Damnit, I wish I could shake Marcy Kaptur’s hand – well done!

Republican Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky just asked paulson during the Senate Banking Committee meeting, “Why is the government bailout going to include student loan and credit card debt?  How does that fix the housing problem?”

Good question.  paulson danced around, stumbled about 300 times, and finally sort of admitted he didn’t have an answer.  No joke – it was REALLY embarrassing to watch.  He sounded no smarter than bush and that’s scary seeing that paulson is heading up this $700 billion bailout that seemingly hasn’t been well thought out.

I’m never tuning into CNBC via the Slingbox during my lunch hour again. I will try to find a video tomorrow on youtube so y’all can see how bad things have gotten.

Update: http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/09/23/congress-paulson-congress-biz-beltway-cx_jz_0923pinata.html

As seen in the above link, Senator Bunning went on to say…

“The Paulson plan will not fix [these] problems; the Paulson plan will not help struggling homeowners.” Bunning continued, saying the bailout out would do nothing but “prop up and clean up the balance sheets of Wall Street. It is a financial socialism and it’s un-American.”

It’s common knowledge that Microsoft Live Search blows/way underperforms.  As mentioned originally on BccList.com here, it will be interesting to see what happens to the world of online advertising if Microsoft ever delivers a somewhat decent search engine product.

In the interim, check out the differences between the mainpages (google.com/msn.com) of each search engine yesterday as they were collectively ringing in the fall season with a leaf.

Good Enough of a Leaf:

Embarrassing/Lame Attempt at a Leaf on MSN.com:

P.S.  Live.com is usually aesthetically pleasing but nobody goes there.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a42969f2-88e1-11dd-a179-0000779fd18c.html

The interest rate thankfully wasn’t slashed last week by the Fed. Demand of oil is down. Supply was only slightly cut the last time OPEC met. But, the price rose $25 a barrel yesterday. What the fck is going on? I’m not joking – there needs to be an investigation into market manipulation.

You’ve probably been forced out of your $95 (or so) short position by yesterday’s rise in price. If you weren’t, stay in the position – this price spike on 9/22 is unexplainable and should drop soon enough though I guess you can never tell.

The only thing I can imagine causing the recent oil price increase is the fact that nobody is trading in a stock market that can’t be shorted. Commodity and oil prices may be extra volatile for another 8-9 days – stock market trading will remain meaningless until the short ban on financial shares ends October 2nd. On that note, could October 3rd be known as Black Friday since traders are dying to get back into the market and short the bejesus out of worthless financial shares trading too high like Goldman Sachs?

Update: As of 9/23 at 12 pm CDT, the price slid back to a more realistic number of $105 a barrel during trading today.  Somebody start the above mentioned investigation IMMEDIATELY.