CraigL

Just to be clear, since the title of the post specifically referenced the presidential race, I selected "Not voting" to signify that I was abstaining from voting in the presidential race, but will still be casting votes in other races. I suspect many of the others who chose "Not voting" are doing likewise.

I feel so betrayed. Terrible.

I don't have a good feeling about all of this. The only thing keeping this bill from easily being rammed through is a constant flow of dissent from constituents. With businesses starting to feel the pinch of tightening credit to customers and suppliers and the slew of lobbyist favors tacked on to the Senate version of the bill, the community of business lobbyists are making an extremely hard push before the House vote (most likely tomorrow), actually focusing their efforts on 80 representatives they believe could agree to change their votes. See this Politico article for more details. The pro-bailout faction is collectively marshalling their efforts to cram this thing through. If you don't want to see the wholesale nationalization of the financial industry, then continue to contact your representatives and fight back. Edit: Fixed a typo.

This news made me immensely happy. I immediately called my family and made sure they sent e-mails to all of their Congressional representatives. We desperately need to keep this opposition front fortified long enough to change the terms of the debate.

The House Republicans just made public a brief correspondence to Nancy Pelosi detailing in broad terms the general principles behind their version of a "rescue plan." Given that we're realistically not going to escape from this situation without at least some form of a power grab by the government, I see this as potentially much more promising than the Paulson/Bush/Frank/Pelosi plan, especially the second general principle: Yes, it's stated in pragmatist-altruist terms ("temporary tax relief", worrying about creating jobs, etc.); however, even a small demonstration of the free market's ability to self-correct could be a good first step toward swaying today's almost unanimous cultural attitude that massive government intervention is the only way to respond.