To quote an eloquent spokesman from the heartland, justifying the physical abuse of a "disloyal, non-patriotic" midwestern farm organizer/terrorist by a town sheriff and a mob of locals in Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, published in 1920:

Maybe it wasn't exactly regular...They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure.

Amazingly, this point of view was regarded back then by city folk as hopelessly unenlightened and provincial.

Thankfully, we now have graduates of the nation's top universities working at prestigious journals of opinion to properly promote the pragmatic perspective as hearteningly mainstream and centrist.

Anyone who thinks this story is being ignored didn't see the front page of the WSJ this morning: House Attacks Fed, Treasury.

Approval of the Paul/Grayson bill is truly encouraging news. In our bleak state, any sign of "outsider" bipartisanship deserves support from anyone who cares about transparency, bottom-up legislation and the pursuit of truly public policy. It is a (relatively) radical departure from business as usual, and such procedural transformations by the nature of things have to spearhead the process of change.

The exact mix of the players, and the current language of the initiative, is much less important than the rather astonishing fact of this dog walking at all. It's premature to see this as a sign that libertarianism or any other particular philosophy is on the ascendancy, or that particular individuals are on their way to amassing scary amounts of power.

Honestly, it's great people have the energy, time and interest to debate the merits of bimetallism, the cultural significance of The Fountainhead, and the hypothetical impact of a possible misuse of the powers invested in Congress by the final version of this bill. Sadly, I suspect this noble legislation will at best suffer a memorable martyrdom, and so don't see much cause for excessive rejoicing or alarm at this pre-natal stage of its development.

I'm just glad, for now, to see a truly diverse coalition of strange bedfellows break down the usual elitist monopoly over financial initiatives. ( And come on now - even you Fedophiles would like to know where all our money went, wouldn't you, if it didn't mean turning the clock back to the McKinley era?)

In the meantime, I plan on postponing my panic attack over the impending Second Coming of Ron Paul and his Libertarian Inflationary Anarchist Republic (LIRA) to at least after Thanksgiving.