What’s it take to make this guy, our moronic tool of a president, seem like an ever-so-slightly sympathetic figure? Well, there’s the hilarious global dancing he likes to do, and then there’s John McCain. McCain parachuted into town yesterday and RUINED THE COMPROMISE that was at least going to maybe try to save the economy before it completely collapsed. Let’s see what George Junior has to say, as the stock market opens and plunges. MORE »

OUR BANKRUPT COMMUNIST NATION: “The best news for people afraid of ‘change’ is that the new president will have about twenty bucks to run the federal government for the next four or eight or hundred years.” [AOL Political Machine]

Oh hey Hank Paulson is talking to some lawmaker types, and a reader wrote in and was like, “Could you liveblog this?” and we thought, aw hell, we have already ripped all the hairs out of our ears and marinated in salt this morning, so why not engage in the last unpleasant activity available to us. How many drawers are being soiled in the Senate Banking Committee right now? Let’s check it out! MORE »

The Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury just launched this great new website where you can force the government to buy your worthless old garbage, too! Somebody wants Paulson to buy this “used douche bag,” which is so gross. Wonkette has submitted a request for $1.4 billion dollars to cover an old HP notebook (no hard drive), some restaurant receipts we forgot to write off last year, a scratched-to-hell copy of “Wowee Zowee” that we already replaced with the box-set version, and five old copies of The Economist we found in the side pocket of an old laptop bag. America is BACK. [Buy My Shitpile, Henry!]

Yikes! The markets are closed and so are you. The Dow ended down 373 — more than 3% — and the S&P 500 dropped nearly 4%. But there’s good news if you are, say, a Saudi Prince: Oil shot the hell up by $16 a barrel, the biggest single-day climb since the Van Halen album 1984. Why do investors hate Hank Paulson’s plan to nationalize the collapsing U.S. economy while destroying capitalism and providing crucial help to the nation’s starving hedge-fund managers? [Marketwatch/Bloomberg]

Congressional Democrats will save the economy this Friday by letting Henry Paulson, the new president, do whatever he wants about anything, policy-wise. Mostly this will involve giving a trillion dollars to his friends on Wall Street in exchange for some junk mortgages which Paulson will re-sell, to no one, because they’re junk mortgages. On the bright side, the dollar will plummet under the weight of all this new debt, meaning inflation will soar, meaning one trillion dollars will be the new 27 cents. Cheap! So who should pay for this, the worst proposal of the Bush Administration since the Iraq war? Let’s see if we can tabulate a trillion dollars worth of sucky people’s money to take for the big Money Bonfire of 2008. MORE »

Well, that was a fun week in finance news. So what did the markets get, after the U.S. government decided to end market capitalism and become the Soviet Bank of Soviet America? Stocks ended the week flat, that’s what. Monday morning, the Dow opened at 11,421. Today, after this unprecedented nationalization of AIG and promises of some “We Buy Your Crap” market run by the Fed, the DJIA closed at 11,388. (The S&P 500 was about the same, starting the week at 1,252 and ending at 1,256.) A half-trillion in new U.S. debt just doesn’t buy what it used to! [Schaeffers Research]

Turns out we didn’t need “stealth socialist” Barack Obama to pervert capitalist America into a crumbling nationalized economy run in private by a dome-skulled kleptocracy as our nation’s battered military wastes away in the forgotten bummer of a civil war in Afghanistan. WAIT A MINUTE that is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union! And the so-called Republicans did it, because they are Fiscal Socialists! MORE »

Oh hey look it’s our president, Henry Paulson, finally telling America what he’s going to do to make sure everyone isn’t so poor anymore. We are a little late to the game here since he started talking a few minutes ago but meh, what the hell, let’s give this a look. MORE »

Today the Bush administration offered its brave response to the current financial crisis, as delivered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The administration has faced overwhelming pressure to give the government more oversight and regulation within the financial markets, since every major player (investment banks, hedge funds) keeps dying and then asks the government for money. And who better to ramp up regulation on investment banks than Henry Paulson, the former C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs! So what’s in his funny new oversight package, and how will it not do anything save the economy again? MORE »

Hank Paulson was brought in as Treasury Secretary to signal Bush’s willingness, in the tail end of his second term, to work with leaders from both sides of the aisle, and also because Bush does not actually give a shit about the Trearusry Department. Paulson, a shining star in the private sector, has received positive reviews from Washington pols, though he’s also accomplished jack shit. MORE »