Some strange things are going on with this bailout plan:

1) Paulson lied overtly and obviously to congress when giving testimony today. He said that the reason the Bush proposal didn't have any oversight built in was because he didn't want to be "presumptuous" and tell Congress how to conduct oversight on him. But in fact the proposal specifically ruled out oversight:

Sec. 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

2) Changes to the proposal to make bailouts more punative, or that give taxpayers more equity in these companies, are being rejected based on the fact that it might discourage some banks from not participating. Specifically, banks that are not in danger of collapsing might therefore decide not to participate. Ummm, why would we want banks that aren't in danger of collapsing to participate? This isn't just a free hand-out that we're doing for fun.

3) Shades of the Patriot act, it turns out that his proposal was written months ago and they were just waiting for the appropriate crisis to pull it out. This leads to the observation that either the crisis isn't so bad that we need to rush into it and/or the Bush administration (including Paulson) was lying when saying that the economy was strong up until last week.

My opinion right now is that Congress ought to just hold steady for now. Frankly, neither presidential candidate has been a leader on this issue*, but i believe there is time to wait for facts to emerge and consider other proposals.

*John McCain's bizarre proposal to fire the head of the SEC notwithstanding (and yes, god help me, i'm linking to George Will).