Yuval Levin at NRO writes:

Everyone should read the actual text of the proposed bailout plan the administration is sending to Congress. It’s clearly not a final version (the part about only purchasing from financial institutions headquartered in the US has already been changed, as Kathryn notes below), but it’s the essential shape of the proposal. See if you can read through the whole of it without concluding that everyone in Washington has lost their minds.

Not everyone’s lost their minds. Unfortunately, the people who matter seem to have.

John McCain owns thirteen cars. Slideshow here.

Bush and Paulson say congress needs to rush and give them a blank check — no time to think about it, change anything, or scrutinize anything.

It seems strange to me that they didn’t bolster their rhetoric by providing congressional leaders with a list of all the times congress and the American people decided to swallow their skepticism and give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, and then everything worked out fine. It’s a really long list, so spelling it out in detail would surely convince a lot of people. Like remember when some folks said Bush’s math was wrong and his tax cuts would lead to large deficits? Idiots! Or those who warned that occupying Iraq might be kind of hard? Morons! If you can’t trust George W. Bush with an unlimited grant of authority then who can you trust?

Via Ross Douthat, it seems that secular people are more likely to hold non-religious paranormal beliefs than are traditional Christians. This is presented as a counterintuitive finding through the technique of demonstrating that it runs to something Bill Maher said, but to me it’s pretty commonsensical.

It’d be interesting to get a richer sociological perspective and compare secular people who were raised in religious families (seculars by choice) to secular people raised in secular families (default secularists) and see if the choosers are less superstitious than the defaulters.

Ali Frick rounds up the record of Bush administration financial mismanagement in the inimitable Think Progress style. Remember when $5.1 billion in expenses for Iraq reconstruction were charged with no documentation? Or the “widespread” waste and mismanagement on the millions of dollars spent on Katrina recovery? And this is to say nothing of the recent blockbuster scandal at the Interior Department.

For the sake of argument, it does seem to be the case that Hank Paulson and the Treasury Team aren’t as inept as the worst of the worst of the Bush administration. But at the same time, they’re asking for much more money. Figure only half as much theft and squandering as you get from a typical Bush initiative, but then inflate the total amount of money under discussion to $700 million and, well, there’s a problem. The FT‘s “Lex” column has observed “Nor is the package necessarily a disaster for the taxpayer or the U.S. dollar. If the Treasury buys assets well, and confidence is restored, there is [a] chance that Mr. Paulson could win fund manager of the year.” Perhaps true, but “if the Treausury buys assets well” is a huge “if” and Paulson is asking for the authority to disburse the money with no oversight.

What’s more, though I suppose it’s indelicate to raise this point, Paulson’s going to be out of a job in a few months and presumably looking for employment in the very same financial industry he’s now in charge of bailing out. The potential conflict of interest is mind-boggling.

In my estimation, this is one hundred percent correct. The only way to avert disaster is for a substantial block of progressive lawmakers to say — as soon as possible — that they will note vote for any bailout that does not:

• Preserve substantial financial upside for taxpayers in the event that the bailout works (I think in practice this requires an equity stake in the bailed out firms, but I’m not sure).
• Meaningful steps to restructure mortgages and keep most people in their houses.
• A real second stimulus package.
• Controls on executive pay for bailed out firms.

If such a block of legislators emerges, it’s conceivable that a bad bailout plan will nonetheless pass with the votes of conservative lawmakers and on the insistence of the Bush administration. And if that’s what happens, that’s what happens. But at all costs the scenario to avoid is a situation in which the lame duck administration, with the assent of progressive lawmakers, passes a bad bailout with only fig leaf protections that conservatives are then able to disavow. Progressives need to make clear that our top priorities are (a) relief for middle class families, and (b) protecting the interests of the taxpayers. If the finance class needs progressive votes for a bailout, they should only be able to get them by agreeing to (a) and (b). To concede in advance that “something” must be done, and then start dickering with the lobbyists over how many scraps ordinary people get tossed would be crazy.