Unqualified Offerings

To them, Enter PLAYER and BEGGAR.
PLAYER. But, honest Friend, I hope you don’t intend that Macheath shall be really executed.
BEGGAR. Most certainly, Sir.—-To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical Justice—-Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other Personages of the Drama, the Audience must have suppos’d they were all hang’d [...]

By Thoreau
It’s not clear to me how much of this bailout will ultimately be done with Congressional approval and how much will be done through the “Because we said so!” theory of executive power.  However, if any of this ultimately goes to a vote in the Senate, I would make a humble proposition to all [...]

Greenwald:
Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.
This rivals Cheney on the dangerous-unchecked-power-o-meter.

What happens in the comment thread to Jonathan Wilde’s breezy "let them eat eTrade!" defense of the corporate state is not pretty. Bracing, but not pretty.

James Joyner sensibly asks, "Bernanke says, “There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises.”But if there’s ever a time to hold strong to fundamental principles, it would seem that this would be it.  We’re setting precedents that will govern the behavior of the international business community for decades to come.  Do [...]

Yglesias:
Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic [...]

In the afterward to the paperback edition of Charles C. Mann’s 1491, he points out that historians have traditionally consigned the pre-Columbian Americas to the domains of anthropology and archaeology rather than history. This partly stems from and fosters the old notion that "primitive" peoples were "without history," even though American cultures from Peru to [...]