President Barack Obama plans to reach out to Republicans and reassure — rather than confront — his liberal supporters when he addresses an extraordinary joint session of Congress at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday.

But he will warn lawmakers against seeking a perfect plan and then winding up doing nothing, as happened to the last Democratic president back in 1994- by Mike Allen & Carrie Budoff Brown

While the U.S. Senate predictably capitulated to the demands of Wall Street, for the first time in recent memory the House listened to the American people and blocked Paulson’s bailout of his rich buddies by U.S. taxpayers. The same House that refuses the public’s demand that the Bush regime be held accountable and its gratuitous wars halted refused to hand over $700 billion to the financial institutions whose irresponsibility has brought the U.S. to its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

We must be thankful for this sign that American democracy is not completely dead and supplanted by executive branch authority. However, whatever bailout package that emerges will fail unless it takes into account the following.

Any package that maintains the mark-to-market rule and permits the resumption of short-selling will undermine itself. In panic conditions without the existence of a market, the mark-to-market rule results in asset prices being driven below their values, thus eroding balance sheets and producing insolvencies. Short-selling permits short-sellers to profit by destroying the share prices of institutions suffering balance sheet problems, thus eliminating their ability to borrow and driving them into failure. A bailout, however large, that maintains the mark-to-market rule and permits short-selling will pour money into a black hole. [More]

What we are witnessing right now is the end of an era: the death of turbo capitalism, writes RENATE OGILVIE.

Time is short, but even at this late date, it would be a simple matter to impeach the president on some issues... President Bush has essentially dared Congress to act, admitting that he openly violated the FISA law - a felony, and openly admitting that he has refused to enact laws passed by the Congress, claiming a power - unitary executive authority - not even mentioned in the Constitution. He has openly admitted to having known about, and approved, “enhanced interrogation techniques” devised by his subordinates - techniques like waterboarding which clearly violate the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. No hearings would be required to establish these high crimes and misdemeanors. They could simply be voted on by an Impeachment Committee and sent to the full House for a vote.

Even if there were no time for a Senate trial, the simple act of impeaching the president for one or more abuses of power would serve notice on future presidents that future such abuses would not be tolerated. Failure to do so, and allowing this administration to leave office unimpeached, would send the opposite message: that Congress is no longer a co-equal branch of government, but is merely a consultative body, at best, and that a president is in effect a dictator.

That Pelosi buckled and permitted a hearing on impeachable crimes by the Bush/Cheney administration is a major victory for the impeachment movement, but it must not be the end of the line... As former Republican representative Bob Barr, now the Libertarian candidate for president, told Friday’s hearing, “We had a nuclear clock during the Cold War. In the ‘90s we had a debt clock. Now we have a Constitution Clock.” That clock is getting close to midnight, and it is ticking. [More]

U.S. Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of "high-value targets" in the President's war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under U.S. Federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees - the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

"The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change", a person familiar with its contents said, and involved "working with opposition groups and passing money"... Some members of the Democratic leadership - Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections - were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party's presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy. [More]