McCain's rant fits the pattern of using a crisis to take aim at a hated regulator, even if that regulator has nothing to do with that crisis. Gas prices to high? Its those damn environmental regulations. Liquidity crisis? Must be Fannie and Freddie. American kids too fat? They wouldn't be if we sent them to ANWR to drill for oil. In this case, poor Mr. Cox is a stand in for the SEC, which somehow has failed to notice that speculators, of all people, hang out in functioning capital markets and has done NOTHING to turn them away. I almost expected McCain to say "We probably wouldn't have short sellers if we privatized Social Security."

I fail to see what exactly Mr. Cox is supposed to have his SEC do in the current crisis. It starts with mortgages and home prices, which fall well outside his jurisdiction, and involved CDOs and other whatnots that are not registered securities, or at least not securities offered on public exchanges to retail investors. Sophisticated qualified investors are not supposed to concern him.

It involves banks and the supply of credit (not him), banks and lending practices (not him). While he regulates investment companies, it has really not been shown that their financial failures are the result of fraud. Speculation, bad bets, but not fraud. He can reaffirm that naked short selling is illegal, but that is not what is causing the problem. For his part, he is supposed to ensure that the markets are functioning, which they are.

He wants hedge funds to start disclosing things about themselves? Off with his head. McCain seems to just be trying to cripple the uppity Commission before it gets it in its head that perhaps qualified investors aren't so responsible after all, and is given the responsibility to regulate the parts of the market that it has been told to stay away from in the past.

So pumping a few hundred billion into didn't stop the panic. A rumor of a bailout does? I went to bed last night thinking that the credit crisis was structural and therefore would not be solved so easily. I was wrong. This is really a simple crisis in confidence that can be solved cheaply by rumors of action and reassurance that everything will be o.k. That's what I hope is happening. Or maybe the wise men of the Fed have figured out that it is actually only 2 or 3 bad mortgages causing the problem, but because these mortgages have been tranched and traded and swapped and derived and optioned and put so many times, these mortgages are now magnified to $100bils of bad on the balance sheets. Maybe this will only cost a few hundred thousand to fix.

I'm hoping what they are doing is spreading a rumor to stop a panic and drive away short sellers, buying themselves time to actually figure out how big the so called liquidity crisis actually is. The other thought is that they might be trying to use the government to bail out wealthy investors who made risky investments that turned out, in retrospect, to be bad investments. I mean, that would be like having a government run solely for the benefit of the wealthy, such that the wealthy would never have to face any consequences or feel any anxiety. What kind of government is that?

I like this MFIT idea. Sign me up to work there. I don't know which power I'd prefer - the ability to tell John Mack that he can't do something because its risk profile is too high for the American Taxpayer to stomach - or the ability to call John Dimon on the phone each quarter and condescendingly demand to know if all of his transactions have been carried out honorably and with the benefit of the commonweal in mind. (Mr. Dimon, have your motives been pure or did you open that branch at the A&P in Hackensack because you thought it would make your company some money?)

You forgot to add that this year's dismal performance by the Mariners has demonstrated that Ichiro, for all his hits and speed, lacks that certain ability to lift and offense and carry a batting order on his back all by himself. That is the opposite of Jeter, who has often been asked to go it alone on teams bereft of talent throughout his career. He is just so clutch.

Jeter could walk away from the game today and still be one of those so called "sure fired first ballot hall of famers" like Robin Yount and Ozzy Smith. Ichiro will have to play a few more seasons (at least two) before the baseball writers can start to write the same thing about him.