On Giuliani getting a phone call from his wife mid-speech?

1 – How many times will Palin mention/praise Hilary Clinton in her speech tonight?

2 – How many times will she use some variant of the phrase “tough decision I made as Mayor/Govenor”?

3 – How many times will refer to McCain as a “maverick”?

4 – Will she bring up abortion? Bonus points if she brings up her CHOICE to keep newborn son (a choice she would deny other women).

5 – How many will she evoke her son going to Iraq? (blunted partially by Dems doing the same with Biden’s son).

Anything else we need to watch for?

If the MSM calls them on it. And so far very few of them are. After McCain's hissy fit and refusal to go on Larry King the press seems to be falling in line with their roll as stenographers to Republican talking points.

but they do betray a breathtaking misunderstanding of the quality of recent government in the United States if they think we could intentionally pull off that kind of massive grifter's scam on China

The ‘current government’ has done a pretty good job of hoodwinking the US into a war with Iraq. It did a pretty good job of hoodwinking American’s to re-elect Bush in 2004.

For all its complete incompetence at actually DOING its job, the current government is very good a fooling people into thinking that its doing its job.

Ever since the housing bill passed a few weeks ago, making the Government backing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae explicit instead of merely assumed I've been expecting a fed takeover. I just expected that the Bush Administration would wait until after the election to pull the trigger.

The fact that they are jumping in NOW before the election tells me the situation may be even worse than we thought.

So the question is, what spooked the Fed and Treasury so much that they stepped in now rather than waiting?

It was a great speech filled with a strong vision of how the government should interact with markets. A speech that laid out a clear path for what we need to do over the next four years to get the markets back to some type of sanity. It had substance, clear policy proposals, laid out bright line distinctions between Obama and McCain.

It was everything the pundits and the MSM CLAIM they want from a candidate.

They’ll ignore it completely because it lacked a refernce to lipstick.

“Too big to fail’ is the new black on Wall Street.

Bank of America is playing the same game sucking up Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. Even today nobody really knows just how much bad debt is sitting on Countrywide’s books. Mark my words; at some point in the next six months BoA will go the Feds and say,

“We will either have to decimate consumer deposits to cover all these bad loans or you’re going to have to buy them from us.”

And that’s exactly what the government will do; absorb all the bad debt at taxpayer expense, in order to ‘save’ BoA. Now BoA has yet another round of derivatives and ugly debt it picked up from Merrill Lynch and it will go back to the Feds and demand coverage for those bad debts as well.

They are going to use the threat of massive losses to consumer accounts and the huge liabilities of the FDIC to blackmail the government into cleaning up their books by making all the bad decisions go away.

It now looks like Wachovia and Morgan-Stanley are going to try and play the same game.

All because they are “Too Big to Fail”/

Congressional Republicans are terrified of the November election. Saddled with a collapsing economcy, a President with approval ratings in the toilet and a record of obstruction ever since Dems got in power, they are looking at potentially catastraphic losses this year.

I suspect many members are looking for any excuse to bad mouth Bush or somehow distance themselves from the last eight years. Look at Gordon Smith in Oregon, he spends half his campaign talking about how great it is to work with Barak Obama. If one did not know better listening to his ads you would think he was a Democrat.

So I suspect will being seeing more 'controversies' like this one over the next couple of months. A few artificial arguments between Congressional Republicans and the White House. Creating a 'rift' that does not really exist but members need to have a chance at reelection.

The taxpayers are getting it in the shorts two ways.

1 – Low interest rates. Meaning that savings no longer even keep up with inflation while our money is being used to finance these risky loans without seeing any of the rewards

2 – FDIC Insurance – Meaning the taxpayer is ultimately on the hook for covering the bad bets.

This is a perfect example of privatizing the profits while socializing the risk.

These new megabanks can now effectively blackmail the Federal government into bailing them out of almost any problem by pointing to mass of consumer accounts and saying:

“Pay us $200 billion to cover the bad debts today or pay $500 billion in FDIC insurance tomorrow or watch millions of American’s lose their savings next week.”

They will every incentive to go out and make even riskier and more convoluted financial shenanigans then they are now.

It’s Russian Roulette with the economy because there is only so much money to go around. Either the Feds will have to print like crazy and trigger massive inflation or go ever deeper into hoc with China and Saudi Arabia making the inevitable day of reckoning even worse.