Congress Calls WallSt.’s Bluff

Excerpt:  "While groups of politicians bickered like schoolchildren over the failure of the House of Representatives to pass Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion bailout plan, the S&P 500 Index plunged to its worst day since the week of the 1987 stock-market crash, wiping out more than $700 billion in the index’s market value.

In other words, we all just spent that $700 billion today — and still didn’t get a rescue plan.

You’re doing a heckuva job, Congress. See full story on House vote.

Let’s be clear: The fat cats on Wall Street are still rich. And there must be several dozen of them in total. They were worth many millions, and now they’re just worth several millions.

But by making this about a bailout of fat cats and not what it clearly was — an emergency rescue of the global financial system — Congress imperils the investments, deposits, money markets and life savings of millions of Americans, to say nothing of people around the world.

Is it Election Day yet?

Even the notoriously splintered government of Belgium was able to engineer a rescue of banking and insurance giant Fortis over 48 hours this weekend. But our own representatives, faced with the gravest economic threat in 70 years, took more than 10 days to hash up this rescue plan, and then rejected it anyway.

In total, more than $1 trillion was wiped off the value of the entire U.S. stock market Monday, as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Index…"