Tim Fernholz

The bailout bill passes the House, 263-171. More analysis when we see the roll call, but the large margin suggests that not too many Blue Dogs defected. The Republicans turned out almost exactly the number of votes they promised last week: 91 for, 108 against. The Democrats supported the bill 172-73. Update, 1:49: Still no […]

In an otherwise straightforward depiction of the Blue Dog Democrats’ role in the House debate over the bailout bill, Time‘s Jay Newton Small offers this nugget: When [Blue Dog Chairman Rep. John] Tanner talks about financial crises, he means not just the credit crunch on Wall Street but the massive deficits breaking the back of […]

During the debate on the bailout bill currently proceeding in the House, Rep. Charlie Rangel is taking time outside of his allotted minutes to say goodbye to Rep. Jim McCrery, a retiring Republican congressman from Louisiana. I love bipartisanship as much as the next guy, but save it for cocktail hour — y’all got an […]

Waking up from our post-debate slumber today, we’re greeted with an unpleasant announcement: The government’s newly released jobs report shows a loss of 159,000 jobs, nearly twice the loss of August or July and the largest monthly decline in employment since 2003. David Leonhardt points out the bad news: The survey was conducted before the […]

A good indicator of which campaign isn’t winning, whether in polling or news cycles, is that they hold a conference call on “the state of the race” — Obama pulled this when he was the underdog a few weeks ago, and now it’s the McCain camp’s turn. Today the campaign reported that it is pulling […]

Much has been made about the McCain camp’s attacks on tonight’s debate moderator, Gwen Ifill. It’s surprising, then, that I haven’t seen anyone recall the last time that Ifill tangled with racial stereotypes. In the early nineties, when Ifill was the New York Times’ White House correspondent, shock jock Don Imus told his audience, ““Isn’t […]

Various outlets, from the Times to Yglesias, have referred to the rescue bill passing with “sweeteners” attached, but that’s not exactly right — in fact, it looks like the Times changed their headline and took the word out of their original article, you can see the original hed here. The only addition to the actual […]

Today’s McCain conference call had Rudy Giuliani saying all kinds of wild stuff. First, he took the spending freeze that McCain suddenly proposed during last week’s debate — which would be a terrible and destructive idea, especially for seniors — and made it into a spending cut: “John McCain recommended exactly this on Friday night […]

Time reports on the machinations behind tonight’s vote on the bailout bill, which has been shoehorned into a Senate tax vote in order to let the upper chamber go first, and provide some more incentive for the House GOP to sign on to the deal. But it looks like the move could cost some Democratic […]

This has been going around but I wanted to highlight it: herewith, the Main Street consequences of your financial crisis: The sudden loss of credit, one of the ripple effects of the current financial turmoil, is affecting local governments in all parts of the country, rich and poor alike. In New York, a real estate […]