Transfusion

World Bank chief economist/Nobel Laureate/Smart Guy Joseph Stiglitz comments on the bailout bill at Democracy Now. His basic take: it's like giving someone suffering from internal bleeding a blood transfusion. It has to be done, but if the bleeding (the foreclosures on the property market, from what I gather in a rush reading) isn't stopped, the patient will die.

Amidst the awfulness there are a lot of lessons to be learned from what the activists who are demonstrating in St. Paul, Minneapolis are doing: they are bringing video cameras, journalists and citizen journalist/activists to every single demonstration. They leave the cameras rolling and document everything. That's how, for instance, we get this awful video of police firing tear gas and concussion grenades into an obviously peaceful crowd, or this video of the widely celebrated and RNC-accredited journalist Amy Goodman (of Democracy Now) being arrested. (Did the police know she was an accredited journalist? Well, the cop in the background who is helpfully saying "arrest the accredited journalist" probably did.) Btw, note the immediate response of the crowd when they cuff her.