Free kibbles

The latest plan has the government buying shares in these failing companies. No mention of loans. Paulson doesn't want to do loans. Naturally he doesn't. This plan went from bad to worse. If the Treasury has 45 days to write guidelines on how it's going to implement the plan, what the rush on legislation? Why can't we spend 45 days debating it including those guidelines? This whole thing stinks to high heaven. It's a conspiracy to radically expand government power, and both parties are in on it.

Warren Buffet informs us that Paulson plans to pay the highest possible price for the problem securities, the mark-to-maturity price. It's interesting that Paulson wants to pay that price while the the administration still requires the financial institutions to price them at mark-to-market. The SEC could change that rule with the stroke of a pen, but it's pretty obvious Bush and Paulson don't want to change it. I agree with Newt that Paulson and his buddies are running roughshod right over Bush, and Bush is so dogmatically loyal, he's falling for it. I think there's a conspiracy going on here. Newt calls for Paulson's resignation. He shouldn't stop there. He should join me in calling for Paulson, Bernanke, Dodd, and Frank to all resign.

When a crisis like this happens, you should never trust the people who were in charge and who didn't stop it to come up with the solution. That makes it too easy to engineer a crisis for a future power grab. Bush's first move should have been to fire Paulson and Bernanke and to demand the resignation of Dodd and Frank. Once that happened, people who weren't responsible for the crisis, and therefore had no baggage regarding it, and who couldn't have engineered it, could have solved it.

UN security council passes another weak sanctions package against Iran because of its nuclear program.

Private company puts space ship into orbit.

Congressman Mike Pence from Indiana, who supported as House minority leader, still opposes this buyout/bailout. Good for him.

This guy has a good point. Anybody can better articulate plans and principles that are good for America better than the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians or another other party, and we all have a format if we want to go for it - YouTube.

Walter Williams is half-right. Things really are gloomy. Unless we fix it, we really are facing the end of the US as we know it within a generation because of entitlement spending. And there's not a reason in hell to believe our politicians will fix it before we collapse. Any more than they fixed the long predicted credit crisis before it blew up. But nobody's talking about that issue. We keep falling for the crisis de jour. And we keep re-electing the foxes who raided the hen house to protect it after the fact.

I agree with Dick Morris that this credit crisis could win McCain the election, and big, if he opposes the buyout/bailout and can unite the House Republicans against it. The problem is McCain has already given tenative support, and it looks like plenty of House Republicans have caved. This is a gift horse for McCain. It allows him to be a leader of Republicans and differentiate himself from Obama and Bush while linking those 2 together. But McCain has run a terrible campaign, failing to point out any of Obama's radicalism, and I think he's screw this up too.

In an expose of the worst run organization in America, the Federal government, Reason explains that free markets and capitalism have nothing to do with the credit crisis. The accounting practices of the government would hysterical if they weren't so dangerous. They also provide an interesting, concise definition of corporatism.

Scientists discover world's oldest rocks at 4.28 billion years. I want to know if they have evidence of life at that time.

Interesting essay explains that people project their own archtypes on the candidates, which would explain the irrational bipartisanism surrounding out elections. This makes a lot of sense. No wonder I've never been a partisan. I just thought elections were about examining the candidates' positions, records and character then making a choice. No wonder it's so hard to communicate with partisans.

Obama's slum lord fund-raiser and recipient of millions of taxpayers dollars funneled to him by Obama is in negotiations to cooperate with the feds after his corruption convictions. The press will bury this story until after the election.

Well written analysis of how government created the subprime mortgage mess that has paralyzed our entire financial industry.

Another well written analysis debunks the blaming of greed and deregulation. I especially like Alan Greenspan's quote blaming low interest rates without noting he was the guy responsible for those low interest rates.

George Will discussed the downside of early, easy voting. How easy should voting be? Do we really want people too lazy to go to the polls to vote? Of course we want absentee voting for people who would vote in their home districts but are blocked by doing so by circumstances. Military personnel come immediately to mind, but this should apply to anybody. But I can walk to my polling station. It's no more than a quarter mile as the crow flies. But if I was too lazy to do that, should government make it so easy I could vote anyway?