What really boggles the mind is how badly Dems got played.

Or bought.

What really boggles the mind is how badly Dems got played. They are such schmucks. Unbelievable.

Lawmakers Reach Accord on Huge Financial Rescue
House Expected to Vote Today on $700 Billion Bailout

…Democrats and Republicans from both chambers met with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. through the afternoon in an effort to forge a compromise on a variety of outstanding issues, including how quickly the government should make money available for the program and whether participating firms should be required to limit executive pay.

Talks also focused on a new issue: how to cover the cost of the program so taxpayers don’t get stuck with the bill. […]

Yesterday, Democrats said they were pressing hard for further taxpayer protections, including a fee that would be imposed on the financial services industry if after five years the government had not fully recouped its money. The proposal, which did not surface in negotiations until yesterday, would help win the support of a fiscally conservative group of House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs, an important bloc of 47 votes.

“We believe that the taxpayer should not be left holding the bag at the end of the day, and we’ve proposed a way to address that,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team.

http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva09202008.html

Lila tells all.

I was at Stanford this weekend and had a long talk yesterday with a friend who is one of the top academic financial economists in the United States. He has hnad several conversations with Paulson in the last ten days, and says that Paulson simply has a bee in his bonnet with respect to the bail-out as planned. The economics profession, right and left, favours the kind of bail-out that Warren Buffett pulled off last week: a combination of warrants, an equity stake and insurance. Odd that the pre-cambrian rethugs are the ones pushing this plan. Anyway, Paulson simply won’t hear anything of it. He seems to think that if the money isn’t given out independently of need (i.e. independently of the level of bad debts), it will strike of favoritism. Apparently this is the lesson he drew from the Japanese crisis some years back.

Anyway, Paulson’s position isn’t particularly ideological, as many of us suspected; it is personal. One of those random events that have cascading consequences.

[…]

Money for the rescue plan would be phased in, he said. The first $350 billion would be available as soon as the president requested it. Congress could try to block later amounts if it believed the program was not working. The president could veto such a move, however, requiring extra large margins in the House and Senate to override.

[…]

the whole article is worth a read.