Sarah Palin would have you believe that her position on abortion -- "I am pro-life. With the exception of a doctor's determination that the mother's life would end if the pregnancy continued," is the mainstream position on the topic, and Obama's position -- that he will "will make safeguarding women's rights under Roe v. Wade a priority" is just too radical for America.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin charged into the culture wars Saturday in Pennsylvania, painting Sen. Barack Obama as a radical on abortion rights.

The stop comes amid news that Palin violated Alaska ethics law by trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from the state police, a state investigator's report for the bipartisan Legislative Council concluded Friday.

Ethics woes aside, Palin focused her attention on abortion -- an issue that rallies the conservative base but some say alienates independent and women voters.

"In times like these with wars and financial crisis, I know that it may be easy to forget even as deep and abiding a concern as the right to life, and it seems that our opponent kind of hopes you will forget that," Palin told a crowd in Johnstown. "He hopes that you won't notice how radical, absolutely radical his idea is on this, and his record is, until it's too late."

On October 9, 2002, the Dow hit its lowest point so far during the President's two terms: 7,286.27.

On October 9, 2007, the Dow hit its highest point in the Bush Presidency: 14,164.53.

Stocks drifted higher through the morning, flattened out in the early afternoon and then began to rise as investors digested the minutes from the Sept. 18 Fed meeting, released at around 2:00 p.m. ET.

"The market had a desire to keep going up and there was nothing in the minutes to prevent it," said Paul Mendelsohn, president and chief investment officer at Windham Financial Services.

Mendelsohn said that investors were a little cautious leading into the minutes but once they saw that there was nothing particularly surprising in the minutes, they redoubled their efforts to move stocks higher.

The Dow and S&P 500 carving out fresh all-time highs will give the stock market more ammunition in the short term, he said, provided that the earnings don't derail the momentum.

Investors already know that third-quarter earnings growth will be at the slowest pace in more than five years. But outside of the financial and homebuilding sectors, there may be expectations for results to beat, particularly in the case of multi-national companies that should benefit from the weak dollar, Mendelsohn said.

The period is called the "Bush Boom", the greatest economic story ever told if you ask Sean Hannity or Larry Kudlow.  (You know, despite Bill Clinton taking the Dow from 3,500 to 10,500 during the course of his Presidency, tripling its value.)

Jefferson County, Alabama, won't make an $83.5 million payment on some of its $3.2 billion of sewer bonds, as it continues to seek more time to negotiate an end to the debt crisis that has pushed it close to bankruptcy.            

Jefferson County Commission President Bettye Fine Collins said yesterday that Wall Street creditors indicated they would be willing to extend a new agreement allowing the county to avoid paying all that it is required on its bonds. Meantime, the county will miss a payment on a portion of the debt, she said.

``We don't have the funds to cover these interest payments,'' Collins, a Republican, said in a telephone interview from Birmingham.  

Jefferson County, which includes Birmingham, has prepared to file for bankruptcy protection if it can't reach an agreement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other creditors to refinance bonds whose interest rates soared as high as 10 percent because of the U.S. financial crisis spawned by the subprime mortgage meltdown. The county is among U.S. states and cities in the $2.6 trillion municipal market whose finances have been pinched by debt costs that have risen more than fourfold in some cases.

Everything since then has been No Confidence.  Every time the US tries something else, the global markets aren't convinced they are going to work.  They've been right so far:  the economic stimulus package, Bear Stearns bailout, rate cuts over the summer, and now the last two weeks leading up to the bailout bill have all failed.

So what does Asia and Europe think about The Big Big Bailout?

Guess.

No Confidence.

Stocks tumbled in Europe and Asia and U.S. index futures retreated as bank bailouts accelerated and the $700 billion plan to rescue American financial institutions failed to unlock money markets.

Dexia SA sank 24 percent after the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were forced to rescue Fortis and the U.K. seized Bradford & Bingley Plc. Hypo Real Estate Holding AG slumped 62 percent as the German government and a group of private banks provided a 35 billion-euro ($50 billion) guarantee for the commercial-property lender. Westpac Banking Corp. of Australia slid 3.5 percent. Wachovia Corp. declined 21 percent in Germany on increasing speculation the sixth-largest U.S. bank by assets may be forced to seek a buyer or mortgage partner.

Europe's Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index lost 3.1 percent to 257.79 at 11:24 a.m. in London. Futures on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index dropped 1.7 percent following the measure's steepest weekly slump since May. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index slid 2.7 percent today.

``There's more pain to come,'' said Andy Lynch, who manages about $3 billion at Schroder Investment Management Ltd. in London. ``People knew the bailout was going to happen. Now it's back to the same-old, same-old of capital writedowns and weekend bailouts. Earnings estimates for next year still are too high.''

Credit losses at UBS AG, along with profit declines at technology companies such as Ericsson AB, helped send earnings lower at 153 of the 332 members of the Stoxx 600 tracked by Bloomberg that reported quarterly results since the beginning of July. More than 40 percent of the Stoxx 600's companies trailed Wall Street's estimates, Bloomberg data show.

Gas lines are back in America.  And the thing is, they may be here to stay for quite some time.

While Congress and Bush administration officials have been working to complete a bailout plan and stem the financial contagion on Wall Street, a different kind of economic crisis emerged across the South this week: A severe, hurricane-related gasoline shortage has curtailed trucking from Atlanta to Asheville, N.C., and created a wave of panic buying among motorists.

The return of gas lines has largely flown under the radar of politicians who are usually keenly attuned, because their constituents are, to what's going on at the pump. But more of the Capitol gang should be paying attention to this.

That's because nationwide our gasoline inventory is shockingly low. Liquidity must be restored soon to this market, or we could be facing a crippling run on the gasoline bank. And if you think Americans are outraged about Wall Street, wait until their Main Street grocery store doesn't get the bread and milk delivery for a week or two.

The chairman of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee said the $700 billion U.S. officials want for a financial services bailout would be doled out over time rather than granted all at once.

Rep. Barney Frank, interviewed on CNBC television, indicated a deal on legislation to authorize the fund was near. It would include curbs on compensation for executives whose companies are able to sell bad assets to the government.

"There will be some phasing in of the $700 billion, there will be some equity protection ... for the taxpayers, there will be restrictions on CEO compensation for those companies that participate, there will be very strong oversight, there will be strong efforts to reduce mortgage foreclosures," the Massachusetts Democrat said.

Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking committee, emerged from a closed-door meeting about the mortgage plan at the White House and said no deal had been reached yet. "I don't believe we have an agreement," Shelby said. Shelby has emerged as an opponent of the Paulson plan in recent days. Shelby talked to reporters briefly and then re-entered the meeting.

There are four very good reasons behind that.

1. The real problem is the housing depression.  This does nothing to solve the problem of housing prices that will fall another 10-25% nationally.  More homeowners will go underwater.  More banks will go insolvent as the good mortgage loans on their books go bad.  Most likely we're going to see a flood of Alt-A mortgages go bad -- the ones that are only a step up from subprime -- mostly issued in 2006 and 2007.  Many of those had 2 or 3 year "introductory rate" offers.  Those are going to reset big time in the next year.  And they will blow up just as badly or worse than subprimes did.

2. Banks are still leveraged way out of proportion.  They don't have the cash on hand to handle another wave of defaults.  And another wave of defaults is most certainly coming when Alt-A's detonate.  They are still leveraged to the hilt in huge amounts of funny paper...far, far more than $700 billion.

3. The problem is not liquidity then, it's insolvency.  These banks aren't going to survive.  This plan doesn't even begin to address how much bad derivative debt these banks are carrying...they are basically insolvent and have been for months.  All this plan will do is buy them enough time to dig a deeper hole for the next President to fill with our money.

4. This plan does nothing to stop moral hazard.  Banks now have every reason to take crazy risks because they believe even the lousiest derivative traps they have set for themselves will get wiped off the books.  We're socializing the debt of these bad investments and letting the banks keep the profits privately.  All this turn out to be is a delaying tactic.  No additional regulatory oversight, no punishment, no safeguards, just Bush demands $700 billion.  Why should we do that?

Sick and tired of making individual Deals with individual companies, Helicopter Ben, Hammerin' Hank, and the whole Deal or No Deal crew has decided to fundamentally change America's economy from capitalism to kleptocracy.

IT'S A DEAL FOR EVERYBODY ON WALL STREET!

Everybody on Main Street will pay for it.

The motherfugger of all bailouts is about to be upon us.  <b.It is nothing less than the nationalization of all the trillions of bad mortgage debt in the country</b>.

Not the PROFITS mind you...no, that's still privatized.  But all the junk mortgage debt...millions...BILLIONS...TRILLIONS...even reaching into the stratosphere of OVER A QUADRILLION DOLLARS of toxic, mutant derivative funny paper is about to be dumped on our backs.

We just became a socialist country.

The federal government, in what will be its most far-reaching attempt yet to contain the financial crisis, is poised to establish a program to let banks get rid of mortgage-related assets that have been hard to value and harder to trade.

Leaders from the House and the Senate were briefed on Thursday evening by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

"The root cause of distress in capital markets is the real estate correction and what's going on in terms of the price declines in real estate," Paulson said at a press briefing after the meeting. "So we're coming together to work for an expeditious solution aimed right at the heart of this problem, which is illiquid assets on financial institutions' balance sheets."

Many details of the plan remained unclear, but it is likely the government would take on tens of billions of dollars in mortgage assets - if not more.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said late Thursday night that lawmakers expected to get the proposal from Treasury in a matter of hours.

"We hope to move very quickly - time is of the essence," Pelosi said.

Paulson, Bernanke and other officials expect to work through the weekend with congressional leaders to finalize a plan, said Brookly McLaughlin, a Treasury spokeswoman.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he believes legislation could be acted on next week.

First, the overnight deal...and it's a massive one.  All the world's Bankers have combined forces for a massive "liquidity bomb" on the world markets.

The Fed, which is adding $50 billion into its own banking system today, will spray dollars around the world via swap lines with other central banks. They can then auction them in their own markets. The ECB, Bank of England and Swiss National Bank allotted a total of $64 billion for one day today.

``The timing, so early in the trading day, shows both the severity of the strains in the interbank market and as well the authorities' determination to resuscitate orderly functioning of the money markets,'' said Julian Callow, head of European economics at Barclays Capital in London.

Under the new arrangements, the ECB doubled the limit of dollars it can get from the Fed to $110 billion and Switzerland's central bank can offer $27 billion, an extra $15 billion. New swap facilities with the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada amount to $60 billion, $40 billion and $10 billion, respectively. The arrangements are authorized until Jan. 30.

Yesterday AIG got the mother of all deals, an $85 billion dollar loan to buy the company enough time to sell off assets.  The government now has an 79.9% stake in the world's largest insurance company, and it's going to be selling chunks of AIG to try to make that money back.

Fearing a financial crisis worldwide, the Federal Reserve reversed course on Tuesday and agreed to an $85 billion bailout that would give the government control of the troubled insurance giant American International Group.

The decision, only two weeks after the Treasury took over the federally chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank's history.

With time running out after A.I.G. failed to get a bank loan to avoid bankruptcy, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, convened a meeting with House and Senate leaders on Capitol Hill about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday to explain the rescue plan. They emerged just after 7:30 p.m. with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke looking grim, but with top lawmakers initially expressing support for the plan. But the bailout is likely to prove controversial, because it effectively puts taxpayer money at risk while protecting bad investments made by A.I.G. and other institutions it does business with.

What frightened Fed and Treasury officials was not simply the prospect of another giant corporate bankruptcy, but A.I.G.'s role as an enormous provider of esoteric financial insurance contracts to investors who bought complex debt securities. They effectively required A.I.G. to cover losses suffered by the buyers in the event the securities defaulted. It meant A.I.G. was potentially on the hook for billions of dollars' worth of risky securities that were once considered safe.

If A.I.G. had collapsed -- and been unable to pay all of its insurance claims -- institutional investors around the world would have been instantly forced to reappraise the value of those securities, and that in turn would have reduced their own capital and the value of their own debt. Small investors, including anyone who owned money market funds with A.I.G. securities, could have been hurt, too. And some insurance policy holders were worried, even though they have some protections.

"It would have been a chain reaction," said Uwe Reinhardt, a professor of economics at Princeton University. "The spillover effects could have been incredible."

It was just one more domino in the chain, one more player in the great game of Deal Or No Deal.  Lehman Bros. got No Deal...and the global markets are in freefall as a result.

But today could be worse.  Today's Deal or No Deal contestant is the largest insurance company in the world, American International Group or AIG.  It's time to play the game.

And AIG is in serious, serious trouble.

American International Group Inc. fell 38 percent in early New York trading after the insurer's credit ratings were cut, threatening efforts to raise funds to keep the company afloat and roiling global financial markets.

S&P lowered AIG's long-term counterparty rating three grades to A- because of ``reduced flexibility in meeting additional collateral needs and concerns over increasing residential mortgage-related losses,'' the rating company said yesterday. Moody's cut AIG's senior unsecured debt two grades to A2. Fitch Ratings lowered its assessment to A from AA-.

The downgrade of AIG is the latest tremor to shake the global financial industry, less than a day after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and Merrill Lynch & Co. sold itself to Bank of America Corp. for about $50 billion. Stock markets from Tokyo to London tumbled as investors weighed the impact of a potential collapse of the largest U.S. insurer by assets.

``There's a systemic risk if AIG isn't saved,'' Benoit de Broissia, an equity analyst at Richelieu Finance in Paris, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. Richelieu has about $6.2 billion under management.

Despite all protestations by Helicopter Ben and Hammerin' Hank, the Fed held an emergency Friday night meeting to discuss the future of Lehman Brothers.  Deal, or No Deal?

The game is on, but it's not like anything you've seen with Howie Mandel.  In this version, Hank and Ben are trying to pick a bank to buy Lehman Brothers, but the problem is this:  All of the suitcases are winners, and they are waiting to be filled by Treasury and The Fed!  The financials have called Treasury and The Fed's bluff.  No buyer has stepped up to the plate to save Lehman...not without a sweetheart deal like JP Morgan Chase got for Bear Stearns.

In other words, what if all the pretty girls on Deal of No Deal said "Hey Howie, one of us is a millionaire!  We'll stop the show unless you and The Banker make US an offer!"  It's a mutiny, and everything's topsy-turvy now.

So now, the clock is ticking.  If Hank and Ben don't pick a suitcase and fill it up with enough taxpayer money before Sunday night...it's No Deal.  And No Deal is the end of the game for America.

The Fed said "We won't give a sweetheart deal, we're still The Banker!"  The financials replied "You're full of shit.  You have until Sunday, and then Lehman goes under and takes the entire financial sector down with it...and that will lead to a complete loss of confidence in the markets.  Game over.  We're The Banker in this game now, and you've got to make a Deal.  You have no choice!"

The Street knows that Hank and Ben have no choice.  Failure to save Lehman Bros. will ruin WaMu, AIG, Wachovia, and trigger a sweeping collapse of the markets.  They will crash and take our economy with it.

We've entered Moral Hazard territory now.  The Banker is now the Player, and the Suitcase Suits are now calling the shots on the show.  After Bear Stearns and Fannie and Freddie,  dozens of banks and financials are now Too Big Too Fail.  The only thing keeping these banks afloat is the general consensus that the Fed will bail them out.

If Lehman goes under, people will be asking "Am I next?"  They will panic.  They will cause panic runs on the financials that are on the edge right now.  The companies that have lost half their value in the last 12 months will lose the other half in 12 hours.  It will be a massacre.

The game of Deal or No Deal is on.

Lehman Brothers may not make it through the weekend.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. entered into talks with potential buyers of the securities firm after Moody's Investors Service said the company must find a ``stronger financial partner'' and the shares plummeted.

Bankers from other firms are reviewing Lehman's books today, people with knowledge of the situation said, declining to identify the potential acquirers. Mark Lane, a spokesman for Lehman, declined to comment.

Without a ``strategic arrangement'' in the ``near term,'' Lehman's credit-ratings may be downgraded, Moody's said yesterday after the New York-based investment bank announced the biggest loss in its 158-year history. Lehman, led by Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, fell as much as 46 percent in New York trading today, ceding its spot as the fourth-biggest U.S. securities firm by market value to Raymond James Financial Inc. in St. Petersburg, Florida.

``While the number of potential acquirers at this point is very few, Moody's action certainly raises the specter of takeout, potentially at a very low price,'' said Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Guy Moszkowski in a report today. He lowered his recommendation on the stock to ``no opinion,'' saying a potential ``take-under'' makes it hard to gauge a price target.

The government has formulated a plan to put troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal control, dismiss their top executives and prop them up financially, federal officials told the two companies yesterday, according to three sources familiar with the conversations.

Under the plan, which could prompt one of the most sweeping government interventions in financial markets in U.S. history, federal officials would place the firms under a conservatorship, a legal status giving the government the option and time to restructure and revive the companies, the sources said. The value of the companies' common stock would be diluted but not wiped out, while the holdings of other securities, including company debt and preferred shares might be protected by the government.

Instead of giving each company a big capital infusion upfront, the government could make quarterly injections as the companies' losses warrant, the sources said. This would be an attempt to minimize the initial cost of the rescue.

The timing of government action remained unclear last night, and the final details were still under discussion. But as the pace of discussions accelerated, Treasury officials contacted senior congressional leaders yesterday, telling them they might be briefed on the plan this weekend and asking for telephone numbers where they could be reached.