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Late Late Nite FDL: Exodus Damage
John Vanderslice’s – Exodus Damage

John Vanderslice – Exodus Damage

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Polls Show Palin Is Starting to Drag Down McCain
The intense focus to reveal the truth about Sarah Palin’s credentials has taken its toll on her numbers.

A New Boom in Natural Gas Threatens Drinking Water
Water and chemicals injected at high pressure can extract more gas and may threaten drinking water in places like New York and Texas.

Sorting and Consensus
My thanks to Bill, TPM, and all the book club contributors and readers this week. This weekend, share a copy of Bill’s book with your favorite political opponent. It’s readable, funny, and enlightening, and you will feel smarter, not…

Long Term
After it became clear that Obama’s trip through the Middle East was not only error-free but wildly successful (because of Maliki’s gambit), there’s been a third wave of press chatter and fretting to the effect that Obama’s trip may now…

White House: McCain Campaign?s Attack On Congress ?Isn?t That Smart?
On the McCain campaign plane today, top adviser Steve Schmidt slammed congressional leaders for adjourning for recess on Sept. 26 before attempting to legislate a fix for the recent Wall Street meltdown: It is a disgrace, a disgrace that the Democratic Congress would say, ‘We’re going to leave Washington and we think this benefits us politically. […]

On the McCain campaign plane today, top adviser Steve Schmidt slammed congressional leaders for adjourning for recess on Sept. 26 before attempting to legislate a fix for the recent Wall Street meltdown:

It is a disgrace, a disgrace that the Democratic Congress would say, ‘We’re going to leave Washington and we think this benefits us politically. … When the democratic leadership in the Congress says we’ll deal with this after the election, we’re going home now is a clear indication that they’re not interested in working, you know, in a bipartisan way, where everybody sits in a room and says we have a major problem here in this country.

The White House, however, thinks a rush to pass legislation isn’t prudent. In today’s briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino said she didn’t know if the White House even had a legislative request for Congress to act on, and hesitated to push legislation during a “market correction”:

I don’t know if we will have specific actions that we would ask them to take. … But I think Democrats themselves, and maybe some Republicans, have questioned whether or not they will be able to get anything done in the next two weeks. And it probably isn’t that smart to try to finalize a legislation in the middle of a market correction as we’re trying to figure out what other possible necessary steps may or may not need to be taken as we move forward.

Perino said any call for a lame-duck session is “premature,” adding, “I think right now that the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have things in hand.” Watch it:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) echoed this sentiment, saying that “lawmakers first would need a better understanding of how the problems developed,” before legislating any remedy, CQ reports. Congress “has to find out what happened, why it happened, who is responsible and how we ought to go forward in the future,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), rejecting calls for passing legislation immediately.

While Schmidt claimed Congress is “not interested in working” and is simply saying “we’re going home now,” Pelosi said that as of yet, “she had not been briefed on any legislative plan by Paulson,” CQ adds. It seems Schmidt was the one looking for a scapegoat to score political points.

McCain and the Meltdown
“The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” John McCain said as Wall Street went into white-knuckle panic over diving investor confidence. Does he believe that? It doesn’t really matter, because the Republican has outsourced his economic policy to the ideologues whose opposition to regulations brought the financial markets to their knees. McCain’s former economic adviser is ex-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. On Dec. 15, 2000, hours before Congress was to leave for Christmas recess, Gramm had a 262-page amendment slipped into the appropriations bill. It forbade federal agencies to regulate the financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors.

Obama’s Remarks in Elko, Nevada
Elko, NV As Prepared for Delivery The events of this week have shown that the stakes in this election couldn’t be clearer. We are in the midst of the most serious financial crisis in generations. Three of America’s five largest investment banks have failed or been sold off in distress. Our housing market is in shambles, and Monday brought the worst losses on Wall Street since the day after September 11th. Monday brought the worst losses on Wall Street since the day after September 11th, and today we learned that the Fed had to take unprecedented action to prevent the failure of one of the largest insurance companies in the world from causing an even larger crisis.