Got it. A pithy label for the financial meltdown, that is.

Ready?

Comes from that “Greed is good” character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street.

Would gladly trade away 14½ of that Warholian supposed 15 minutes of fame in order to ask just one question at any of the debates.

The recent plan originally proposed by Secretary Paulson, and to a lesser extent the economic aid bill in the House, removes judicial review of actions and spending. A multi-part question then:

1) Do you support, oppose or are undecided regarding absolute removal provisions?

2) In concert with many other recent and contemporary similar exemptions, would you characterize these as efforts at chipping away at and/or politically neutralizing the third branch as far as review of governmental actions and policy?

3) Do you agree with and will you and your administration enforce Marbury v. Madison (ref.), establishing and validating judicial rulings of unconstitutionality?

… and just go read it.

Please.

Overall fast reaction? Lethargic and rote. The short versions:

McCain: I have a history (but don’t look at it too closely).

Obama: I have ideas (but don’t count on them being implemented).

What stood out (but likely will be glossed over elsewhere) was McCain’s direct admission and implicit charge (more than once) that the woebegone G. Walker administration has engaged in the crime of torture. Not ‘allegedly’ but unequivocally.

What else stood out were several instances of repeated reference to things done or things said by others which simply and provably are not so, then using those fabrications as springboards for proposed policy.

It took almost a full eight years, but the woebegone G. Walker administration has in the end morphed the United States of America into a super-sized equivalent of his own failed Arbusto Energy.

With only about 3½ months left for the miscreants in power to inflict direct damage, cross your digits.

Meanwhile, the world’s hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye game of seven hundred billion card monte plays on.

$700 billion? $700,000,000,000?

First, by historical standards, this is a low-ball figure as far as what the woebegone G. Walker administration actually wants to lay hands on. One could probably easily add another 50%, but the sheer chutzpah of demanding anything with the word trillion attached seems a psychological boundary not yet crossable.

Yes, financial markets and exotic instruments of credit are dog paddling through the crapper right now, but the establishment of a modicum of stability and an injection of liquidity via direct cash infusion and buyout or assumption of valued-questionable risk, common sense declares, requires much less than what would be the entire budget of some countries.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with — temporarily and for a fixed period not subject to extension — guaranteeing a floor price (value) to these commodities, in effect subsidizing that which is right now deemed too toxic, too perplexing to put a firm price upon or just too crucial to be dumped, baby and bathwater, into a panicky fire sale. But to outright buy them and then sell them again to the selfsame market players is to engage in precisely the trading actions which all the troubled and defunct firms have performed (acting as if the buffet were an endless free lunch and discounting or ignoring basic laws of economics covering the possibility and probability of a downturn in base commodity pricing).

What this is is not a number pulled out of a hat in the face of immediate crisis, but rather pulled off the shelf in a naked gambit to place a stranglehold on discretionary spending, the budget process and the economy for the next administration as well as to move the Congress one step further away from its budgetary prerogative.

Cynical? Maybe. But after eight years of fear-fueled hobnailed boot strides towards an imperium, not without precedent and certainly not to be discounted on its face. That the White House saw fit to send the very CEO of fear mongering and evangelist for a unitary militaristic executive, the First Dick, to Capitol Hill to lobby speaks volumes.

Memo to Wall Street:

A house of cards is a house of cards is a house of cards.

Ever-changing pseudo-beliefs now coming daily, if not hourly, out of the mouth of a floundering man.

’nuff said.

Short takes on the two acceptance of nomination speeches:

Sen. McCain pronounced a paean to personality.

Sen. Obama provided a prescription for policy.

What most struck ye old scribe is how Sen. McCain came across as primarily interested in and devoted to being President, while Sen. Obama came across as primarily interested in and devoted to working as President.

McCain, simply by being older,should have more to crow about yet dwelled at length on what he did during a personally horrendous 6 year period in Viet Nam, while his 25 years in Congress and anything substantive while there were glossed over as hardly a footnote.

Pertinent proclamation: While this writer my not agree wholeheartedly nor in full with the entire peroration, these few lines ring as true as true can be and are more than sufficient simply on their own:

…Those who still think Obama shouldn’t be elected, especially when the alternative is as blastingly clear, should think about the motives for their resistance. The next two months are no longer about refining and honing the candidate we want, but about defeating the disaster we don’t want.… Source

The inner cynic conjectures.

Senator Biden:

1) Roundly and soundly rejected for national office by the America populace multiple times, including as recently as this very election cycle.

2) Self-confessed plagiarist.

3) A near-mania for extended and long-winded peroration; for quantity as opposed to quality of argument. Listening is more valuable a quality than lecturing, and one in which he has historically been lacking. Acknowledgment of government by consensus strikes ye old scribe as in woefully short supply.

4) Among the most inside of D.C. insiders, having virtually never worked a day of his adult life outside of the Senate (recall that when elected he was 29 - and had to turn 30 before being eligible for the actual office).

The selection strikes this old scribe as reactive to the McCain campaign in place of proactively setting course ahead. Rather than taking an exit off the standard political highway, the Obama campaign has merely changed lanes.

Governor Palin:

Cannot help but surmise that the most wildly optimistic electoral count projections from the highest levels of the McCain campaign (numbers which only a favored few hold extremely close to the vest) show Alaska as necessary to just top the magic number of 270, that no matter how they view a best-case-scenario dataset it comes out to 268 or 269 without the 49th state.

Due to Alaska’s Sen. Stevens being deeply, deeply mired in scandal (along with the recent scandalous upheavals involving Republicans and entrenched interests in the state house of Alaska), there is a clear and real chance of an anti-Republican backlash in Alaska this year.

Something was needed to attempt to ensure those unusually jeopardized electoral votes.

Mirabile dictu, there exists there a woman G.O.P. governor out of the national spotlight, and with credentials practically as far to the right as the ideology meter will go (Ms. Palin ardently supported and campaigned for Pat Buchanan in 2000 - not just during primaries but also for the general election).

And she recently carried to term a child with Down’s Syndrome, making a choice - a choice which she has clearly stated she would deny and snatch from every other woman in the country if given the power to make it so. In what universe is ultra-self-righteousness in any way deemed any sort of qualification for national political office?

The far-right and the evangelical sectors may not be happy being in bed politically with McCain, but shall fairly slaver over Gov. Palin sharing that timeworn mattress.

Too, she was earlier tightly affiliated with a party calling for the secession of Alaska (which baldly and clearly rejects the designation “American”) — hardly the stuff of the McCain campaign’s heavy-handed “Country First” slogan (and on that subject it remains strangely contradictory in comparison, doesn’t it, that the Constitution to which every national officeholder, to which every member of the military as well swears fealty to puts “We the people” first?).

And let’s face it — Alaska is not a beat to which any of the major media will assign heavyweights or long foot the expense of an ongoing fully-staffed political bureau.

Unlike some other commentators, ye old scribe doesn’t see the selection of Gov. Palin directly as pandering, but as calculated to and driven by the electoral map and the concomitant Arctic wrench thrown into what would normally be a ’safe’ G.O.P. state by the combination of Sen. Stevens’ alleged serious misdeeds and a noted groundswell of nominal support for the Obama campaign, as someone who could slither, like Dan Quayle, under the relatively low bar the major media normally sets for V.P. choices.

Leave us not discount as well that for the past eight years oil, gas and entrenched energy interests have had, at the very least, an open express channel to the White House and the Old Executive Office building, and certainly would be running full tilt to put into place someone like-minded who would guarantee the same full 24/7 priority access for another term.