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...

While John McCain, listening to advice from his economic advisors he’d be better served to ignore (if not take out and shoot) tells us “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” and other self-evident piffle… reality has set in, and the market has not accepted that the nationalization of insurance giant AIG will solve the financial market’s woes… and the Dow Industrial Average fell nearly 450 points more today. Among other attributes of the 449 point decline is that Morgan Stanley (whose shares fell by around 25%) is talking about a merger with Wachovia, and other institutions are talking about...

In their continued acts of financial improvisation, after another Weekend at Bernanke’s that I discussed here, Lehman Bros. was regarded as “not too big to fail”, Merrill Lynch’s management didn’t need to wait and see if the Fed and Treasury felt that it was too big to fail and quickly accepted a shotgun wedding with Bank of America, and the behemoth world’s-largest-insurer (I think they are, anyway) American International Group, better known as AIG, tried to remain afloat amidst the financial meltdown. Today, after some market turmoil (the Dow was down over 500 points yesterday, but rebounded a bit, a...

First, be sure and check out Al Giordano’s take (who else?) on “Tanning-bed-gate” (try putting lipstick on that one)! And check out the rest of Al’s goodies, including the fact that Barack is now ahead in Virginia. Cause for panic? Maybe for McCain-Palin, there is… And then, we compare and contrast the following: … with … Just saying.

Is the health and well-being of people you care about. We wish godspeed and a speedy recovery to our friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

And so talks continue in the shadow of Ground Zero over at the New York Federal Reserve Bank over the fate of beleaguered financial giant Lehman Brothers. Apparently, the taxpayer-backstopped interventions to deal with Bear Sterns and of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have wiped out the U.S. Treasury’s reserves to do similar deals involving taxpayer money (solution: lower taxes for the rich… more), and so the leading proposals involve a break-up, and a disposal of Lehman’s “bad” assets to a consortium of banks, who would themselves absorb the risk. Needless to say, some of those banks are balking, and...

Any decent sailor will tell you that a key way to get to where you’re going (not to mention to avoid seasickness) is to focus on a point on the horizon, and keep heading for it–not to be thrown off course by the wind, or the waves, or other distractions… just as Al Giordano keeps telling us to banish “chicken littles” who keep insisting the electoral sky is falling. This piece is a case in point of why I check his site at least daily: Al knows what the f*** he is talking about. Let me summarize: Sarah Palin? Distraction....