The Stock Market just dropped 700 points. I guess Republicans will get their free market solution after all.

On the bright side, dog food futures just went through the roof.

Just curious how the Republicans plan to square their opposition with John McCain's statements earlier today in Ohio.

John McCain -- Thanks for your great efforts with the House Republicans - NOT.

Interesting. Ironically, this GOP double-cross is probably going to result in outright socialism. Seems like nationalization of a bunch of banks is more and more likely, eh?

Countdown to the Republican Trolls condeming the Dems for the failure.

Oh wait, never mind. They already started.

The GOP may have gambled with the nation's prosperity, but how do you explain almost 40% of Dems voting against it? That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Pelosi.

House Republicans would risk financial Armageddon because they felt dissed by Pelosi? Good luck getting the American public to sympathize with that.

Ironically, this GOP double-cross is probably going to result in outright socialism. Posted by: Phil

A girl can dream.

are they f**king KIDDING? the House Republicans didn't vote for it because of something Nancy Pelosi said? since when do they give a sh*t what Pelosi says, about anything?

these Republicans are the biggest bunch of pussies imaginable.

whether the bill passes or not, i can only hope this shows that McCain is totally impotent--he can't even get his own people to vote for this. and HE'S the candidate that can reach across the aisle?

House Republicans would risk financial Armageddon because they felt dissed by Pelosi? - kth

No kidding! Children like these inspire abortions.

My recommendation: Buy apple. Not the computer company, the fruit. You can sell them out of a box on the street corner.

Chris Matthews on CNN is laying the blame squarely on the Republican House leadership. He makes a good point...you don't bring a bill like this to the floor unless you're sure it will pass. The Minority leader either lied to Pelosi, his members lied to him, or he set this up for political gain.

The financial markets can be calmed with the passage of an impeachment bill by the House of Representatives.

At least the progressives are fair about their socialism, they wanted to subsidize both the rich and the poor!

"And so it goes."

Dems controlcongress - 95 rejected Nancy Pelosi's leadership.

How can this NOT be the Democrats fault?

Blaming Pelosi's speech for the defeat has got to be the most politically dumb thing to do at this point. Voters will see through this. The GOP is in shambles.

Shorter Boehner and Blount: "We were going to vote to save the country from financial disaster, but the mean lady hurt our feelings! Waaaah!"

Minority Leader Boehner (R-OH) is blaming Nancy Pelosi. Apparently she is just that powerful. Republican rank and file congressmen are just unable to do just the opposite of anything she says.

"Republican" means never having to be responsible.

Wow, what did Pelosi say? And why couldn't she have said if before the Iraq war to scuttle that too?

"It was, of course, Republican opposition that scuttled the deal. Rumor has it that Boehner & Co. had promised to deliver between 80 and 90 Republican votes, and that clearly didn't happen. With so many GOP lawmakers balking, fewer Dems had a reason to stick out their necks in support of the package."

What an incredibly asinine statement to make from someone who claims to be an astute political observer. It doesn't matter how much Republican opposition there was to bill. If the Democratic Leadership wanted it to pass, it should have passed by a majority vote. The fact that 40% of the Democratic Caucus voted against the bill that Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Leadership are the most incompetent in this country's history.

As I stated on the previous thread:

[T]his vote exposes Nancy Pelosi to be the worst Speaker in history. The House runs on straight majority control. The Dems are the majority party. If Nancy can't get her majority to vote for a bill that she brings to the floor, that represents a failure of her leadership plain and simple. Any attempt to blame Republicans for the failure of this thing to pass by the Dems and the Media should be met with howls of laughter.

Considering this me laughing in your face, Steve. LOL

The House web site is kaput. I wonder why?

looks like a workable plan is now hidden in a cave with Bin Laden, never to be found.

It was not only Republicans who voted against the bill. Progressive Democrat Dennis Kucinich, for one, also opposed the bill, and spoke eloquently against it in an interview this morning with journalist Amy Goodman on the Pacifica radio program Democracy Now.

Personally I was opposed to Congress passing this bill without first holding extensive, in-depth public hearings to examine the crisis, its causes, and alternative approaches to dealing with it. Certainly no one has made any real case that Congress needed to rush through this, weeks before the election, to hand Bush & Co. hundreds of billions of dollars to give to their kleptocratic cronies on Wall Street.

We call blockage of a really crappy bill a "Republican failure"???

It's too early to call...

If a better bill complete with anti-trust flavor and advantageous equity stakes in the bailed out company are added in, my opposition would be minimal and we might see an end to corporate malfeasance. Markets can't work if some companies are allowed to fail, yet survive.

My advice is wait until we have more and better Democrats after the election, and do this right. It took years of Republican mismanagement to get us here, we can wait a few more weeks until the American people send a clear message to these guys and do the bill right.

IS THAT THE RIGHT LINK?? It looks to be the wrong roll call vote.

It is the Republicans fault because of their economic policies of deregulation and lax oversight of financial institutions of the past seven years. Paulson, the Republican Sec. of Treasury, sat on the problem of failing banks until he had to call for a huge welfare bailout to prevent their collapse, when he should have started preventing their collapse, with the oversight power of his position, as soon as he took office.

SecularAnimist, sanity, thanks. I was beginning to wonder who these Democrats really are!

it's an interesting roll call. Just looking at the Democrats who voted "no," they're an odd mix - on one side, leftists like Kucinich, Lee, and Woolsey, and a lot of members of the CBC (including Cummings and Conyers) . On the other side, a lot of Blue dogs. The mainstream middle of the party mostly voted "yes".

Of those in competitive or potentially competitive Senate races, both Udalls and Steve Pearce voted no; Tom Allen voted yes. The leadership in both parties voted in favor. All the relatively sane Republicans appear to have voted in favor (e.g. Shays, Gilchrest, LaHood). 25 of 37 Democratic members of the House Financial Services committee voted in favor, including the 8 most senior members of the committee. On the other hand, only 9 of the 33 Republicans on the committee voted in favor, including the four most senior.

If I'm Pelosi and Frank, revise the bill the way that it will pass with Democrat/Moderate Republican support and let Bush veteo it. It's clear the Republicans are setting the stage for how they will behave under an Obama Administration and it won't hurt to start getting our progressive ducks in a row.

"The fact that 40% of the Democratic Caucus voted against the bill that Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Leadership are the most incompetent in this country's history."
Posted by: Chicounsel on September 29, 2008 at 3:06 PM

And the fact that 2/3rds of the Republican Caucus (justly famous for their ability to vote in lockstep) voted against it means what, exactly? Pelosi apparently got as many of her members to support it as she promised she would get. Boehner failed miserably to gather the Republican support he claimed he could get. I'm no fan of Pelosi, but she isn't anywhere near the incompetent fool that Boehner is.

The stock market goes up and down anyway. We've lost these percentages of points many times. Nobody really knows the solution to this problem. Bush pulled the 700 billion figure out of his ass. Anything sufficiently complex appears to be magic.

"Apparently, the new line from the right -- repeated by Boehner, Gingrich, and some conservative bloggers -- is that House Republicans ended up rejecting the bill because they didn't like Nancy Pelosi's speech on the subject.

Isn't Gingrich the same person who sought to shut down the federal government because Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One while on a trip to a funeral?

Now he's happy to have his Republican sycophants shut down the economy because Nancy Pelosi rubbed them the wrong way in a speech?

Why the fuck is anybody still paying attention to anything this idiot says?

This was a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" bill. I wasn't sold on it in total, but I think something needs to be done sooner rather than later. Let me know what everyone thinks when they're out of a job in 6 months.

What have they been waiting for, apparently Paulson & Co have been working on this for 7 months.A remarkable coincidence that on Daily Kos website there is an article from Feb 08 by Elliot Spitzer talking about this, wonder if there were more reasons he was pushed out of office.

These guys had to get one last f up in before they left. I hope we can afford it.

Both parties are really lost and don't understand the economic situation. There will be some kind of a deal eventually, but these conditions will go well into next year, if not beyond. http://mycommentspage.blogspot.com/

"With Raines and Johnson on Obama's payroll"
Posted by: Eric Blair on September 29, 2008 at 3:13 PM

??????? If you want to argue stupid positions, I guess that's your right, but at least get your facts right if you don't want to look like a raving loon. Johnson was head of the VP search team (presumably an unpaid position) for several minutes back in June before he had to resign over getting a lower than market mortgage on his house. He has no connection with the Obama campaign now. Raines never had any affiliation with the campaign at all other than in John McCain's fevered imagination. Once statements are proved to be lies, responsible adults stop repeating them.

And once again the reliably moronic Chico demonstrates the idiocy of being a Republican. If it were possible for the Democrats to vote 100% on a bill then they would be Republicans (even the joke impeachment of Clinton had Democratic House members voting for it).

What our blatantly dishonest Mr. Unsel wanted was for this to be the "Bush/Democrats" bill - passed without a single Republican vote (he's even said so). Why? Because it a) might have done something useful, and b) would have been a demagogic talking point for trolls like himself.

What the Republicans want is pure politics. They want the benefit of something being done without the responsibility for the cost of it. This is why voting for Republicans has become a de facto admission of treasonous intent. No rational person, seeing the damage done by Bush and the Republicans over the past eight years could possibly hold them in anything but contempt.

Chicounsel - go the fuck away. You are a traitor to the nation and a sick bastard to boot.

I just don't get it. What is the urgency, if not political? This is a panic-stricken Congress and administration if I've ever see one. But I suspect it's all political panic, and not inspired by any urgent danger to the union. Why can't this wait until after the election, when cooler minds can prevail?

Perhaps it's too late. They've already committed themselves to the position that the sky is falling in.

What a mess this is. I think our government has
failed us. They don't know what the hell they are doing, and that is scary.

Thanks for the Kucinich link, Secular Animist. I never realized just how completely kooky he is! Gee, I love his idea of getting us out of a liquidity trap by infrastructure spending. I mean, it was so successful in Japan. Uh. Errr.

We need nationalization. We're not going to get it. The bill was the best we could get. A depression is going to hurt all of us, not just bankers. Wake up.

Good riddance. Time to produce an acceptable bill paid for via:

10% surtax on all incomes of $1 million/year for couples, $500,000 for singles. Add a 0.25% surtax on all stock and currency trades. For good measure, create an insurance system ala the GOP idea for those mortgages that haven't been perverted and chopped into an uninsurable and unrecognizable mess. Make them pay the premiums to the government.

Not a single voter of any importance would be hurt by such a plan. This plan could be passed without a single GOP vote (and do it AFTER the election). Let the f*cks that did this and/or benefited the most from the criminality before it crashed pay for it.

Yah, sure. The R's get to vote no and let the D's pass the bill to save the R's sorry asses. Sorry (not really), but the R's are going to have to take the credit for their actions. The bill went down because they ignored Bush and his Boner and voted against it. If the Republicans really want a bill, the Democrats will work with them, but if all they want is political theater, well that's exactly what they got. The one person who looks totally ineffectual coming out of this is McCain.

This was a bad bill, poorly thought out, poorly executed, rushed through. Lazio, Kucinich and others were absolutely right to oppose it.

It deserved to flame out.

Come up with a real alternative, Dems, not some soft-around-the-edges neo-Bushian Goldman Sachs savin' piece of horseshit.

From a quick scan, it looks like the Dems who voted nay included some blue dogs, some CBCers, some progressives - my hunch is that once it became clear the GOP wasn't going to come up with the 80-90 they promised, several Dems switched from aye to nay. On the theory that they shouldn't expose themselves to attack ads by voting for a bill that will fail anyway. 'Course i'm not sure that logic is right in this situation (they can now be blamed for a stock market crash) and even when right it's a callow play to make ... but there you go.

I have a Palin-sized understanding of the economy and stock market and stuff. I do know that I'd feel a whole lot better about a plan, any plan, that had a better name than "Bail Out." It just feels like we're using a whole lot of money to keep the perpetrators out of jail. Know what I mean?

Now "New Deal." There's a plan I can get behind. And, like the New Deal, I'd find it easier to support a plan that, at the very least, showed some obvious benefit to the everyday American in it.

This feels more like when your coke-head brother stops by on Christmas and asks for a few hundred bucks to get himself straightened out. But, you know where that money is going.

Or it's like a tax rebate stimulus check that's supposed to encourage you to buy something you've been putting off. But when that ol' check comes in the mail you're like, "where'd it go?"

I want a plan that says: 1] Here's where we fucked up; 2] Here's how we've fixed it; and 3] Here's how it's going to help everyone, not just Wall St.

Like I say, me and money -- duh! But, isn't that how the average Joe sees it? Don't they want to feel like a $700 billion plan has them in mind and not just the stock broker on the ledge?

I hope my wife is willing to give up her jewels.

Why did everybody panic? Why didn't they wait until after the election? Bush and Paulson have created a global panic when they have absolutely no credibility. How could this happen? How could Congress allow itself to be stampeded into this mess?

I don't think our government has any idea of what it is doing, and I find that a lot more scary than this financial crisis.

I agree that is was (mostly) the republicans who scuttled this bill, but you know what? Good for them. It was a terrible bill, basically buying the scumbags who got into this mess out of it. No one has been able to explain WHY failure to pass this bill will result in financial Armageddon - we've only had Shrub's boys, recently backed up by Pelosi & Reid, telling us that this is so.

And frankly, whenever Bush tells you something, almost certainly the opposite is true. But I agree with Chicounsel - Pelosi may go down as the worst speaker in history. Couldn't pass S-CHIP, capitulated on FISA, "subpoena power" is a joke, we've yet to outlaw the f***ing torture of power, and then this.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I hope Donna Edwards, Jon Tester, or Darcy Burner (hopefully) end up being the type of Democrats we've needed for so long, because the Pelosi/Reid cabal is an utter and abject failure.

I also laugh with Chicounsel (although from the opposite side of the ideological divide): LOL

Anyone saying that this bill could have and should have been passed by a straight Dem party-line vote hasn't been paying attention. Either this bill was going to pass with 75% voting yes and ideologue R's and everyone from either party who is in a close race voting no, or it wasn't going to pass at all. With the public not believing that the crisis is real and iminent, no one with a chance of losing their seat was going to vote yes without lots of cover from both sides. This was a very easy no vote for a congressman to justify to himself, and a very hard yes vote to justify. Long term thinking in congress right now is defined as being 5 weeks long. No congressman is looking farther ahead than that.

Notes to Boner.

1) Sometimes the truth really hurts.
2) Can't take insults from a girl?

The final was 228/205? It would have taken only 12 of those no votes going to yeah in order to win this thing---but I see a whole lot more than 12 Dems who voted against it.

This is the House of Representatives, people! With the inundation of phone calls and emails to the House system over the past several days,---most being a cry from constituents to vote this damned thing down---are we really to expect that Representatives, who are SUPPOSED to vote their constituents' wishes, are going to turn against their own electorate and do what Pelosi demands?

To be honest---and brutally blunt---I'm expecting a few Dems to lose their seats over this thing; not for voting against the bill, but voting FOR it, if it manages to pass on a re-vote. That won't hert much, though; it'll be more than made up for by the GOPers who ignored THEIR constituents' wishes, and voted to pass the bill.

This "bill" still has far too many gray areas in it to be worth an actual floor vote. It needs to be broken down by the Committees and put through the system the way it's SUPPOSED to go through the system. If that means the DOW has to tank to 8,000 points, then so be it---a lot of economists have been predicting that since what---Spring?

This bill, as it's written, is nothing but a band-aid on what amounts economically to a severed artery. What we need is a tourniquet, followed by surgery---and that tourniquet was called for today by the folks who said "no" to the band-aid.

Democrats, AND Republicans, alike....

"Why would Republicans work with the Democrats if they are going to be blamed for the problem anyway?"

Uh, newsflash Eric - they *are* responsible for the problem. They let the Bush administration piss on the Constitution for 6 entire years without as much as a peep. So how much oversight do you think went on with regard to our regulatory bodies ? These Republican jackasses couldn't govern their way out of a wet paper sack.

Orwell(eric blair), you were banned from this blog a month ago.

But since you're here, I offer you one word: Landslide.

Anyone seen Pops today? Haven't heard a peep. Maybe they're devising away to postpone the next debate too.

12 votes needed, 95 D's voted against it.

Pelosi's speech was too much:
"It is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies—policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system."

Who in the hell do you think voted for all of Bush's policies, Nancy ? She couldn't let it go, pass the legislation, then call republicans the idiots they are. Ready. Fire. Aim

The final was 228/205? It would have taken only 12 of those no votes going to yeah in order to win this thing---but I see a whole lot more than 12 Dems who voted against it.

Again: The Democrats were not going to pass it in the face of a Republican defection, as was made clear at the start of this whole process.

Republican bad faith sank this bailout, for good or ill.

Don't get me wrong, any bill that would garner Bush The Incompetent and Malicious' signature was bound to be a bad one. But the bad faith on the part of the Republicans was both astounding and expected.

Still reading, and still looking to understand Dems.

One reason for the bail out?
Dems got hysterical?

Another reason? Someone might unplug the ATM machines?

A more sensible reason? It will take years to rebuild the financial system?

I don't get it. Plug in the ATM machine, give Dems a sedative, invite sound foreign banks to come in and open up financial centers.

I mean, what skills are we losing by laying off a bunch of American investment bankers? When was the last time you worried about some fat, balding cigar chesing, swaggering, bigshot, American male banker?

House Republicans would risk financial Armageddon because they felt dissed by Pelosi? Good luck getting the American public to sympathize with that

Dude, she made them cry.. have a heart, they need a hug.

Wow. It's all the Republicans' fault whether they control congress or not. That's a convenient way to, um, “reason“.

If you want to be the majority, act like it. Pelosi had 95 Democrats who could have closed the gap, a lame-duck President, a Democrat Senate, all in an election year. Are you telling me the Great and Mystical Obama couldn't even energize the base enough to get the constituents on board for Pelosi? You want to blame Boehner when the Messiah himself couldn’t rally the devout?

Twelve dissenters came from Barney Frank's own Banking committee. Speaking of Barney; maybe he should have listened to OFHEO in 2003 or again in 2005???

I'm in favor of the bailout but Pelosi was just stupid enough to provide political cover for those who already wanted to vote against the bill; leaders don't do that. The question isn’t “Did she run off enough votes to kill the bill�, it’s “Did she do everything possible as the leader of Congress to ensure its passage?�

Libs can’t mention Republicans, excuse me “Neocons� without using the word “Divisive�. So what was Nancy’s little diatribe, inclusive? Warm?, inviting? A celebration of diversity? There go the democrats again, all full of divisive vile hatred and emotion.

You don’t get 95 defections from your own party because of a partisan speech. Pelosi is the Captain William Bligh of modern politics. Maybe her raft will wash up on the Dominican Republic and she can crash at Charlie Rangel's place.

PELOSI, Lost the vote on a bad bill that the republicans could not vote for. MSM tells us this must be done, all the Dems want to point fingers, McCain went back to help, and was accused with politicking but was able to give the GOP the B"""s to oppose a very partisan bill with gloom and doom looming they said NO! The DFL could have done it on their own but couldn't get enough votes from their own base. Where Obama in this? Oh call me if you need me. Sorry McCain and the GOP although still must swallow hard but the bill the senate will vote on today is a great deal better than the others before it for the American people! Compare all 4 proposals and you will see that because of the debates the people have had a particle win.