The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize gave another push this afternoon to his administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, with a speech at the White House. The only thing I heard that was really new was that he busted the chops of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saying one of its anti-CFPA ads—which claims that the agency will end up regulating your local butcher—was “completely false.” (The 0.05% of Americans who still get their meat from a local butcher breathed a great sigh of relief at that.)

Meanwhile, the Chamber sent out a press release before Obama’s speech saying they “disagree that a massive new federal agency with unprecedented powers over vast segments of the business community will be good for consumers, for America’s job creators or for the economy.” I don’t fully understand why the Chamber is getting itself so deep into this fight, considering that most of its members won’t be directly affected by the new agency. Maybe it’s a slippery-slope argument (“When they came for the dodgy mortgage lenders, I did nothing, for I was not a dodgy mortgage lender …”). Or maybe, as in their strangely hard stand on global warming, they’ve just decided that fighting is what good lobbying organizations do, even when many of their members don’t want them to.