Sometimes, all you can do is just all you can do.

Both President Obama and the Congress seem poised to launch another round of legislating in the hopes that the economy will get its act together — preferably before November's elections.

The details of what they appear to be planning to do are remarkably similar to what they have already done. We can call it the legislative version of the Rocky Syndrome.

The Rocky Syndrome is the unfortunate tendency of Hollywood movie studios to produce seemingly endless sequels to movies that do well at the box office. (It doesn't happen as often as it used to, though, so perhaps it was simply a historical aberration. At least, we can hope.)

In legislative parlance, it means that if Congress is at a loss as to what to do next, they'll simply turn around and do what they just did.

From what they're saying, it looks like they've decided that their prior intervention may not have ended the recession but it (probably) kept it from being any worse. So, this time, maybe it will end the recession and, in any event, it's better than doing nothing.

Part of the reason why they don't know what to do is because they economy is not behaving the way it used to and nobody has appeared to explain how it is behaving now because nobody really knows.

Besides the incentives provided by campaign donations, lawmakers like to tinker with big companies at times like this because the big companies haven't changed. They remain familiar and the lawmakers understand them.

The things they are doing for small businesses are only helping a small number of them because only a small number of them are still doing business in 20th century ways. They don't know how we operate anymore and there aren't enough of them who do their own tweeting for us to explain it to them.

They are working with elderly, crumbling economic structures that have been abandoned by most of us long since. It's all they know, so it's what they do.

It's kind of sad, of course, but you also have to wonder: how long do you think it'll be before they figure out that they are singing in the stadium to an army of empty bleachers?