Robert Scheer

This week, Matt, Bob, and Arianna discuss what the bail out plan includes and what it's missing (homeowner bail outs, according to Bob), while Tony isn't so sure a bail out is a productive solution.

Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising "tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings, no special interest giveaways"? How dumb do they think we are?

Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation's mortgage market. But what is McCain's excuse?

Looking to Palin for advice on helping the rest of us during the oil crunch is a bit like asking Putin to provide a model for our nation's economic woes. They hardly feel our pain at the pump.

A lesson McCain should have learned is that the world is a complex place, that today's enemies may be tomorrow's negotiating partners -- as Obama has at times dared to suggest.

Our "reason" for developing an arsenal of biological weapons is that the US needs to learn how to prevent attacks from deranged outsiders. Now we have another reminder that the enemy may be us.

Both candidates are embracing, rather than challenging, the fundamental irrationality of Bush's "war on terror," which substitutes hysteria for rational analysis in appraising the dangers the country faces.

Indifference to economics does not explain the prominence of Phil Gramm in the McCain campaign during the U.S. financial crisis. Indifference to the folks losing their homes is a more plausible explanation.

To the Chinese, irrespective of past allegiances, the prospect of war has come to be viewed as counterproductive, and they now have the confidence to show it.

It was always about the oil -- that's why "we" invaded Iraq -- only "we" aren't getting any, at least not at a reasonable price. The oil companies are.

The DNC's attack on McCain speaks volumes to the bipartisan gut-checking in favor of military waste that has led us to squander trillions of taxpayer dollars since 9/11.

Will the real John McCain stand up? Actually, I don't expect him to, now that he is the Republican presidential candidate, he is pandering to the irrationalities that drive his party.

Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality?

There is no better measure of the failure of Bush's foreign policy than that the American taxpayers who paid for the invasion of Iraq are now being rewarded with skyrocketing prices at the pump.

Shouldn't the potential leader of a nation that used nuclear bombs to obliterate hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese employ extreme caution before making such a threat?