I couldn’t agree more.
ETA: I kept wanting to ask Palin to define “Maverick,” “Reform,” and “Change” last night. Reform is such a great word. They use it all the time. The problem is, they don’t actually want to change anything. THey talk about stopping the greed and corruption on Wall Street, but they never say how. Wave a magic wand? Say “Stop!”?
I guess he’ll just have to write tell-all biography in a couple of years. 
Didn’t he already admit in his 2002 bio that his running in 2000 was motivated by pure ambition? Apparently either no one but Keith Olbermann noticed, or people think now he’s being sincere?
We are so screwed.
I’m on the fence about the bill also, and I have no problem with those that either voted for or against it before, but I do have a problem with those who changed to a yes vote after this earmark. I hope those bastards lose their seat in 5 weeks.
Not to mention stopping the greed and corruption in the government. Obama is running on the “change” platform, himself, which I might be a little more inclined to believe if he ever lifted one tiny finger against corruption when he was a politician in what is probably the most corrupt city in one of the most corrupt states in the union.
To be fair, I think some of the voters changed their minds and told their reps as much. Plus the market dropped so precipitously on Monday after the bill was voted down. I honestly think that had they resubmitted the bill as voted on Monday, it might have passed by similar numbers today. The pork made some people happier about it, and me personally much unhappier about it.
The market was already very much in the tank before the vote took place. IIRC Barney Frank was shouting at other members that the Dow was down 600 points to encourage them of the importance of voting yes. It dropped a bit further, down 770 at close.
Then, the following day and with no bailout plan in sight, the Dow recovered 2/3 of its losses. Much ado about nothing.
The Dow recovered because the Street expected there to be a plan in place fairly soon. If today hadn’t passed, I think you would have seen the market take a nose dive. But, of course, we’ll never know now. (nice alliteration there)
Eh…not so sure. If the bailout was the thing then why did the Dow tank the day of the vote when everybody thought it would pass?
As you say we’ll never know for sure but doesn’t quite add up in my head.
Why’d it drop 157 today? 
I thought Lieberman was anti-pork.
The bill didn’t pass early in the day. The vote started going south and so did the market.
Did it? Last I’d heard it was up! It closed down? I am surprised.
Well, as everyone has said, this bill at best fixes nothing. At best it retards damage.
I saw an interesting blog post about issues surrounding short-term commercial lending, and why this bill may actually make things worse there due to increased demand for treasuries. So it may be that the markets already priced in the expected confidence bump due to anticipated passage of this bill yesterday, and today are getting back to the business of predicting a gloomy financial future for us all. Hard to say.
I suspect that our original instincts were right. This is a bill to infuse money into the top of the financial structure. It will not help unemployment. It will not trickle down to homeowners in trouble until it is too late. How does bailing out the Saudis and Chinese who we talked into buying these crappy financial papers help the average American ? Paulson probably felt we owed them . I don’t.
I believe that this is first time Mick Jagger has been (mis)quoted in a Congressional debate. Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, cited the great philosopher:
:dubious:
The market went down because jobs went down another 159,000 in August, not because the bill passed.
Paul Krugman supported this bill, holding his nose all the way. That was enough for me.
It really, really pissed me off that the mental health parity piece suddenly got attached to this behemoth. It’s hard to celebrate its passage knowing that it was used as bait for the terrible bailout bill.
There were lots of really good and bad things attached to that bill to “sweeten it up” so that people would vote for it. Nobody likes the bill. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t hate it. They’re just mostly saying they think it’s necessary.