The New-New Bank Bailout Plan, AKA "Thing Which Makes Me Contemplate Mob Hit On Self To Collect Life Insurance For My Family"

So I caught some of Obama's bailout road show in Elkhart, Indiana, in which he said we're in the run-up to something like another Great Depression, only probably worse. Something in that subject inspired a Washington Post reporter to ask what the President thought of Olympic swimming Wheaties-box superstar Michael Phelps going to a frat party and taking a bong hit before getting laid by a cadre of sorority girls. Or maybe he asked something about the pre-Madonna A-Rod taking steroids and how he won't ameliorate his contrition intravenously with the two hundred million dollars he's made as a baseball player. Either way, the Infinite Estate just reached a new journalistic high.

This caused me to look up the stimulus plan between panic attacks, and to actually listen to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's interview about his enhanced bank bailout plan today, or at least to some of it. About three minutes in, I hurriedly ran out along with the rest of Wall Street hitting the mute button on my conference calls to start frenziedly converting cash and redeemable assets into more gold bullion and stick it in hard-to-search places. (Did you know you could get gold femur replacements?) Liquidation is a vexing, complicated process, so we could only sell enough of the Dow to lower it by 4.8% in two hours.

Having known some bankers, I empathize. Geithner didn't name even one of them or confirm their home address so he could send them, their lovely wives, mistresses, call girls and children seven or eight figure magic checks. More palliatively for their panic, however, the "bad asset bank" you may have heard about was discussed in the form of a "Public Private Investment Fund.” Apart from language being officially dead after a life-long torture by Washington beaurocrats, Satan ruling with blood and power on this earth, and people getting tax cuts for buying crappy new cars, those words don't even form an acceptable acronym. Attempting to explain the PPIF makes even less sense, because it will be “jointly run by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, with financing from private investors, to buy up hard-to-sell assets that have bogged down banks and financial institutions for the past year.”

Bogged down? My plan for bipartisanship was to cram a stimulus bill down Republican throats, getting two votes short of cloture and then letting them make more fulsome assholes of themselves by filibustering for three months on the Senate floor reading autographed English and Arabic translations of Mein Kampf. But no. We got this. Maybe, as Lord Wife urged Team Obama, they can just take the bill back into committee and add stimulus in, with a provision for razing the vacant public school three blocks away from our house and turning it into an Indy-Car race track for hyper-competitive children. Also with some other stuff like job creation, public works, renewable energy projects which would never get built except by a government and will move us up into this century and keep giving back for 120 years.

I've just taken two deep lung-fulls of air and have started holding my hopeful breath. The political system could change from within, unlike the rioting by the without in Iceland, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Argentina, the demonstrations and strikes in France and England. And what would happen here? We shoot socialists, don't we?