Senators loaded the economic rescue bill with tax breaks and other sweeteners before passing it by a wide margin, 74-25, a month before the presidential and congressional elections.

The bill has now swelled from 3 pages to 451 - full text PDF at my sig. And some interesting comments from Obama:

"I understand completely why people would be skeptical when President Bush called for a blank check to solve this problem," he said.

"There will be time to punish those who set this fire, but now is not the time to argue about how it got set or did the neighbor...leave the stove on," Obama said. "Right now we want to put out that fire..."

Accountability? A few more bad apples going on the pile?

Maybe they'll go arrest the dumb peasants who were stupid enough to take this cheap credit and buy houses while prices were climbing on a weekly basis and rents were sky-rocketing... I get angry when those ordinary borrowers get blamed for being irresponsible. It's not like they had much other good options. And wasn't it Bush himself who said this is an "ownership economy"?

Watered down with tax breaks for business.

In fairness to Paulstein and Pearlson, Glenn - what would Paul O'Neill know? He was stupid enough to disagree when Dick Cheney said "deficits don't matter" back in 2002. A month later he was out of a job! Ha!!! LOOOOOSSSSEEEERRRRRR!!!

Then this poor loser starts crawling around the media, desperately trying to help his buddy Ron Suskind flog a book, "The Price Of Loyalty"! Yeah, and I'm like "OOOHH... BWWWAAHAHAHA, poor baby his jobby!"

But you know what really got to me, Glenn? This guy, this loser, he started dissing our President:

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."

The guy is a frickin' traitor, man. He even betrayed secret discussions about national security meetings:

And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.

You know what, Glenn? We don't need smarty pants whiners like this in our government. We need people with attitude, team players who can take orders and kick ass!

I'm voting for the Moose Lady! Yeeeaaargghh!!! Who's with me...?

I particularly liked this bit:

The deep public distrust of our Government and the establishment which Pearlstein serves is profoundly rational and well-informed. It is the blind trust Pearlstein is eager to vest that is ignorant.

This is a crisis of confidence which has both a financial and a political component.

If I may, I will refer readers to my earlier comment (link at sig) regarding the neocon's close ties to Goldman Sachs, including how Goldman Sachs helped manipulate oil prices in favour of the GOP's 2006 mid-term campaign, and Robert Zoellick's revolving door work for Goldman Sachs.