Ok, Democrats. Explain this:

There’s more, so read the whole thing. Now consider this excerpt from the official Democrat party platform:

we oppose laws that require identification in order to vote or register to vote

That’s on page number 56 of the plaform document, at the linked site it is p. 58 of the total document because the first two pages are not numbered.

Makes no sense to me. Vote once, vote often, vote a zillion times. Let the foreign visitors vote. Let the kids vote. Pay them to vote. Help them vote for the “right guy.”

Why? Why is this a “good thing?”

In Genesis, 18:22-33 the Lord and Abraham have a conversation of a political nature:

So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord. Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

One of the things which the author of this passage is relating, succinctly, is that political ethics are not exactly the same as personal ethics. The dialogue does not run down to “Suppose there is one there”, the reason for that is that in politics there it is not possible ethics are a muddier thing than in personal interactions. War, for example, can be just, justly executed, and be necessary that is “a fighting of the good fight” and at the same time innocents will as with any other war, die. It is not that the deaths of those innocent is “good”, but that in execution of one thing, which is necessary and good (the war), innocents will die, which in an of itself does not make the war “not good” or necessary.
Read the rest of this entry

How’s Obama’s native state’s health care experiment working?

Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

Gov. Linda Lingle’s administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

"People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free," said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. "I don’t believe that was the intent of the program."

Government programs change people’s behavior.  You can’t just create a new program in a vacuum, on a state nor a national level.

Whoever the next President of the United States is, he’s going to inherit a financial sector that’s on the ropes.  It will not have tanked because of him personally, either of them, but he’ll have to deal with it.

I remember when Kerry was campaigning against Bush.  Democrats were all over the media, early in the campaign, saying that we’d lost jobs under Bush, which was true.  What they hoped you had forgotten was that the economy was already heading downward in the quarter or two before Bush even go to move in to the White House, and they utterly ignored the hit our economy took after 9/11.  ("Never forget" indeed.) 

Frankly, I think the President has less affect on the economy than most people think.  The best he can ever do is make conditions better for the people to grow the economy.  Anything else is a short-term band-aid that could at least give little long-term benefit or at worst give us its unintended consequences. 

Where do we get when we come to a place where we’ve established and believe that the “other side” isn’t stupid or evil. It seems that one of the results holding that as an axiom, is that identification of who agrees with “your view” of things is the sort of person whom you might support, and that this is in fact as (or possibly) more important than competence in a political standpoint. Thus the team urgency and loyalty we see by, for example, GOP vs Democrat actually makes far more logical sense than one might think. It isn’t the same as “team loyalty” to a particular football or baseball team. You support and have political loyalty to a party which “speaks your language”, and in doing so assures you that their train of logic and their conception of the good in government is shared by you. Alsdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? writes in some length about how hard it is for those who do not share essential assumptions on the fundamental concerns defining the Good and the rational to communicate. So often those who do not share your assumptions don’t make sense. It is hard to understand why the “other” arrives at the conclusions that they do, and more often than not, we fall back on the (erroneous) assumption that the other is merely deluded, stupid, or intentionally malefic. Read the rest of this entry

Short take: McCain finally started hitting on the policy issues that he was missing in the first 2 debates.  Mostly, he took on some of Obama’s mischaracterizations of him.  He should have started this 2 debates ago.  I felt better about his performance, but the quick poll of undecideds on Fox showed movement toward Obama.

Random items:

* The "even Fox News" line from Obama shows how much a blind spot Democrats have for rampant liberal bias in the media.  And if this is his only shot at them, it only proves they are indeed balanced.

* "Joe the Plumber", Joe Wurzelbacher, got about 60 minutes of fame, well more than his allotted 15.  Folks that don’t read the blogs may not have known who he is (though the networks have wanted to make sure you know about that 106-year-old nun who’s voting for Obama), but McCain made sure he got the word out.  Hopefully, they’ll find out that this small business owner is going to get taxed more under Obama, and that "infuriates" him.  Maybe they’ll find the video of Obama telling him he wants to "spread the wealth around" (translation: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need).  Hopefully.

* Obama still insists that 95% of people will get a tax cut, ignoring the fact that many people pay no taxes at all.  And as a conservative pundit noted (forget which one), Bill Clinton campaigned on a middle class tax cut.  Amnesia set in as soon as he sat down in the Oval Office.

* Finally, McCain drove the point home that he wants to give you choice over your healthcare, and not introduce a federal bureaucracy into the mix.  Obama’s plan may sound modest enough, but it’s the foot in the door for an even bigger program.  "This worked, so let’s make it bigger and stronger."  That’s what happens to government programs.  McCain’s plan stops at giving you a credit and letting you spend it with no federal mandate whatsoever.  He avoids the slippery slope. 

And now, the home stretch.

Jesse Jackson, not a spokesman for Obama but one who certainly believes he knows what’s coming, spoke about key foreign policy changes he sees in an Obama administration.

He promised "fundamental changes" in US foreign policy – saying America must "heal wounds" it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the "arrogance of the Bush administration."

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel’s interests first" would end.

Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

First, let’s talk about "first", as in the US "putting Israel’s interests first".  First in front of whom, ours?  Hasn’t been that was so far.  First in front of the myriad countries in the Middle East who have been attacking, or supporting attacks on, Israel?  Well sure, but our alliance with a well-functioning democracy — the best in the region — against aggressor nations and gangs is, I would think, a good thing. 

I guess the main question would be; which country or countries would get boosted?  The Palestinians?  The folks who vote in terrorist organizations to run their government and lob rockets virtually daily into civilian Israeli towns?  The ones who, while living in Israel, get the right to vote and all?  The ones who, when given land for peace, use that land for launching attacks?  Yeah, apparently them.

Jackson is especially critical of President Bush’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

"Bush was so afraid of a snafu and of upsetting Israel that he gave the whole thing a miss," Jackson says. "Barack will change that," because, as long as the Palestinians haven’t seen justice, the Middle East will "remain a source of danger to us all."

If we’d just wipe Israel off the map, like Hamas wants, we’d all be much safer.  Yeah, right.

Second, about those alliances allegedly needing reviving.  I think Jackson has believed the media reports that we went into Iraq "unilaterally".  A browsing of Wikipedia will dispel that misnomer.  Granted, the US has had the vast majority of troops there, but we had more to contribute.  Much like the widow’s mite, it’s not so much the absolute amount contributed as it is the sort of sacrifice it may be.  You’ll find listed a number of countries freed from Soviet domination when we won the Cold War.  You’ll find quite a diverse collection of nationalities, all in support of the US and its policy in Iraq. 

You won’t find France on there.  That’s because they decided to work with Iraq, under the table and subverting the sanctions, for their own economic gain.  When the shooting started, however, they slinked away and waited it out.  Yeah, that’s the kind of country I want in my alliance.  Revive us today, indeed, Obama.

So our foreign policy may indeed look quite different than it does today, but that’s not necessarily a better thing.  Since the Iraq war, many countries (including, just last night, Canada and, interestingly, France) have shifted to the right politically.  Zaptero’s Spain tried appeasing terrorism by pulling out of Iraq after a change in administrations, but the Madrid bombings happened anyway.  The world has nudged slightly toward the right, and where it hasn’t, in hopes of avoiding confrontation, it’s been hounded by the bad guys anyway. 

The world is beginning to see what George W. Bush saw, but unfortunately the United States apparently doesn’t.

Connecticut now has same-sex marriage due to legislative action judicial fiat.  One 4-to-3 ruling, rather than the voice of the people, has brought it to that state.  One more reason why seeking constitutional amendments to stop this isn’t some overreaction; it’s the playing field the Left is using.  You could argue, possibly correctly, that the citizens would likely vote for this anyway, but that’s not the point at all.  They should say so themselves; not have their minds read.

Now, if you believe that homosexuality is wrong, but figure that allowing homosexuals to marry each other doesn’t really affect anything, studies in Europe and the US are showing that you get more of behavior you encourage.

An accumulation of research from around the world finds that societies which endorse homosexual behavior increase the prevalence of homosexuality in those societies. The legalization of same-sex marriage—which is being considered by voters in several U.S. states—is the ultimate in societal endorsement and will result in more individuals living a homosexual lifestyle.

Extensive research from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the United States reveals that homosexuality is primarily environmentally induced. Specifically, social and/or family factors, as well as permissive environments which affirm homosexuality, play major environmental roles in the development of homosexual behavior.

In essence, society’s norms and, in this case, state regulations have a bigger influence on homosexual behavior than even genetics.

But first, it should be noted that although the Swedish and Finnish twin studies are among the best to date, they still have wide margins of error. In fact, the margins of error are so wide it remains entirely possible that genetic factors play no role in the development of homosexuality. That remains to be determined, but what has been resolved is that the primary factor in the development of homosexuality is environmental.

(Emphasis in original.)  Read the whole thing for further details and the conclusion. 

Rights are a very confusing notion. It seems to me there are two possibilities regarding Mr Obama’s recent claim that “health care is a right.” Either he means something completely different by “right” than I might understand it to mean (which is to say not a common notion of what is casually meant by “a right”) or he should not get anybody’s vote because he’s, well, insane. Bill Whittle, former democrat, at NRO puts this one perspective:

Well, back in the day, we would simply say that a right has legal authority — it’s in the Constitution and therefore it’s a not just a right, it’s a birthright. So why shouldn’t we amend the Constitution to include the rights to health care, food, housing, education — all the rest? What’s the difference between the rights we have and the “rights” Obama wants to give us?

Simply this: Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.

The Declaration states that the “rights we hold to be self-evident” (and perhaps granted by Nature’s God) where Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Happiness almost certainly mean for Jefferson, Adams and Franklin to be the Aristotelian eudomonia (definition #2 at the link). Rights for our founders are emphatically not consumables that the government should provide for us.

There are two essential problems with Mr Obama’s (insane?) claim that health care is a “right”. The first is illustrated above, and that it is not a right as normally thought. The notion that health care is a fundamental right to which every person is entitled is radical policy of redistribution at best. The second problem with the idea of healthcare as thing which government can cure is that it’s wrong! Read the rest of this entry

In an article about how the current financial crisis would affect the two presidential candidates promises, the NY Times demonstrates the real problem without even noticing it.

While first commenting, as I did, that neither candidate could get specific on what promised programs they would not implement or delay as a result of circumstances, the paper immediately jumps in with the absolutely wrong emphasis.

The big issue for each candidate is not spending, per se, but how the crisis will affect their promises on taxes. Mr. Obama has said that he would raise taxes on the wealthy, starting next year, to help restore fairness to the tax code and to pay for his spending plans. With the economy tanking, however, it’s hard to imagine how he could prudently do that. He should acknowledge the likelihood of having to postpone a tax increase and explain how that change will affect his plans. Then, he can promise to raise those taxes as soon as the economy allows.

Mr. McCain has an even tougher job. To be straight with voters, he would have to acknowledge that the centerpiece of his economic plan — to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts beyond their expiration in 2011 and to add billions of dollars of new tax breaks — is impossible. If he went ahead with those plans, the national debt would explode, undermining the borrowing that the nation must undertake to finance the bailouts.

Sounding like some forlorn caller to the Dave Ramsey show, complaining that they could get out of debt if only they could make more money, the Times looks only to the income side of the ledger.  Not content to ignore spending, they specifically rule it out.  But as anyone who’s listened to Dave, or to advice from Crown Financial Ministries, or just about any other financial advisor, it is far, far easier to regulate your spending thanit is your income level.  Now, the federal government is in a different position than most of us, in that they can simply legislate the amount of money they want to come in, but as these advisors will tell you, if you don’t discipline your spending and set good habits in that regard, no amount of income will be enough.  Ever.

Not only does the Times come at this problem incorrectly, it’s ironic that it paints itself into a corner on its proposed solution.  Obama can’t raise taxes, but McCain can’t cut them.  Guess the Bush tax levels are, as Goldilocks might say, just right?

But seriously folks, let’s not forget who’s backward proposal this is; the New York Times.  No one would mistake them for a member of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  This is a liberal answer to the problem, and it is entirely the wrong approach.  The conservative answer to this are common sense financial principles.

Notice I’m not naming party names.  This is mostly because, while Democrats can spend like a drunken sailor, Republicans have show that they can get about as drunk themselves.  If the conservative, common sense solution is to have a ghost of a chance, Republican politicians have to get back to their conservative roots. 

And we, as their constituents, have to get out of our entitlement mentality, waiting to see which candidate for whatever office will give us the most stuff.  Otherwise, the road to the presidency will be won by the candidate promising to be the most pandering and the least responsible.  The best thing about our republic is that it is government "by the people", but sometimes it’s the worst thing about it, too.

Short impression of the 2nd Presidential Debate:  Just like the 1st Presidential Debate, but with more walking around.

Not much new ground covered in this debate, even though there was ample opportunity for it.  The questions just teed up the candidates for the same stump speech excerpts we heard last time.  As such, Obama comes out of the debate in the driver’s seat since the pressure for a game changer was on McCain. 

A few notes:

Obama continued to lie about what brought about this financial crisis.  The wheels did not magically start to come off the day George W. Bush sat down in the Oval Office chair, and the party-line votes regarding Fannie and Freddie put the Democrats on the side against regulation of those institutions.  Even Bill Clinton has debunked this line.  That John McCain didn’t even bother to set the record straight on this is a huge missed opportunity, moreso because it was a carbon copy of Obama’s line in the first debate.

If I hear the phrase "fundamental difference" one more time, I’ll scream.

One bit of new ground that was actually covered was McCain’s 300 billion dollar bailout of people who bought more home than they could afford.  I was extremely disappointed in this.  As I said recently, huge federal debt is not the way to fix a problem that is debt-related.  This is a further example of how our politicians have been conditioned to go after votes by offering giveaways because we respond to giveaways.  McCain’s obviously looking to curry favor with those who think the government should protect people from the consequences of their decisions.  This makes as much fiscal sense as allowing me to refinance my car every year at its new, lower value.  No, I incurred a debt that I am morally obligated to pay.  This is another example of the faux "fairness" and class warfare our country has come to accept to a large extent. 

What about illegal immigration?  What about abortion?  What about judicial appointments?  What about a host of other issues that haven’t been touched on in 2 debates?  Mr. Brokaw, you fell down on the job.

If health care is a "right", Mr. Obama, is food now a right as well?  Which is more important; food that you need every day or health care you need once in a while? 

John, John, John…don’t crack jokes.  They really didn’t work.

Obama is suddenly for nuclear power?  I’m sure there were some environmentalist supporters of his who spewed coffee out their noses at that.

Anyway, so much for another debate.  Not very notable, and mostly a rehash. 

In both debates so far, all 4 candidates were asked which promises and/or programs that they’d proposed would they not be implementing due to the current financial crisis.  I don’t think any of them gave a satisfactory answer to this question, with Obama’s “scaling back” response being the only thing close.

If anything, this credit crisis should be teaching us one lesson: severely curtail borrowing.  Huge debt is killing us.  In the mortgage-backed-securities field, things were compounded when Bank A would take an IOU from Bank B and use it as collateral to get a loan from Bank C.  Repeat this with Bank C and continue until you can hardly follow the trail.

The same goes for the federal government, who, in addition to the national debt already run up, plans to be the final resting place of this toxic debt.  So now all are eggs will be in one unimaginably huge basket.  If the bailout bill doesn’t do the trick and if foreign investors call in their chips, who bails out the feds?

Make no mistake; we are not out of the woods yet.  Sarah Palin mentioned in the VP debate the need for American’s to do their part by not taking on excessive debt.  (Personal responsibility; what a concept!)  This should ring throughout Washington, DC as well.  Spending needs to be cut, deeply and immediately.  A trillion dollars in new programs are not what this nation needs at this moment in time.  Soaking the rich to pay for more big government programs is just kicking the problem down the road.  Soaking businesses to pay for them affects employment and prices in a negative way, so we all get hit by it (promises of aiding the middle class to the contrary).

What I am afraid will happen, however, is that once the current crisis is no longer front page news — when it’s financial concepts that the public doesn’t have time for — the politicians will continue their MO like nothing’s happened.  I wish at least John McCain would get real with this issue, but he won’t any more than Barack Obama will.

And that’s largely our own fault.  Too many of us have the “Ask not what your country can do for your” mentality.  We’re buying the line that if only the rich would pay their “fair share” we’d be out of this mess, but we’ve bought into an incredibly selfish definition of the word “fair”.  We say we want our politicians to tell us the truth, but our vote too often goes to the one promising us more and more for less and less.

The bill has come due.  Let’s cut up the credit cards and stop spending what we don’t have.  This is the first step to freeing up our politicians to tell the truth.

No matter who you are, the current credit crunch does affect you, even if you don’t have a penny in the bank or a stock.  Never mind (for now) the domino effect of the credit market seizing up, if you vote, it should affect you.

Item 1:  Rep. Barney Frank has called this current crisis two things that are both flat-out lies; a failure of the free market and the result of Bush administration policies.  Frank should, and likely does, know better, since he’s the chair of the House Committee on Financial Services.  There has been video all over the blogosphere, and linked here as well, that show he and his fellow Democrats denying any problems at all with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and now he’s trying to solely blame Republicans.  There’s plenty of blame to go around in both parties, but he’s in a unique position, as committee chair, to pronounce the truth of the matter to us.  Instead, he’s politicizing this huge issue for partisan gain.  If you’re from Massachusetts and you vote, this should affect your vote.

Item 1a: Senator Joe Biden said the same thing about it being all about Bush administration policies.  This should affect your vote.

Item 2:  At the foundation of this crisis is an abandonment of free market principles, not the failure of them.  Republicans have (more often) been the keepers of the free market flame.  (That’s not been a constant by any means, but a good generality.)  The Community Reinvestment Act is a Carter-era program to basically force lenders to give home loans to those who would otherwise not qualify, and the default rate of these loans is higher than normal.  That, along with the Gramm-Leach-Billey act which allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to write or buy up these loans in a bigger way, released other banks from this higher-risk paper and continued us down the primrose path.  Again, videos highlighted here showed, one of Obama economic advisors Franklin Raines, who at the time of the video was CEO of Fannie Mae, insisted that home prices would always go up.  Now, there is no doubt in my mind that Wall St. greed fueled this as well, but with a government mandate to write high-risk loans, and a (for all intents and purposes) government agency ready and willing to buy them up, this was a recipe for disaster.

The point is, as honorable and as high-minded the intentions were to try to get more people into their own homes, it set more people up for failure.  You can say that the number of foreclosures wasn’t enough to be a problem, yet here we are, the engine of commerce about to seize up over securities backed by mortgages.  This started when Democrats decided that the free market wasn’t working and instituted policies to, in their eyes, fix things.  While it did get many into homes that might not have otherwise been able to, does it really help us in the long run when Congress has to eventually bail us out to try to avoid a recession or worse?  (And the jury’s still out on if the bailout will really do it, or if it’s just a short-term band-aid.) 

Those who think that the free market failed us then, and are now ironically blaming the free market again, are running for President in November.  This should affect your vote. 

It does affect you.  Or it should.

In the book (and eponymous essay) Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays Wendell Barry writes an final impassioned essay pushing the importance of community. Mr Barry notes the inability of public discourse to deal with sex and other issues is due to the failure of community. Writing:

Once it [a society or culture] has shrugged off the interests and claims of the community, the public language of sexuality comes directly under the influence of private lust, ambition, and greed and becomes inadequate to deal with the real issues and problems of sexuality. The public dialogue degenerates into a stupefying and useless contest between so-called liberation and so-called morality. The real issues and problems, as they are experienced and suffered in people’s lives, cannot be talked about. The public language can deal, however awkwardly and perhaps uselessly, with pornography, sexual harassment, rape, and so on. But it cannot talk about respect, responsibility, sexual discipline, fidelity, or the practice of love. “Sexual education” carried on in this public language, is and can only be, a dispirited description of the working of a sort of anatomical machinery — and this is a sexuality that is neither erotic nor social nor sacramental but rather a cold-blooded, abstract procedure which is finally not even imaginable.

[…]

The public discussion of sexual issues has thus degenerated into a poor attempt to equivocate between private lusts and public emergencies. Nowhere in public life (that is, in the public life that counts: the discussions of political and corporate leaders) is there an attempt to respond to community needs in the language of community interest.

Bertrand de Jouvenel as summarized in Mahoney’s little book Bertrand De Jouvenel: Conservative Liberal & Illusions Of Modernity (Library of Modern Thinkers) also notes that the discourse between liberal and conservative is an intramural struggle between two parties which share a largely common set of (erroneous) assumptions. Modern political discussion is straight-jacketed by the Hobbesian/Lockean assumptions which are largely fraught with error, yet remain dominant. For example, Locke proposes notions of natural rights to protect from the obvious dictatorship of Hobbes social contracts ability to subsume any and all parts of the private into the public realm. Rousseau, critiqued this by noting that the notion of rights does not in any way hinder the government from taking. Observe the last weeks dialogs on the banking crises. Nowhere in the discussions do we find asked if it is the “right” of government to decide whether the proposed takings (the $700 billion) was right. So often there is talk about the barriers between politics and religion. Barriers between the partisan political and the financial seem, if anything, more important. But no fundamentals needed discussion here. The assumption is, that whatever is needed, can be extracted by fiat by those in the beltway.

I have on a number of occasions argued for pushing our political members to assign powers and responsibilities to the local level. There are many good reasons for this. Above, Mr Berry notes eloquently yet another of them. Community in this country is dying. In part this is due to the very low price of energy in our petroleum driven economy. High mobility and ease of travel makes anonymity and disconnect from our neighbor easy and in part natural. This may be a temporary adjustment as it may be likely that in a half-century the petroleum engine driving the modern 20th and 21st century economy may in fact wind down. Mr Berry points as well to other structural elements in our society that keep our alienation from community intact. Mr Jouvenel also isolates and notes the peculiar yearnings that citizen of Babylon (as he terms our multifarious multicultural society) possess. For the citizen of Babylon is a repellent and attractive nature to the smaller more unified societies of old. The unity that a small society could have is at the same time exciting in that it is a thing one can strongly believe in, can join, and participate fully … but at the same time that giving up of self to one particular thing is repellent.

My suggestion to this is strengthening of the small community by giving it responsibility and authority. Babylon might perhaps co-exist with a multiplicity of small cohesive micro-societies joining together in a larger whole.

We have a new poll question today.  Do you approve of having some sort of bailout bill from Congress to deal with the subprime mortage crisis.  If so, what form would you like the bailout to take; buy the debt, insure the debt but don’t buy it, or some other option?  If you have a different idea, let us know in the comment section.  Or would you prefer to just let the chips fall where they may?

The proposed & amended bailout bill failed today, so the question is, what (if anything) now?  This is an open thread (aka “You Cry Out”) on what you think the next step should be.

Polls are opened until Friday night at midnight.