best quote of the day

The nation’s credit crisis exposed Monday a much deeper and more fundamental problem — a political credibility crisis that now threatens to harm our nation further, should the markets freeze up and more companies begin to fail, as many experts predict. – Michael Scherer, Time.

One of my initial thoughts after the failed bailout proposal was that someone must have seriously mismanaged their political capital in trying to get this bill through.  But after some more thought, I believe one of our problems is that our policymakers have very little political capital left to leverage. When reputations have sunk so miserably and when trust in Congress is so dismally low, much of the standard political capital that Congressional leaders or cabinet members draw upon to get a bill passed is as worthless as the equity in these mortgage backed securities.