Candidates Obama and McCain will meet at the White House today for hand-to-hand combat to the death to discuss the ongoing economic crisis. All I can say is that this, the-greatest-campaign-ever, just keeps getting better, and better. Update: As of Thursday 25 Sept. evening, no deal. But since his “brilliant bipartisan negotiating skills” appeared only to have queered an already done deal, does this qualify as a good enough excuse for McCain not to be in Oxford, MS tomorrow evening? Don’t know, but that’s sure not how you bet…

Another GTMO prosecutor quit, this one over the “war crimes” prosecution of Afghan national Mohammed Jawad (for throwing a grenade in combat… that’s a “war crime”?) The reason: the prosecutor acknowledged that the prosecution deliberately withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense. Another day… another abuse of justice… for those who might have forgotten that GTMO was there… it’s still there…

An amazing day of political posturing by Team McCain, which, ahead of collapsing poll numbers (both broad-based and in key swing states) and Friday night’s first debate in Oxford, MS, to be hosted by the-not-brazenly-biased-like-Bob-George-W.-Bush’s-Best-Friend-Forever-Shieffer-and-the-other-MSM-whores Jim Lehrer, attempted to cast himself as the savior of the nation by McCain’s magnanimously insisting that he would “suspend his campaign” to return to Washington to concentrate on the Wall Street fat-cat-bailout… Al Giordano (who else) explains it all for you… Team Obama, demonstrating the earlier mastery by which the O Team ultimately outlasted a diehard Hillary Clinton campaign hellbent on destroying its own...

Well, I continue to violate the first rule of Sarah Palin (“first rule of Sarah Palin is that we don’t talk about Sarah Palin”) because John McCain continues to refuse to release nearly 1,000 pages of medical records that, since he refuses to release them, may well justify us considering the very real possibility that his skin cancer is much farther along than feared, and hence, “President Sarah Palin” is not a contingency, but an inevitability should McCain-Palin prevail. Just something else to consider.

Alas, the financial crisis has been diverting attention from the more “regular fare” here at TTD… our nation’s complete and total moral collapse. Fortunately, D-Day keeps us up to date with “this week in torture.” Thanks, D-Day.

Apparently, there hasn’t been universal regard for SecTreas Paulson’s brilliant new idea to give away taxpayer money; a nice summary of the pushback is here at “Swamp Politics”. At least one poll shows that the public opposes the Paulson bailout plan by a 37-28% plurality. And Krugman just gets to the nitty gritty of what’s wrong with the bailout plan (hint: other than satisfying the need to “do something… anything,” what’s not wrong with it?). Oh, does the unlimited discretion given to the Treasury Secretary beyond court or Congressional oversight… remind you of anything else that this Administration has pulled...

What a concept! Amidst the “need for speed” being touted by our new official national leaders (that would be SecTreas Paulson and Fed Chief Bernanke), one might ask the musical question, “are these extraordinary times that call for extraordinary measures of extra-legal power”? That is precisely the question asked by Sandy Levinson over at Balkinization, hearkening back to the wisdom of Carl Schmitt and noting, inter alia, the events of post Sept. 11 America and good old Article 30 of the Weimar Republic’s Constitution (the clause that allowed Hitler to “legally” exercise “merely” dictatorial and eventually genocidal powers). Because once...

Arrrrr, as we continue with “talk like a pirate day,” we give you Honest John McCain (the arrrrthritic avenger, maties!) tellin’s us that… wait for it… Barack Obama probably singlehandedly caused the current financial meltdown because of his associations with various financial figures. Oh, I hear Obama lived next door to Tony Rezko. Honest John McCain must not be takin’ his meds, or he’d remembered that old gem! Arrr…. reminds me of the time Pink Pirate Palin was pretendin’ to oppose a bridge to nowhere while she was actually supportin’ it… but no matter what, Pink Pirate Palin still raided...

Ay, maties, I was so excited about “talk like a pirate day” that I completely forgot that yesterday, September 18th, marked seven years of blogging here at the talking dog. That makes us one of the greybeards o’bloggin’… arrrrrr! As you were, maties!

Arrrrrr! Avast, me maties… it’s only fittin’ on this, “talk like a pirate day,” that Beltway Buccanneer Ben Bernanke and Henry the Pirate Paulson managed to raid the halls of Congress to get the usual fatcats there in their slow moving vessels to hand over all the dubloons in the hold… by proposin’ the largest act of public financial piracy in the history of the world. In a move that the pirates from Wall Street will love, the publicly paid pirates decided who they would stick with the bar tab for the national drinking binge of the last nearly eight...