Yes there should be hell to pay. Hopefully that price is written in the bill. But we have act now to unstick the credit markets. Not passing it isn't giving Wall Street the finger, it's giving the finger to the American economy.

Finally, a Democrat is winning! Of course everyone is over the moon - the description of the crowd at the capitol is hilarious! Also the grumpy Republicans stewing in the back of the room. I love it, this made my day.

Republicans were a little less enthusiastic. Or you can assume they were -- most of them weren't in the Senate chamber to hear Obama speak.

That's OK, they won't have so much opportunity when Obama delivers the next State of the Union address. Let 'em not show up while they can.

GEH!!!

Maybe he DIDN'T want it to pass earlier, for example when McCain was rushing to DC to "save" the original bill that Bush proposed giving his Treasury Secretary carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wanted to do with the money... It seems that most of the country didn't want THAT to pass.

... that in the end the election won't be close.

Kerry never got this support from his own party and lost by 3%. The economy was neutral and Americans were still spooked by terrorism and still wrongly thinking the incumbent was a "safe" choice. And even then the Republicans needed every vote suppression tactic in their arsenal to pull off a narrow electoral college victory.

Obama has intense, enthusiastic support from his own party and independents, the economy is completely in the tank, the war is incredibly unpopular, and the incumbent party even more so. And, while vote suppression tactics are still real, Obama's team has a huge ground force already countering them and ready for immediate response.

Meanwhile, Republicans do NOT like John McCain -- either in Congress or in the field. They feel the same about him as we do about Joe Lieberman. The only enthusiasm he has comes from Sarah Palin, and while 2/3rds of core republicans love her the other 1/3rd is secretly (or not so secretly) appalled.

Because Republicans are the best customers of their own bullshit worldview, they strongly believe that an Obama presidency would shock America and cause Americans to run back in droves to the arms of the Republican party. Which is why so many Republicans are privately saying that losing in 2008 would be a good thing as it would create massive new Republican support for 2010 and 2012.

All these factors indicate that while the poll numbers will ebb and flow a bit in coming weeks they will consistently trend Obama's way. At some point, perhaps when the aggregate national lead is 8-9 points, the bandwagon effect will kick in.

Yeah, I'm nervous, too. We are about to endure from McCain a month of the slimiest, nastiest Presidential campaign in modern history. But every historical election analysis shows this will be a landslide.

He came into the senate with his self appointed big brother, Dick Durbin having campaigned with Obama here in Illinois and paving the way for him early and Obama being the one highlight in a dismal year by giving the dems a senate seat with his win.

But, Obama also proved himself to be deferential to the senior senators, a serious and substantive and hard working senator and having a winning personality.

Now he comes back to the senate as the leader of his party and doing very well in the polls a month before the election.

These senate democrats are seeing a democratic president and it makes them giddy.

I have been SO skeptical and angry that anyone would be expected to give 700 billion dollars worth of trust to a single word Bush or his henchmen say, after they have been wrong and lied about so much for so long. And I'm SO GLAD this didn't get rushed through to make Paulson the czar of the universe. If Barack Obama says this is necessary and that there will be taxpayer protections for getting the money back, with the banks paying if it falls short, then I believe it must happen.

I also like the idea I heard today on NPR of a funding stream including additional taxes on those who've sucked in obscene profits from the Bush economy. For me, the test of whether this was the right thing to do will be whether or not accountability actually materializes after the bailout passes. Start with the people who got rich off of no-bid contracts related to the stupid fucking war. Talk about a sub-prime investment . . .

Call this number

to tell our Senators

how you feel about the "bail out" / "rescue plan"

anyone would be expected to give 700 billion dollars..."

Heads up: It'a up to 850 billion.

I agree with Obama and much of the rhetoric coming from our nation's capital on this bail-out issue. However, make no mistake... once this money has been spent, interest rates will go up... which will truly bring the house of cards down, as Bush is leaving us with a 10 to 15 trillion dollar deficit (if you count Freddie and Fannie).... and when interest rates go up, the cost of borrowing to pay for that debt will cripple our government in ways that are so extreme... the only example I can think of is when the USSR went bankrupt, and their government and country utterly fell apart.

Obama is wrong. This is a worse bill than the House version. And how much pork will Pelosi have to lard on in order to get enough House Dems on board?

Is nobody outraged at the way the Federal government throws our money around? This is all on the word of Paulson, who got everything else wrong and whio will be gone in four months.

Just another well-educated fool.

The sad fact is that warning signs of this housing bubble crisis were known for years by these financial firms and government officials yet they chose to ignore them hoping it would all go away. Yet anyone who warned about it was ridiculed. But now that this day of reckoning has arrived, Obama and others would have us give authority to those who chose to ignore these signs and lead us out of this mess?

Why should I believe anything that they say when in the original bill, “Decisions by the Secretary (Paulson) pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Is this some kind of joke? Did I go to bed one night in America and wake up in Soviet Russia? Do you really believe that I should give my freedom away to this loon?

All of this is too eerily similar to the run up to the Iraq War where politicians claimed that if we did not invade ASAP, Saddam would unleash WMD against America. That time, any dissenting voice was not only ridiculed, like now, but their very patriotism was questioned.

That will not happen now. If these troubled financial firms cannot survive, they should use the laws and courts already in place and declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy punishes these firms. But a bailout transfers the obligation from these firms that authorized risky loans to the taxpayers.