Deal or no deal? Though using that TV show name has now become trite when referring to emergency bailout talks in Washington between the White House, Congressional leaders, and presidential candidates Republican Sen. John McCain and Barack Obama, it’s the best description of news reports about the day of high political drama. Or would the real TV title of the day be “Lost” — as in lost...

UPDATE: It now appears that Washington Mutual was actually closed by the government because regulators felt it was unsound and it was then sold to Morgan. According to news reports customers withdrew $ 20 billion in deposits over the past week. One of the other shoes has dropped as JP Morgan buys out Washington Mutual for a reported price of $ 1.9 billion. It looks to be a pretty good deal for Morgan as WaMu...

The skepticism of fellow The Moderate Voice blogger Polimom is understandable. All the pieces are in place for John McCain to, sometime tomorrow, be portrayed as the hero who brokered a resolution to the financial crisis acceptable to The White House, Congressional Democrats, and recalcitrant conservative Congressional Republicans. It seems so pat, so obvious, and it just might be true. But I don’t think...

Playboy publishing giant Hugh Hefner is being urged to lay off the Playboy bunnies. In an employer sense, that is. His experts are saying that even the Playboy empire feels the crunch and that he needs to get rid of some of the bunnies on his staff. And since this is related to Hefner’s image, the question is whether laying off the bunnies will make Hefner a big boob: Tycoon Hugh Hefner has been advised...

RJ Matson, Roll Call

The two most recent occupants of the Oval Office were in prime time last night, while aspirants to succeed them prepared to go to the White House today in a bizarre interactive TV reality show that will affect the financial survival of millions of Americans. George W. Bush, who was voted off the island two years ago but refused to leave, looked voters in the eye and talked about panic and recession with a straight...

Every now and then you read something that (to borrow two tired clichés) cuts through the clutter and calls a spade a spade. Victor Davis Hanson offers such a read this morning at RCP. Granted, I don’t agree with everything Hanson posits in this piece (e.g., his suggestion that 40% of the population “should stick to renting”) — but, on balance, his essay is a good wake-up call …...

First 5 minutes of a 13 minute, 42 second speech delivered on March 12, 1933. History Matters has the full transcript: When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number...

The familiar frat boy smirk was absent when George Bush went before the nation last night to cry wolf. The man speaking from the White House had recently managed the feat of polling disapproval ratings lower than Richard Nixon during the week before he resigned, while the people objecting most vociferously to the $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout plan being engineered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson,...

You know, after spending $700 billion to help the American economy not sink into Depression 2.0 … $25 billion for the Big Three is like the change you find under the couch: With Congress preoccupied with the massive, $700 billion bailout plan for the financial industry, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have finally secured Part One of their own federal rescue plan. A bill set to be passed by Congress...

Did he basically play the 911 card with a different design all over again? The Washington Note’s Steve Clemons has some thoughts. What are yours?

So now GOP Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, pointing to the Wall Street meltdown and the chance that Congress will balk at the Bush administration’s crucial bailout solution, has suspended his campaign — and reportedly won’t show up at Friday’s debate even if Democratic Sen. Barack Obama does. In terms of the impact on Campaign 2008, the next few days will be critical as a new...

There are three ways you can succeed with a political stunt: 1) The people don’t realize it’s a stunt and you look selfless on the face of it. 2) The attention given to the event at issue actually helps a substantive problem get solved. People see it as a stunt but one that “raises awareness” of an important issue and gets things done. 3) The opponent overplays his hand and falls into...

I’m really saddened by my reaction to McCain’s maneuver statement that he’s suspending his campaign in favor of rushing off to lead the country into the sunrise. I’ve discovered a truly deep well of cynicism about all things political lately. And he wants the first debate postponed until the “crisis is over”? LOL! The elections could very well be over before we’re...

As noted here, last week was the game changer in the 2008 presidential campaign and that finally seems to have sunk in this afternoon as John McCain announced that he was suspending campaigning to help fix the economy, urged Barack Obama to do the same and, oh, wants to hold off on that first debate. The McCain-Sarah Palin campaign is imploding. After campaign spokesmouths criticized one national poll earlier...

Here’s why I can’t view McCain’s plan to suspend his campaign and return to Washington until the economic crisis is fixed with anything but cynicism: He hasn’t voted in the Senate since April 10, more than five months ago. To be fair, Obama has missed a lot of votes as well. But McCain has missed 64% of votes in the 110th Congress to Obama’s 46%. And while the current economic...

Okay, not really Ikea, but the land where Ikea was born: Sweden. Bruce Strokes has an interesting article on how Sweden faced a similar crisis to what the US is facing now back in the early 90s. You need to read the whole thing, but here is a peek: In the early 1990s, Sweden experienced the worst financial crisis suffered by any industrial country since the Depression. The Swedish banking collapse wiped out...

The political Quote of the Day comes from The Politico’s Ben Smith on GOP Presidential campaign John McCain’s dramatic announcement that due to the economic crisis he is suspending his campaign, heading back to Washington and wants rival Democratic. Sen. Barack Obama to do the same and to postpone Friday’s debate: McCain suspends his campaign, and asks to postpone Friday’s debate, to...

Paulson and Bernanke would have us believe that there’s no alternative to giving banks $700 billion in public funds. That unless we do so, individuals and businesses will be starved of needed cash. But in fact there is a much better solution to our current financial crisis. One that gets money directly to the people who need it, people who will use it for the right purposes, and not to banks that will...

Is the current financial crisis the latest bit of evidence that the final collapse of American power is at hand? If these weren’t the fears of Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister that knows the debt that Europeans owe the United States, one could perhaps more easily dismiss these sentiments as ‘schadenfreude‘ [taking pleasure in the pain of others]. For Germany’s Die Zeit,...

This is the second of three special Guest Voice posts on the present Wall Street economic meltdown by Mikkel Fishman, a TMV reader and frequent writer in our comments section who is also an author and computer scientist. The 2008 Economic Crisis: Consequences And Fix (Part I of III) by Mikkel Fishman In my previous post, I discussed what I believe is the root cause of this current mess on a very abstract and...

With the struggle for his political soul between the Religious Right and Reagan Republicans settled by the choice of a running mate, there are increasing qualms about the new John McCain by traditional voices in his own party. “Under the pressure of the financial crisis,” writes conservative icon George Will, “one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league...

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

(1.) It’s no surprise that senior citizens are among the most vocal opponents of the $700 billion financial bailout plan. Only they can recall first hand the privations of the Great Depression, the last great systemic collapse of American financial institutions. (2.) Efforts by both Republicans and Democrats to the contrary, the meltdown does not have partisan roots. Both parties must share in the blame....

Yet another poll has come out that suggests a substantive shift has now occurred in the 2008 Presidential race due to America’s growing financial crisis: a new Washington Post-ABC News national poll now shows Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has taken a 9 point lead over GOP Sen. John McCain as the two head into Friday’s crucial televised foreign policy debate: Turmoil in the financial industry and growing...