Robert Kuttner breaks it down:
With the Senate's passage of the bailout bill, 72 to 25, Democrats in Congress need to begin preparing right now for a second package to do the job properly. They also need to begin the tightest possible monitoring of Secretary Paulson’s actions and their effects on financial markets. Here is what is likely to unfold over the next few weeks:
The House will pass the bill after at least twenty more Republicans agree to support it. A few more Blue Dog Democrats may switch their votes to no, in protest against the trillion dollars of tax breaks added by the Senate as sweeteners for Republicans.
And Matt Yglesias argues that, in the midst of the current crisis, we shouldn't forget how much the cost of the war has effected our economy:
Since September 11, the American imagination has been captured by the terrifying image of an American city struck by a terrorist WMD attack. It's a gripping scenario, but though the risk of such an event is certainly a reason to do our best to halt and reverse nuclear proliferation, it's always been a pretty outlandish concern. Nuclear weapons, it turns out, are really hard to build, even for states and for all the understandable anxiety nobody's ever created an effective biological weapon. A smallish band of terrorists operating on a shoestring budget doesn't have any plausible means of creating a mass casualty device. And though stolen Russian missiles became something of a 1990s movie cliché, in the real world, the Russians guard this stuff pretty carefully.
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