Hayworth: What we really ought to be working for is non-partisanship.Not bipartisanship. But saying these are American priorities, we have some disagreements, let's take a couple from column R and a couple from Column D and we'll work it out.

Ford: But in fairness, JD, more than 30% of this bill was made up of tax cuts. There are many things that this president conceded. but for some reason many of my former Republican co0lleagues decided not to vote along with him. They had every right to do that. There's a philosophical gamble that's been made here. And all I ask is that if you're on the other side of that ledger, saying you are against this bill, don't don't root against the country. I'm not saying you are, but in a lot of ways you're rooting against the economy.

Hayworth: No, No. You're making a tragic mistake confusing the welfare of the president and the welfare of the country. And speaking of welfare, when you take out all the welfare reforms, again, a bipartisan triumph of the Clinton administration and the then Republican congress, when you take that out of the way and you redefine tax cuts as payments to people who don't pay taxes, I gotta tell ya -- it's a legitimate philosophical difference. That's not a tax cut, that's welfare.


Ford: People who go to work everyday deserve a tax cut. And again, that's a philosophical difference. I hope what President Obama pushed through the congress works. I know you do as well. If it doesn't work, I hope they all have the ability to come back to the table and work on a package that will work.... (blah, blah blah.)

Hayward: There are legitimate philosophical differences, but please lets not make the mistake right out of the gate of saying that because we disagree, one side is hoping the worst for America... [ha! -- ed]

Matthews: Would we be better of if we had eight more years like the eight we just had?

Hayward: I believe, although I've got my differences with John McCain, I believe he would have done a better job with some of these...

Matthews: No,no,no, eight more years of the policies we just had. Hayward: Eight more years of the same policies? well..

Matthews: The same policies that you guys had the last eight years.

Hayward: Tax cuts that promote jobs? sure.

Matthews: The economic policies that led us to where we are right now. We should have eight more years of that and we'd be better off.

Hayward: We should have had... Look the tax cuts I worked for, on the Ways and means Committee. ..

Matthews: No, no

Hayward: That's part of the eight years!

Matthews: You guys controlled the White House for eight years. Would we be better off if we had eight more years of that policy of the Republicans for eight more years. Would we be better off?

Hayward: Low taxes, a strong national defense and good economic growth. Yeah, I'll take that.

Matthews: But that's not what we've got! We have an economic catastrophe on our hands after the last eight years! We have nobody buying anything, nobody selling anything. Nobody buying houses, nobody buying cars, stock prices going through the floor. You think this is good?

Hayward: You want to get into the whereas's of this we can go back and take a look. No, I'll tell you what was bad. The sneak attack on our economy, the dress rehearsal that was the debacle of Indybank, that Chuck Shumer helped get that started and the guy in the backround, George Soros manipulating all the currency. You wanna keep that goin'?

Matthews: What?

Hayworth: That's what's goin' on here. The fact is that ...

Matthews: You mean the economic situation we face right now is not the results of the administration policy but ..

Hayworth: You want to get started on outlandish scenarios, go take a look at what Paul Kanjorski had to say...

Matthews: JD, you can talk fast, but I don't know what you're talking about.

Hayworth: You don't want to listen

Matthews: George Soros? What are you talking about?

Hayworth: Go take a look at what Paul Kanjorski said a couple of weeks ago on CSPAN about how the economy got in the mess it was in. I'll tell ya this. On balance, six of the eight years were strong years. Did we have a meltdown, you bet. Do I want to see the meltdown continue? No. No American wants to see that. But to have you set up a narrowly defined area where you can say "aha! I gotcha, and I really should be running for the senate against Arlen Specter" -- is a moot point, Chris. And maybe that's why Specter went for the package after all.

Matthews: (Looking confused) Let me go back to Harold Ford. I think it's a reasonable question. When someone criticizes the president's policies today, you ask them whether they would prefer the policies of the last eight years. I think that's a good question.

Ford: The country answered resoundingly, no...

This is un-frickin-believable. The financial crisis was deliberate, planned, staged. Who made the run? …

On Thursday Sept 15, 2008 at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two. Money was being removed electronically. …

More to think about. Somebody took a lot of money out of the banks. A lot. So where did it go? Who to? …

A run is a banker’s term of art [Pure. Comedy. Platinum. With Marshmallows. And Fudge Topping. -- ed.], and it is like a herd stampede, or panic, or a psychosis of a lot of people. …

So, the people who do such things, who monitor who and where the orders come from, and who keep track of whose accounts the money is taken from, have to have been able to figure that out, and who was responsible.

Yet, they do not tell us. …

And while I do not pretend to be on the inside of any of these nefarious machinations - it can’t help but raise a red [sic] that the US treasury department, one week after nationalizing the banks, is giving seminars in Islamic finance and George Soros is buying our assets from the FDIC.

Oh where, where, where to begin? Well, for starters, of course, with what actually happened. Given the time frame mentioned by Kanjorski, he’s referring to the following sequence of events. On September 15, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. A major money market fund — the Reserve Primary Fund — held almost $785 million in IOUs from Lehman Brothers, causing a number of investors, both institutional and individual, to withdraw funds from the fund. The large volume of withdrawals cause the Fund to “break the buck,” meaning that each share was worth a few cents less than a dollar. Money market funds aren’t supposed to do this, and that prompted large transfers of funds from other money market funds to other investments and accounts

Now, of course, among the points of hilarity in Pam’s financial sleuthing is the idea that this money was “disappearing” from the system, as if an acceptable destination of an electronic funds transfer was “under my mattress” or “behind the rock near the front of my cave in Pakistan.” Equally insane is her notion that a Treasury Department seminar on a Islamic banking is a harbinger of a takeover by Muslim terrorists and proof that the transfers were engineered by Islamo-terrorists. We probably shouldn’t tell her the Department of Agriculture provides classes teaching people how to speak Arabic.

There's more. Much more.

The Soros thing is even more obscure, but I think it also has something to do with this (and the fact that the name Soros has a totemic meaning to conservatives, that has something to do with jews and nazis and ruthless bankers --- 'cept he's in league with the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. And hippies.)

Still, Hayworth dissolving into angry, wingnut conspiracy gibberish shows that Matthews' question had him stumped. To be sure, he didn't give the standard wingnut response, which is that he fought Bush's spending too (even though he didn't) but that two wrongs don't make a right. But then he's not the sharpest tool, even in a shed full of very, very dull ones. Considering that we've got Huckleberry whining on television that "the country is screwed" and John Boehner stomping his little feet and throwing piles of paper on the House floor, I think it's obvious that they are having a very hard time keeping their heads from exploding.

Maybe it'll work for them, I don't know. But I suspect people are really wishing that their leaders won't go completely batshit insane right now. I could be wrong.

If what Kanjorski says is "fiction," Americans, particularly Americans in Kanjorski's 11th district of Pennsylvania, need to know. After all, this isn't a story that just goes away on its own, particularly not when Paul Kanjorski is chairman of the Capital Markets Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee. Of course, incredible as Kanjorski's revelations were, almost equally incredible was the interviewer's failure to ask the next obvious question of national interest: Who or what was responsible for that electronic run on the banks "to the tune of $550 billion"?

That's where Limbaugh went with the story. "Now, let's assume for a second here that elements of this are true," Limbaugh said of Kanjorski's statement. "Let's assume that there was a $550 billion ... electronic run on the banks and money market accounts in one to two hours. The question is who was doing this? Who was withdrawing all this money? And the next question is why? That's where my mind starts exploding, and this is dangerous to have these explosions going this way. Could it have been George Soros? Could it have been a consortium of countries -- Russia, China, Venezuela -- countries that are eager to have Barack Obama elected because they know that will make it easier for them to continue their own foreign policies in the world?"

I've heard serious people float similar theories regarding financial attacks on our economy emanating from the Middle East, but again, who knows?