A number of Republican House members and staff, along with others who are plugged in, are telling me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will come back with a new bill that includes all the left-wing stuff that was scrubbed from the bill that was defeated today in the House.
Before getting to Friday night's debate, let us look at what happened before the debate.Yes, John McCain's suspension of his campaign earlier in the week and call for a delay of Friday's debate were campaign stunts.
You can sum up much of 20th century history by saying that in the 1930s Americans decided that markets didn't work and government did, and that in the 1970s Americans decided that government didn't work and markets did.
The single-biggest mistake in the Paulson bank-rescue-plan marketing effort has been the failure to explain clearly how taxpayers are going to recoup $700 billion used to buy toxic assets at auction in order to unfreeze the banking system.
McCain has transformed a minority in both houses of Congress and a losing position in the polls into the key role in the bailout package, the main man around whom the final package will take shape. He arrived in Washington to find the Democrats working with the Bush Administration to pass an unpopular $700 billion bailout.
Alcee Hastings used to be a federal judge. Then he got impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. Now he's a congressman from Florida. People have a right to vote for whomever they want, even one of the six federal judges in America ever to be removed by Congress.
Presidential debate season is upon us. That means John McCain, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Sarah Palin are traveling around the country with huge binders of prep materials under their arms---and dreams of an eight-year relationship with the Secret Service dancing in their heads.
Until Wednesday afternoon, when GOP presidential nominee John McCain announced that he was heading to Washington to work with congressional leaders and the Bushies to craft a better bailout bill, both McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama clearly had believed that the last place they wanted to be seen was in Washington.
BATON ROUGE, La. -- I assume that someone has removed the crushed blue Hyundai from the parking lot of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. Two days after Hurricane Ike, the car was there with a tree trunk still embedded in its roof. And Ike was a pussycat next to Gustav, which had pummeled the area two weeks before.
Debate over how to resolve the nation's financial emergency is taking a salutary direction for the moment, as politicians of both parties refuse to be herded by the Bush White House into a ridiculous $700-billion swindle.
Honestly. A clean bill as requested by Treasury man Henry Paulson, along with John McCain’s oversight board, can help fix the credit-crunch problem. It needn’t be this hard.
Before or after every speech I ever give, somebody asks me: "What is O'Reilly really like?"
The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.
It takes a major crisis for a lame duck president, especially one whose popularity is as low as George W. Bush's, to take center stage during a hard-fought presidential campaign.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Wall Street executives you see hanging their heads have been called many things, chief among them "greedy." But in deciding their guilt, you must consider mitigating circumstances. Compare these two sets of circumstances.
I understood the Bush administration's decision to promise up to $30 billion to facilitate the fire sale of Bear Stearns. I got the administration's decision to spend as much as $200 billion to stabilize mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are worth about $5 trillion. Ditto the $85 billion federal bailout of AIG.
But he has to fuse the issues of the economy and taxes — to show how Barack Obama’s tax proposals would lead to a catastrophic implosion of the nation’s capital base.
We can fix this. If nothing else, that's the message I hope readers take away from this column. Of course, the "this" is the run on the world banking system. Stock markets have plunged globally, gold prices have shot up, and U.S. Treasury bill rates have plummeted to 10 basis points, the lowest since the 1950s.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the 500-point plunge of the Dow, the government takeover of AIG -- all these have got the presidential candidates talking about the economy. But both Barack Obama and John McCain have been vague about their solutions. And for good reason.
"The fundamentals of our economy are strong," John McCain said as Wall Street went into white-knuckle panic over diving investor confidence. Does he believe that? It doesn't really matter, because the Republican has outsourced his economic policy to the ideologues whose opposition to regulations brought the financial markets to their knees.
