscreants.
He explained how Dodd Frank was fashioned to prevent this from happening again.
Listening, Mad Dog's impatience gave way to fascination. This was a highly complex story, but O'Rourke, had broken it down into digestible pieces and it became comprehensible, almost obvious.
By the time he finished everyone in the room seemed to accept his version was accurate. Nobody objected. He had built his case: Undoing Dodd Frank was a bad idea. It was as if the Netherlands decided to dismantle the dikes.
So we were left to ask: Why would anyone vote to undo Dodd Frank?
Well, Republicans would do it because Republicans are all about no government. No government regulations whether it be on polluting rivers, or burning coal or on banks. Why Republicans wanted to destroy Dodd-Frank is easy enough to understand.
But why would Democrats vote for that?
Follow the money, this prosecutor said. Half a million in contributions over the past 5 years from the banking lobby (information available on the website Open Secrets--if you know how to navigate that website) to each of our Democratic senators. What other explanation could there be?
The senators said Dodd Frank had hurt "community banks."
But how do you define "community banks?"
One way is by how much money they control and that's below $10 billion. But these community banks all want to get bigger, to get to be big players and they acquire each other and now they have $50 billion under the control of each and if three of those fail, it would be as bad as if one "too big to fail" bank crashed.
So, saying this vote was just a correction so Main Street banks could get out from under regulations meant to control Wall Street banks is a dodge. "Community" banks are just Wall Street bank wannabes.
The citizens examined this case. What other possible explanations could there be for these votes?
Eventually, the group seemed to say: He's right. They sold their votes.
But then someone said: Okay, so they sold out. But they had to. Without money, they'd lose their next election.
And better to have a Democrat in those seats than a Republican Kelly Ayotte (friend of Joe Arpaio) or a Scott Brown (Cosmo centerfold.)
To which O'Rourke replied: Better to have Democrats in those seats who vote like Democrats. Why do Democrats always have to have compromise candidates and Congress people? The Republicans don't have that.
And so the citizens of Hampton drifted off into the night, boats which had beaten against the current, borne ceaselessly back to the past.
The ghost of Alexander Hamilton hung out as 25 citizens gathered in a living room to listen to one of 10 candidates for the United States Congress seat in the New Hampshire first discuss important issues of the day.
There were no TV ads with piano music wafting in the background.
No slogans.
No music at all, unless you count the music of the soul which wafted about the room.
They listened to Terence O'Rourke, a lawyer from Rochester, NH, talk about Healthcare, and they asked him questions, asked each other questions, just talked.
Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, there was little disagreement about healthcare--even when, or especially when O'Rourke said we had to take the profit motive out of American healthcare. Hardly a voice demurred when he discussed immigration and dismissed the Louie Gohmert exhortations about the impending apocalypse building on our southern border. O'Rourke, who has prosecuted MS-13 types said when illegal aliens violate the law, our legal system can handle that.
 |
| Gomer Gohmert |
Hardly an eye blinked when O'Rourke responded calmly to the screed about abortion being mass murder. He simply said whether something is infanticide or abortion all comes down to drawing lines and when you draw the line at fertilization, conception, there is no room for discussion, but most people don't draw it there; most people agree the point of viability is a more reasonable place to draw that line. So the explosive issue of abortion was dispatched in this room of New Hampshire citizens as if it was nothing more than a problem which could be solved by reasonable people of good will.
But then came Dodd-Frank.
Mad Dog had expected an eruption over this because O'Rourke has been going around saying the voters, the citizens of our state have been betrayed by our two Democratic senators and by one of our Representatives, who sold their votes, selling out the citizens of Main Street to pay off the debts they incurred when they took money from Wall Street.
A lot of people in that room worked hard to get Senators Hassan and Shaheen elected. And this being New Hampshire, they had drunk coffee, sailed around Portsmouth harbor with these senators.
So the stage was set for an eruption.
But O'Rourke set about explaining why the new Republican bill gutting Dodd Frank was such a manifestly bad idea. He took his time and Mad Dog was looking at his watch and looking at poster board showing we had 5 more issues after Dodd Frank to cover and calculating we might not finish until midnight if we took too long on Dodd Frank.
But O'Rourke was not deterred or rushed. He started with the Great Depression and how greed and recklessness on Wall Street had brought the country down, and how Congress eventually responded with Glass-Steagall which separated out banking from speculative finance and how that had protected us until people forgot all about the Depression in the roaring 1990's and repealed that law. And he took us through, step by step what happened as a result, when the reins and leashes on the wild horses of wall street were broken and how greed and heedlessness sent banks off the cliff and with the banks, our economy which was still tangled up with strong ropes to these banks, almost got pulled off the cliff with these financial miscreants.
He explained how Dodd Frank was fashioned to prevent this from happening again.
 |
| O'Rourke |
Listening, Mad Dog's impatience gave way to fascination. This was a highly complex story, but O'Rourke, had broken it down into digestible pieces and it became comprehensible, almost obvious.
By the time he finished everyone in the room seemed to accept his version was accurate. Nobody objected. He had built his case: Undoing Dodd Frank was a bad idea. It was as if the Netherlands decided to dismantle the dikes.
So we were left to ask: Why would anyone vote to undo Dodd Frank?
Well, Republicans would do it because Republicans are all about no government. No government regulations whether it be on polluting rivers, or burning coal or on banks. Why Republicans wanted to destroy Dodd-Frank is easy enough to understand.
But why would Democrats vote for that?
Follow the money, this prosecutor said. Half a million in contributions over the past 5 years from the banking lobby (information available on the website Open Secrets--if you know how to navigate that website) to each of our Democratic senators. What other explanation could there be?
The senators said Dodd Frank had hurt "community banks."
But how do you define "community banks?"
One way is by how much money they control and that's below $10 billion. But these community banks all want to get bigger, to get to be big players and they acquire each other and now they have $50 billion under the control of each and if three of those fail, it would be as bad as if one "too big to fail" bank crashed.
So, saying this vote was just a correction so Main Street banks could get out from under regulations meant to control Wall Street banks is a dodge. "Community" banks are just Wall Street bank wannabes.
The citizens examined this case. What other possible explanations could there be for these votes?
Eventually, the group seemed to say: He's right. They sold their votes.
But then someone said: Okay, so they sold out. But they had to. Without money, they'd lose their next election.
And better to have a Democrat in those seats than a Republican Kelly Ayotte (friend of Joe Arpaio) or a Scott Brown (Cosmo centerfold.)
To which O'Rourke replied: Better to have Democrats in those seats who vote like Democrats. Why do Democrats always have to have compromise candidates and Congress people? The Republicans don't have that.
And so the citizens of Hampton drifted off into the night, boats which had beaten against the current, borne ceaselessly back to the past.
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