blizzard of lies

If you only read one thing today make it this. (It's too good to excerpt... hat tip to Molly)

And if you read two things make the other this (h/t Jeff)

Sunday chatter: financial meltdown edition

The WaPo wonders when Palin will start doing real interviews

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) polled a bunch of economists on the candidates

A concise summary of why we're in such a financial mess

Paulson's spam email

Five problems with the bail-out bill

Ed Kilgore notes that if Dems go along they will sorely regret it

Atrios offers a shorter version of the same thing:

If the Democrats pass this piece of shit, look for Republican challengers to run against them on it.

Chris Dodd has his own plan, which is getting better reviews

Waaaaaah:

Sen. John McCain's top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called "liars." They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama's record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt's charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama's embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter's over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin
when, in each case, the truth would have been damaging enough.

"Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars," Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

Asked about the series of errors, McCain aides could not provide evidence to back up Schmidt's assertions.

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was "quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right."

Another, Brian Rogers, responded more directly:

"You are in the tank," he e-mailed.

Jonathan Alter says McCain failed to learn the lessons of the Keating Five scandal (vid)

Cheney ordered not to destroy his records. We'll see how that goes...