Tim Fernholz

After yesterday’s events, the relevant political question is determining how some kind of financial-crisis bill comes out of Congress — specifically, out of the House, where Minority Leader John Boehner is holding up an otherwise straightforward compromise. While the House GOP’s free-market conservatives are refusing to commit, the reason negotiations collapsed is John McCain, whose […]

I’d rather lose the economy than lose an election. –Tim Fernholz

This New York Times story on the bailout breakdown is an absolute must-read. As a friend remarked to me, it’s like a movie — Paulson kneeling in front of Pelosi, begging for a bill, then conceding that the House GOP is holding up the bill? Jeez. But look at John McCain’s behavior — he swoops […]

The bailout, however it eventually ends up passing, will have repercussions for the next president’s agenda that each campaign and voter ought to consider. Time magazine’s David von Drehle does everyone an odd sort of service by writing an article that explains how not to go about this task. Drehle mocks the real concerns both […]

Here’s a video of McCain two days ago, saying he hadn’t read the Paulson plan yet. Paulson released his three-page long proposal Friday, five days before this interview. Perhaps if McCain had read the plan then, he would have had time to take some action without “suspending” his campaign. (Note: Despite his claims, McCain’s surrogates […]

Let me game this out for you. First of all, we know that the deal is already close to coming together — we knew that yesterday, and the AP says it today. But today John McCain says, ” It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal to meet the […]

…Republican Minority leaders Mitch McConnell in the Senate and John Boehner in the House. These guys are dealing with a party platform that explicitly opposes any kind of bailout, a lame-duck president whose administration is wildly unpopular, and a presidential nominee whose actions are completely unpredictable. They can’t please conservatives with any kind of bail […]

Obsession, a controversial movie about terrorism funded by a right-wing organization, is now being distributed in swing-states to perhaps millions of voters. Muslim groups are calling for an investigation to determine if this is being done to influence the election. Short answer: It probably is. I’ve only seen the first ten minutes of the movie […]

Breaking news! John McCain wants to postpone the debates to go back to Washington and work on the economic crisis. It’s an interesting gambit for McCain, especially after a rough forty-eight hours in which, as Ben Smith notes, nothing has changed except public polling numbers (down for McCain), Joe Biden’s blistering foreign policy speech this […]

Steven Pearlstein makes a good point: Why should we trust Paulson and Co. with an enormous amount of taxpayer money when they haven’t admitted that they made mistakes in the past, much less explained what they’ve learned from them? Keep in mind that Paulson soft-pedaled the potential crisis for months (see Matt’s handy graph here) […]