I am not educated enough to know if the bailout being proposed by Bernanke and Paulson is truly needed to avoid catastrophe, or not.  I tend to think it probably is, sadly for us all.

But if a bailout is enacted, it needs to address the people who pillaged our system for their own gain.

All I can say is the folks who peddled and profited from these financial WMDs, ensconced in their Upper East Side penthouses and Hamptons mansions, ought feel happy tonight that they're not living in 1792 in Paris.  They should also be thankful for the general ignorance of the American people, and glad that most of them don't know just how much money they made over the past few years.

All that said, we should make sure they give their pound — or more — of flesh. After all, we're all picking up the bill.

Class warfare? You bet your ass.

This is repulsive. I don’t know of any attack by any liberal commentator or blogger on Sarah Palin that is even half as sickening as this. Limbaugh is a joke, he’s a disgrace to the country. And ought to be a disgrace to right-wingers if they had any sense or class.

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No, not because he's drunk all the time.

But rather, because of this kind of drivel, in which he smugly asserts Obama is a latter day Dukakis, (and, he thinks, rhetorically) asks:

OK, Hitch, how about this line from his convention speech since you asked about this first:

Or:

Or:

Hitch, you're a dumbass.

Folks like Hitchens (who act like the very sons of liberty) always attack liberals and Democrat for their supposed mealy-mouthed "decency" — code word, for their crowd, for wussie.  To say, "My guy may be an idiot and doesn't deserve to win, but he's better than your spineless wimp." Then to evade any responsibility for the gutless advocacy. "I didn't want Bush to win — it's just your candidate was so pathetic."

Memo to Hitch: Not this time. Not this year.

Really, given their respective reactions to this week, who is better prepared to be President? Not even close.

H/t: http://jedreport.com/

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I've seen a troubling — ok, entirely false — assertion being made in a couple of right-leaning or right-wing blogs about the roots of our current meltdown the last few days. An argument only right-wing ideologues could love or propagate, one that tries to lay the blame for our current mess on the desire (of liberals, naturally) to increase rates of home ownership.

The argument goes like this:

This from David Frum, former Bush speechwriter, who lays the blame for our current woes at the doorstep of lower-middle class and the poor who tried to buy homes (and who were given loans by folks like Countrywide and others).

Here is right-leaning blogger Megan McCardle on the crisis:

Emphasis mine.

There is no doubt that banks made bad loans, to people who couldn't afford them, and that that is a part of this crisis. But as many (smarter) commentators have pointed out, if crisis was just limited to subprime loans, it would be a much smaller, and more manageable, problem than the one we face now. One more in line with the scope of the S&L crisis.

The scope, depth, extremity of this crisis is a result of our near total reliance on a consumption driven economy these past eight years.  We went from earning more than we spent in 2001 to spending more than we earned by 2007.

And our national binge was encouraged by policymakers (Republicans running all branches of goverment), and fueled by credit card debt, second mortgages and an avalanche of supposedly "free money." All those loans to us were then repackaged by banks and Wall Street, sold to one another, generating enormous fees and profits.

So, if you encounter someone like Frum or McCardle who peddle this nonsense, get equipped with the facts. Here are three quick resources:

A good discussion of this in the Freakonomics blog today

An excellent overview in Time by Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan

And "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown" — I wrote about it here.

I’m watching John McCain and Sarah Palin live now at a town hall. And I’m sorry, but the more I see Sarah Palin speak in an unscripted setting, the more I think of this video.

Go ahead. Call me a goddam elitist…

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The casino culture meme has clearly taken hold in reportage of the current Wall Street meltdown.

But let get the metaphor straightened out. Casinos behave a lot more responsibly, and prudently, than these banks, hedge funds and other financial players.

So when we talk about casino culture, we're not saying these financial players are like casinos. No, no, no.

Rather, we're saying that they're like your cousin Mort from Vero Beach or Stockton or Pittsburgh, in Vegas in his Bermuda shorts and black knee-highs, at the roulette table. Playing with the kind of carefree, "What me worry" mania of a man who's gambling someone else's money. Playing, indeed, with the $500 or $1000 that you lent him.

Oh, and I should mention, Mort has a house in the Hamptons and a nice penthouse in Manhattan, thank you very much. When you play with other people's money, see, only the other people are losers.

This is what we mean by casino culture. I can resist closing this post with this most appropriate photo of our man, Johnny Mac (courtesy JedReport):

Great line from Barack in this speech at the 1:10 mark. Thanks, JedReport.

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That's the provocative title of this book by Charles Morris.

I read it on a flight to Indianapolis last May (on my way, incidentally, to work for Barack Obama in Muncie, Indiana). It's a slim book, you can read it in a few hours.

And I suggest you do, because it is the most lucid account yet, that I have read, of why we are in this mess. By which I mean Bear Stearns, subprime mortgages, CDOs, Lehman, AIG, and so on.

If you want the even shorter outline, there is this.  Basically, too much free money (i.e., low interest rates from the Feds); too much dependence on a consumption-driven economy, fueled by over-heated real estate prices; and Wall Street barons and bankers gambling extravagantly with other people's money, turning our financial institutions into one big casino.

Oh, and the Republicans running the country for most of the past eight years not really giving a damn about any of this, running deficits of multiple kinds (budget, trade, etc) with a "What, me worry" smirk.

Morris tallies up the likely damage in his book and he estimates it is likely to be at 1 trillion dollars. With the collapse of Bear, Lehman, etc., I'm not sure where we're at. But looking at this chart, seems as if we're close — and have maybe even surpassed, now — the $1 trillion in losses mark.

And to think, in light of this, that people — some of them thoughtful and reasonable — might vote for John McCain, even though his policy would be "more of the same." 

A reminder of what rhetoric from an intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed politician sound like.

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