Wall Street, Main Street, You, Me And 700 Billion Dollars

With a congressional disapproval rating of 71%, the 110^th Congress has a staggering emergency on its hands.  

As Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke laid out the frightening ramifications of the financial crisis, congressional leaders sat in stunned silence.

 ”When you listened to him describe it you gulped,” said Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY). Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) said, “We’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”  Dodd went on to describe the meeting this way, “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words. We have never heard language like this. This problem began with bad lending practices.”

The Palin Effect

Excellent analysis by Noemie Emery in The Weekly Standard: The Palin Effect

Obama = Bush

Worth the read: Betting on John McCain, by Steven Landsburg, in The Atlantic.

2. McCain is not Bush. This came as a surprise to me. I’d been assuming, in my ill-read, uneducated way, that McCain had been complicit in most of the great travesties of the Bush administration and the execrable Republican Senate. I’ve learned that’s largely untrue. [...]

Obama, by contrast, is in many ways a continuation of Bush. Like Bush (only far more so), Obama is fine with tariffs and subsidies. Like Bush, he wants to send jackbooted thugs into every meatpacking plant in America to rid the American workplace of anyone who happens to have been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Like Bush, he wants a more progressive tax code. [..] Like Bush, he wants more regulation, not less.

Obama: told to put a lid on it?

“Given the gravity of this situation, and based on conversations I have had with both Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke, I have asked my economic team to refrain from presenting a more detailed blue-print of how an immediate plan might be structured until the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have had an opportunity to present their proposal.” - Obama

In other words, we know you’re in the middle of a heated campaign, but please, enough of the hysterics about the economy, we don’t need you spooking the horses any more than they already are.

A quick note from the Palin email hacker…

This was part of a longer message left by the hacker after reading through Palin’s emails:

I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING, I read everything, every little blackberry confirmation… all the pictures, and there was nothing

Read the rest of the letter and the accompanying story

Stocks set for an historic rally?

Action taken by the government to secure the financial sector and a hold on short sales is potentially setting the market up for a huge gain today.

Stocks head for rally after word of gov’t plan

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7810964

European shares surge as banks rally hard

Short selling ban is on in force

HK stocks rally dramatically, market’s full recovery looms

US Stock Futures Rally, Extending Global Surge; Banks Soar

Wall Street ready for big open

Liberal Terrorist Being Hunted

Progressive American terrorist, Daniel Andreas San Diego, is on the run after planting sophisticated bombs at two different corporations he tied to a third corporation that does laboratory testing on animals. 

He is a part of the progressive organization named Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, whose members perform acts of intimidation by following employees children to school and continuing their protests there.

Read the article

NJ callers dialing Dems get sex chat offer instead

I don’t know about you, but if I thought I was about to talk to the Democratic Party over the phone and ended up talking to a sex chat lady instead, I’d be relieved.  The short story.

McCain’s economic advisor Fiorina benched after gaffe

Ah, speaking your mind is now a gaffe?  Apparently so.  Fiorina stated that none of the four people involved in the presidential election could run a company, which would be a tragic sort of thing given that running the country requires the exact same skills plus some: the ability to hire good people to be around you, the ability to delegate, the ability to inspire, the ability to listen to various points of view and make the right decisions through the confusion of people with their own agendas, the ability to win support for your positions.  Chuck in foreign policy, the country’s monetary policy and dealing with members of your own company (the other party) who are actively working against you, and I would say that being President of the country is quite a bit more than running a company.

read the story

Chinese dairy industry puts melamine in milk powder: 4 killed, 6000 injured

The company that brought you such fantastic products of slave labor as lead tainted toys and deadly dog food and heparin has not gotten into the contamination of the milk supply business.  The good news for the rest of the world is that most of the problem has been contained to China.  The bad news is that 4 children have died and over 6000 have been injured.

Lots of stories about it.  Try this one.