The clown Congress strikes again.

This government bailout plan would have been passed days ago if the Democrats hadn't been playing class warfare games. Here's the latest joke:

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing for a new Wall Street tax that would cover the potential costs of a $700 billion bailout being negotiated by Congress and the Bush administration.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking to reporters after a meeting with fellow Democrats, said the fee could be assessed after five years if the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined taxpayers had lost money in the bailout.

The current crisis was caused by financial institutions running out of money and going bankrupt, and for some reason Nancy Pelosi wants to raise taxes on financial institutions? That's totally insane.

The economy is on the brink and Democrats are playing games again.

What else do you expect from Nancy Pelosi's Clown Congress? From Fox News:

Scrambling for a swift deal on the $700 billion bailout for failing financial firms, key Democrats and Bush administration officials agreed Monday to include mortgage help for beleaguered homeowners but wrangled over other issues, including "golden parachutes" for executives who benefit from the unprecedented rescue.

Democrats demanded that the measure limit pay packages for executives of companies helped by the biggest financial rescue since the Great Depression. The administration was balking at that, and also at a proposal by Democrats to let judges rewrite mortgages to lower bankrupt homeowners' monthly payments.

Highly neurotic blogging

• It's always depressing when a blogger that I normally highly respect decides to go off the deep end during the election. The latest victim is an Evolutionblog that is highly offended that John McCain would dare to say that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" (embedded hyperlinks removed):

  “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” is a standard cliche politicians use when faced with a shock to the economy. It is one of those useful, empty statements that sounds intelligent and can be used to deflect political blame in the face of bad economic news.
  
  Sometimes it's even true. There are times when a shock to the economy causes short-term hardship, but the only real solution is to just ride it out.
  
  That's not this time. Even Alan Greenspan has described the recent meltdown of the nation's largest financial institutions as a once ina century event. Tim Fernholz of Tapped provides some details. Spiking unemployment. Decreased median income. Low consumer confidence. Increasing inflation. Falling markets. Exploding defiicits. Tepid growth.

  Leading economic indicators have declined to levels not seen since 2003 or so, so obviously we must be in the worst depression since the great depression.
  
  Evolutionblog concludes the post with a stunning non-sequitor:

  If McCain manages to win this election it will be the ultimate proof that the mindless segment of the population has grown so bloated that democracy is dead as a workable governing philosophy.



• Journalist Fatimah Ali predicted open race and class war if McCain wins the election:

  If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness - and hopelessness!

  She has now refined her remarks:

  I know that putting the words "race" and "war" together is like hurling an incendiary device. But I wasn't issuing a call to arms, it was a metaphorical prediction.

  Apparently the phrase "race war" was used to indicate that individual Americans might become so enraged by a McCain electoral victory that they will find themselves writing angry letters to newspaper editors. What a relief!



• No list of highly neurotic blog posts could be complete without the latest from Andrew Sullivan (embedded hyperlink removed):

  An interesting debate has been going on out of the media limelight. Sarah Palin's decision earlier this year to have an amniocentesis to determine if her unborn child had Down Syndrome is not uncontroversial among pro-lifers. I'd be curious to find out from women readers, especially pro-life women readers, what their views of amniocentesis are, and how common it is for totally principled pro-life pregnant women to consent to having them.

Sullivan gets it wrong (again).

Andrew Sullivan points out an exchange that occured in Sarah Palin's interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory defense. We have the right to preemptively strike any other country that we believe is going to attack us.

Palin: I agree that a president's job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

For some reason, Sullivan ridicules Palin for giving a correct answer:

Actually, the first priority is to defend the constitution of the United States. Palin doesn't even know the oath she is supposed to swear.

Palin is entirely correct here. The top priorities of any president must be, first, to defend the lives of the people of the United States of America; second, to secure and to defend the rights of the people of the United States of America; and third, to defend the constitution of the United States of America.

Under normal circumstances of peace and war, we as Americans believe that the best was to accomplish the first two of these priorities is by accomplishing the third. This belief is justified: the United States under its constitution has historically been supremely able to wage war and to defend itself from attack.

A thought about "Bablyon A.D."

This is probably going to be known to history as one of the most stupid Hollywood films of 2008. The basic premise is that a Russian mafia boss hires a mercenary (played by Vin Diesel) to smuggle a young girl from a monastery in Mongolia into the United States. Along the way, we eventually learn that the girl has a virgin pregnancy with twins who are thus enormously powerful and potentially messiahs. Vin Diesel's character must therefore make every possible sacrifice to keep this girl from falling into the clutches of the New Age church that is trying to take over the world.

Let's think logically about this for a minute. The whole point of a virgin birth in Christianity is the fact that it is miraculous in nature. Ergo, it follows that producing a pregnant virgin by any type of rational, scientific means is, by definition, not a miraculous birth at all. That any Christian (or for that matter, anyone who isn't an idiot) would ascribe any religious implications at all to a technically virgin woman who had been inseminated by a supercomputer or a robot is utterly inexplicable. The characters in this film even live in a future where you can find cloned Siberian tigers in cages in the middle of Kazakhstan, but supposedly a virgin birth is still mysterious and profoundly theological to them.

This takes us to the fundamental premise of the film, which is the sloppy Hollywood assumption that whatever the Hollywood filmmaking class thinks about American culture circa 2008 will be the commonplace, unremarkable way of life circa 2017 and beyond. It therefore makes perfect sense for a religious establishment of the future to make a bid for global domination by attempting to fake a virgin birth. Surely the Hollywood consensus is that American Christians are more than stupid enough to fall for it.

Palin Derangement Syndrome is spreading.

The internet can be a real pain sometimes. Yesterday, Jim Emerson's scanners::blog was by far the most awesome film blog on the internet. Today, it turns out that the author has a full-blown case of Palin Derangement Syndrome. He wrote:

I had just begun working on a piece about how comedy is the the only adequate response to the modern world, and the most profound approach to exploring and understanding the modern human psyche... when this [the Palin Vice-Presidential annoucement] happened. The folly and tragedy of human existence, and the indifferent and inhospitable relationship of the universe to human needs and desires, can be plumbed only by the sharpest and most penetrating comedy, without which tragedy loses its meaning and its deepest pain. And sometimes it just happens without comedy writers needing to make anything up. Or is it the other way around? Miss Congeniality. Elle Woods. Tracy Flick. Could this be an example of life imitating comedy?

The opinion here is apparently that McCain is so stupid that he thinks he can put a woman in charge of the country and not screw it up.

Look, everyone knows that liberals believe that any women who gets between a prominent Democratic Party man and power is a slut, trailer trash, or an airhead (or, in the case of Hillary Clinton, a ball-busting harpy). We get it. It's not funny.