DC bickers over bailout

Well, the good news is that the Congress didn't just hand over a blank check in a fit of panic and is calling the White House bluff on the bailout plan. Dodd has a proposal that some people like. I gave you Reich's plan yesterday.

Meanwhile, the White House appears to be moving to some extent from their initial carte blanche position but Paulson insists that curbs on CEO payouts are not on the table. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but I tend to agree with John Cole. Less than completely horrible doesn't make an already awful plan, a good one.

Meanwhile, Matt Stoller asks some good questions.

1. What will prevent the bill from allowing both parties to use the guise of purchasing worthless mortgages to further enrich their largest campaign donors?

2. How are Americans and investors supposed to feel confident that the crisis will be solved, if the very people who engineered the crisis are being relied on to solve it?

3. How is this meltdown a failure of "oversight" if it has almost nothing to do with illegality?

4. When did a crisis suddenly mean that giving away taxpayer cash to campaign donors is laudably apolitical, but spending taxpayer money on taxpayers is inappropriately "political?"

5. How are we going to pay for this?

The bottom line for me is still why the hell should we bail them out at all? It will only forestall the inevitable crash to after Bush skulks out of town. Maybe it's just time to let it fail and reset the whole market value system. This bailout approach strikes me as being like sinking thousands, bit by bit, into a cobbled together computer server system that doesn't really support the database rather than biting the bullet and paying all at once for a whole new system that's designed to the job right.

In any event, the people are mad as hell and they don't want to take it anymore. If you haven't yet contacted your Congresslizards to let them know where you stand, here's a new petition that just started circulating. You can sign it in ten seconds and it's going to be presented to the all various parties inside the Beltway.

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]