Handicapping the fate of financial regulatory reform at this juncture seems nearly impossible, even for veteran Senate watchers. But there are a few things we know for sure. The bill gets weaker the further it progresses, and it is nowhere near as strong as the bill passed by Barney Frank in the House last December. In fact, according to ace financial regulation analyst Mike Rorty, the evolving Senate bill is beginning to look a lot like a proposed House GOP bill that never made it to the floor.

Corker, reports the Times, said he was "very disappointed" and that Dodd's gambit is likely an attempt to cover his left flank.

"I think what Chairman Dodd is going to do probably is introduce a bill on Monday that is a little to the left of where we were, to try to ensure that he can do as much as he can in the way of getting Democratic support on the committee. And then I think he will move to the right."

Let's try defining "moving to the right": Weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as much as possible, avoiding tough derivatives regulation, and not coming anywhere close to prohibiting banks from the kind of risky bets that precipitated the financial crisis.

The conventional wisdom parrots Corker's position, since the Democrats only control 59 votes in the Senate and thus cannot beat a filibuster. Comparisons with the plight of healthcare reform abound.

But those comparisons are not valid. Whether you blame Republican obfuscation or Democratic compromises with the health industry, the public's attitude toward passing healthcare reform is highly ambivalent. Not so with Wall Street. Senate Democrats have a golden opportunity to put together a solid bill and then force Republicans to filibuster against it, thus placing the GOP in the clear position of defending the interests of the financial industry against the interests of the general public. It would be nice to think that Dodd is finally realizing this. But after watching his zigs and zags over the past few months, during which reform has only become more watered down, it's difficult to feel confident that finally, somehow, the Dems are willing and ready to make a stand.

But let's see what happens Monday.

"Why do we keep doing this? .... Why do we keep passing debt on to our children? Why do we keep running program after program out here that is shrouded in sweetness and light but not paid for?"

Hasn't Gregg been listening? There's no shortage of economists who will explain the benefits of running a government deficit during an economic downturn. The goal is to boost demand, which will lead to higher employment, and ultimately, higher tax revenues that could conceivably end up reducing the deficit. Gregg knows this. He's been around the block a few times. Maybe he's just trying to show solidarity with those of his colleagues who believe we should just stop giving unemployment benefits to workers, period, but at the very least he is being remarkably disingenuous. He's a politician: High unemployment is bad for politicians, too.

If he's still wondering today, maybe he should look at the new jobless claims numbers which offer precious little support for the hope that March is going to witness gangbuster employment growth. New claims for benefits for the first week of March fell only 6,000 from the previous week, down to 468,000. The four-week moving average rose by 5000. Neither number jibes with the prediction made by some analysts that 300,000 new jobs will be added to payrolls in March.

And even a seemingly big jump wouldn't necessarily be that great news, argues Calculated Risk, if you take into account the likely effects of February snow and March census hiring. On the jobs front, there's precious little good news to hang one's hopes on. And without employment growth, consumers won't spend, homeowners will continue to be forced into foreclosure and the likelihood that politicians will hold onto their seats in November will continue to fall.

That's why, Judd.

And then I sped away, riding a wave of shiny new bicycle euphoria, along with my beautiful steel-framed Bianchi. Two months ago, my home was broken into and my laptop, bicycle, and the leather jacket I inherited from my father were stolen. It is a stab in the gut to lose a bike that I had ridden ten thousand miles on in the last ten years, a sucker-punch that just kept on giving. But nothing heals such wounds like a new bicycle.

I got the bike last night. Then, this morning, I woke up and learned that Google has added a layer of biking directions to Google Maps. The bike gods, truly, are smiling. Because adding a layer of biking goodness to Google Maps is an unadulteratedly fine thing.

This is something that cyclists have been hoping for and working towards for a long time. Oh sure, I know there will be bugs in Google's routing algorithm, which is designed to automatically suggest the most bike-friendly route to get you from point to point. It's a lot trickier to figure out the best bike route for a trip than the speediest, most direct route for a car. Bikers will go out of their away to avoid high traffic streets or will purposely seek out especially scenic routes. And, if the alpha bike geeks who swarm in the Bay Area are any example, they will not be shy about exposing Google's failures and trumpeting them to the heavens. But Google's representatives are taking pains to stress that they will be welcoming user feedback to correct any errors or add additional info: My hope is that a properly designed and administered system will marry Google's algorithmic-fu with localized human intelligence and, over time, we will get a platform of bike-rich geography that just keeps improving. That, more or less, is how the distributed knowledge-base that is the Internet keeps evolving.

However, I did think that Google's geeks, especially those based in Seattle, were made of tougher stuff than this:

Uphill slopes: l don't know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, especially when you're trying to get somewhere you need to be. Going uphill is worse than simply being much slower; it's also exhausting and can take a toll on the rest of your ride. Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you're biking on. Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you'll require and the speed you'll achieve while going uphill. We take this speed into account when determining the time estimate for your journey, and we also try hard to avoid routes that will require an unreasonable degree of exertion. Sometimes the model will determine that it's far more efficient to make you ride several extra blocks than to have to deal with a massive hill. My teammates in San Francisco were relieved to see that this does indeed work!

He doesn't know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, in Seattle?! I respectfully suggest that these cyclists are not living in the right city. OK, maybe "enjoy" isn't quite the right word to capture the exhilaration of burning quads and an aching back and black existential despair as you struggle in your lowest gear to get up an endless 15 percent grade. But there's no downhill joy without that uphill pain, and how else are you going to get stronger?

I fully expect that the next iteration of Google Maps will include a feature that allows me to seek the hilliest route between two points. But I'll be patient while I wait. Because I have a new bike, and now the whole world is a lot more shiny.

McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, has made challenging the mores of the organic, slow food, eat local movements his life work. The title of his last book: "Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly," is sufficiently illuminating. This time out, his argument is straightforward: The reaction against "industrial food" is just another time-honored manifestation of an American infatuation with a simpler life.

For all their moral impact, our linear jeremiads fail to capture the circularity of history. This is especially true with our back-to-the past reaction to "industrial food." Current calls for dietary simplicity might have a revolutionary ring to them. But what's overlooked in all the enthusiasm is this: Americans have always idealized, or at least harkened back to, an agricultural era when production was supposedly simpler, closer to the land, and unadulterated by the complexities of modernization. What we're seeing right now with the food movement is, for all its supposed novelty, a stock (even banal) reaction to broad historical changes.

Wow: "curious," "entertaining" and "banal." That's quite the triple play. I imagine McWilliams observing the customers at a Berkeley farmer's market with the bored half-smile of a late 18th century French aristocrat gracing his face. Ah, the native customs here, their very quaintness makes them both fascinating and so very, very dull!

I will grant that Americans have an undeniable tendency to idealize "mythical golden ages" and McWilliams does a good job of unearthing outbreaks of such longing, as they pertain to food, going all the way back to James Madison. But this emphasis on the circularity of history plows directly into a paradox: By dismissing those who are currently pushing for healthier food and more sustainable agriculture as "primitives" he is making an implicit argument against another core American belief -- our faith in progress.

Michael Roberts, an economist who specializes in food issues, touches upon this issue in his own response to McWilliams:

The difference between today's movement and the past is that we have data that show real costs to health stemming from cheap and highly processed food. The obesity crisis is real. Growth in diabetes is real. The broader causes are pretty clear.

That's right. Science. Michael Pollan's pithy manifesto -- "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" -- isn't a reaction against modernity; it's a consequence of the human ability to probe the mysteries of the universe and learn how things work. It is rooted in science, the outcome of our ever-advancing understanding of biology and chemistry and nutrition. If the course of the Industrial Revolution proves anything, it is that history is not circular. We are hurtling into the future at high speed and making lots of mistakes as we do so. But we're smart critters and we can learn from our mistakes and fix things as we go. (That's the theory anyway -- the 21st century may yet prove me wrong.) There are health implications to eating too much processed or junk food, and there are environmental implications to industrial agribusiness, and there are always better ways to do things.

In her review of "Just Food" for Grist, Stephanie Ogburn wrote that "Again and again, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that McWilliams creates fanatical straw men in order to make his own presentation of facts seem like a rational alternative." That's exactly what he's doing at Freakonomics, and it is neither curious nor entertaining. But it is predictable contrarianism, so I guess it qualifies as banal.

Dorning notes that economic growth is currently stronger than the consensus forecast of economists one year ago.

Since then, monthly job losses have abated, from 779,000 during the month Obama took office to 36,000 last month. Corporate profits have grown; among 491 companies in the S&P 500 that reported fourth-quarter earnings, profits rose 180 percent from a year ago, according to Bloomberg data. Durable goods orders in January were up 9.3 percent from a year earlier. Inflation is tame, and long-term interest rates remain low.

Piece de resistance quote:

"We've had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board," said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. "If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president."

But we don't, for a plethora of reasons, ranging from the comprehensive critique best articulated by Simon Johnson -- who argues convincingly that the failure to meaningfully reduce the size of banks will make the next crisis even worse than the most recent one -- to the raw truth of the state of labor markets right now.

The Labor Department announced today January employment numbers broken down by state.

Bloomberg:

The unemployment rate decreased in nine U.S. states in January and climbed in 30, signaling the thawing of the labor market is not broad-based.

Rising unemployment in 30 states in January translates to more problems with state finances, and more cuts in services. And that, in turn, means that the judgment of people, as opposed to money, is a little less than overwhelmingly positive.

From the Environmental Research Letters: (Thanks to Berkeleyside for the tip.)

In this letter we propose standard characteristics for an avoided power plant that have physical meaning and intuitive plausibility, for use in back-of-the-envelope calculations and characterizing energy savings results. We also propose naming the annual energy savings of such a plant as a new unit in Art Rosenfeld's honor (the Rosenfeld) because Dr Rosenfeld continues to be the most prominent advocate of characterizing efficiency savings in terms of avoided power plants.

Dr Rosenfeld made a transition from particle physics to studying energy efficiency at the time of the first oil embargo. Over the past 35 years he has been at the forefront of efforts to improve the efficiency of energy use around the world and has devoted special care to making the results of complex energy analysis understandable to a lay audience. For years, Dr Rosenfeld has characterized oil savings in terms of 'Arctic Refuges saved' and electricity savings in terms of 'avoided power plants' to emphasize that supply and demand side policy options are fungible and that replacing power plants with more efficient energy technologies would be beneficial for consumers' electricity bills and for the environment.

Is the new "metric for electricity savings" measurement going to catch on? Energy efficiency is much in the news in recent days. President Obama pushed his Home Star Cash for Caulkers weatherization program in Georgia last week and there has been a slew of Congressional activity.

Let's look at one of the bills -- "Building Star," legislation introduced last Tuesday by Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) Building Star's goal is to push energy-efficient renovations in commercial and multi-family residential buildings.

According to SustainableBusiness.com, "'Building Star' is expected to save building owners more than $3 billion on their energy bills annually by reducing enough peak electricity demand to avoid the need for thirty-three 300-megawatt power plants."

Let's see. 33 300 megawatt power plants is equivalent to just about 20 500 megawatt plants, which would come out to around 20 Rosenfelds.

That's right! This new legislation could save us 20 ROSENFELDS!

Hmmm. It's a nice gesture, and it does carry with it a certain touch of supreme geekiness, but I don't think it's really going to fly in the public sphere.