... meanwhile there's a whole other bailout going on

While lawmakers bartered over the terms and specifics of a proposed $700 billion bailout of the banking industry this week, a smaller bailout for the auto industry passed relatively quietly. Congress approved $25 billion (yes that's with a 'b') to help Detroit's big 3 auto makers retool their plants and finally come around to the green revolution the Toyotas and Hondas of the world started capitalizing on oh... almost a decade ago. Sweet.

Say it with me, powers that be, "Free Markets! Competition! Rah rah Rah!"

Oy!

Debates and Antics

There is a growing consensus in the blogosphere that the McCain campaign's announcement that they want to delay Friday night's debate is theater, and many are suggesting that it may be both bad theater and tactically foolish. As today unfolds it looks more and more likely that congressional representatives will come up with a compromise around the bailout plan, perhaps even before McCain can make it south to DC from his campaigning (Wait... wasn't his campaign "suspended" yesterday??) at the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC.

Wonkette throws my favorite wording onto this whole campaign theatrical fiasco in this post, where they link the debate delay suggestion to the McCain camp's hesitancy to allow Sarah Palin to do anything other than read directly off a teleprompter to crowds that have been pre-screened to be that perfect mix of 95.3% bible-thumping Republican and 4.7% cold-dead-hands-gun-gripping Republican. This snippet is 1/3 of their post, but you should really read the whole thing yourself:

"...and then once they’ve rescheduled the Palin/Biden debate, John McCain can pull another crazy stunt — announcing his own daughter is fake pregnant, maybe, or firing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or refusing to appear in public in anything but a glittering leotard — and everyone will forget all about this Palin nut and how she withers under intense questioning by Katie freaking Couric."

Views on the Bailout: Part 3

Thanks to Matt for starting up a quality series of posts related to the bailout. I found an editorial I wanted to post yesterday or the day before about the bailout, socialism, and hypocrisy but it took me a day to get it up here, so I'll add it as part 3 in this ongoing series. Thomas F. Schaller writes for the Baltimore Sun (and Salon.com) and in a rather scathing and brilliant bit of rhetoric (cause that's all we liberals really care about these days anyway) he give us the following:

To social conservatives, Darwinism is merely an unproven "theory" about how our species evolved. But "social Darwinism" is an ineluctable fact: The smart and hardworking prosper, while the stupid and lazy fail.

Yet notice how those same chest-thumping capitalists of talk radio and at the corporate-funded think tanks often fall silent in the face of fixed markets, no-bid contracts, bailouts and subsidies for the very corporations that demand less government oversight when things are going well, then turn to Washington when things go horribly wrong.

The hypocrisies abound.

Now, pointing out the hypocrisies involved here doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the question of whether or not bailing-out is an economic necessity, I suppose. Still, I think it does have a direct bearing on some of the particulars at stake this week as the congress weighs and negotiates what a bill may look like.

These issues bear into the picture on questions around executive pay and the need for oversight. This sort of governmental largess in terms of spending cannot be made without the possibility for oversight, to do so would be somewhere way beyond reckless. Again, Shaller puts it well when he says:

Those of us who work hard and pay our taxes are getting screwed. Our Christmas bonus this year? The privilege of covering the tab for greedy executives in the deregulated insurance and mortgage industries who scoff at safety nets for you but demand a safety trapeze for themselves.

Since it's looking more and more inevitable that we'll all be screwed by this to some degree, ie: the taxpayers will be footing something in the way of a bailout, let's at least have someone watching the ways in which this screwing is taking place to make sure it doesn't become slimy and despicable on top of how ridiculous (if perhaps necessary) it already is.

Campbell Brown Goes To Town On Sexism and Sarah Palin... With a Twist.

I'll be honest, I don't know if this feels real or a little too theatrical, but regardless Campbell Brown has a point, and I like it. Nice of her to flip the sexism claim, and I'd love to see what Carly Fiorina has to say about this rant.

Baseball Break: Bullpens Make the Difference, Bomb Threats And The Phanatic

Jayson Stark has a nice piece of commentary over at ESPN this week about how the race between the Phillies and Mets this fall is being decided by bullpens. The Phillies amped up their bullpen support in the off-season by signing primo closer Brad Lidge, who has been lights-out all season long. Meanwhile, the Mets have struggled with injuries and inconsistency out of their own bullpen.

His article give evidence to support what I could already observe in the couple of Mets fans, Kim and Carolyn specifically, who I know. We went to a game at Shea where Johann Santana pitched 7 great innings, leaving with a 5-run lead, only to have the Phillies rally back in the 9th against Mets relief and take a victory. This pattern has repeated so many times this season that I can see my friends cringe even with late-game leads, knowing they're never safe until 27 outs have been recorded and the lights are turned out on a Mets game. The Phillies have given their fans reason to feel this way many times, but this year we have reason to believe.

Still funnier, yesterday there was a bomb threat at Citizens Bank park. "Funny?!?!!?!?," you might ask. Yeah. Funny when you know the back story. Turns out they were filming a commercial with the Philly Phanatic, the Phillies classic and bombastic mascot outside the stadium. Said commercial involved the fanatic shooting foil-wrapped hot dogs out of this air gun, and lord only knows what else. When they wrapped, they left a couple foil-wrapped dogs behind, and later someone spotted them and followed the post-9/11 "See Something/Say Something" credo. The police evacuated fans from the stadium and called in the bomb squad to detonate the packages... only to learn very quickly that they were blowing up all-beef franks.

Isn't a little fall baseball just what we need to release a little of the bailout/financial crisis pressure?

Go PHILLIES!