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...

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.