Speaker Boehner!

Do the Republicans have a pulse?

You never know.

First the GOP gained ground on the issue of domestic oil drilling, as four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline drove even hardcore environmentalists in Santa Barbara to declare, "It's just a duck."

Then last Thursday, after a day in the financial markets that one trader described as "five hundred trades from Armageddon," the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chairman went to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office and told key House and Senate leaders that the stock market was just hours or days away from crashing and launching economic hard times like the country hasn't seen since the Great Depression.

Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans and House Democrats worked with the Bush administration to throw together a rescue plan that would put taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion and give the Treasury Secretary unprecedented control over how the money was spent. Pale and panicked, the lawmakers scrambled to agree on legislation before there was a market crash, a run on the banks, a collapse of the U.S. financial system and five or six other really bad things that they were told might happen.

Every day they assured financial reporters that they knew they had to get this done to prevent a catastrophic market crash.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon.

As Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer proudly told reporters how they were working in a bipartisan fashion to do what was best for the country, the telephone lines at the Capitol were burning up with furious calls from constituents. Southern California Democrat Brad Sherman said calls to his office had run 300 to 2 against the plan. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski said the calls to his office were coming in fifty-fifty: half "no" and half "Hell, no."

One lawmaker said the public sentiment was ninety-nine percent against the bailout.

On Thursday, one week after the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chairman had given congressional leaders the scare of their political lives, President Bush invited all parties to the White House for a showcase meeting of bipartisan negotiations to save the economy from a credit crisis and a stock market crash.

And that's when it happened. The House Republicans refused to go along with the deal.

In a week when all the players--and they're all the best in the business--were positioning themselves to be near the credit and away from the blame, House Minority Leader John Boehner outmaneuvered everybody.

There were the Democrats, working all night to bail out Wall Street's lords of luxury with the hard-earned tax dollars of teachers and nurses. There was the president, a Republican, promoting a plan for unprecedented government intervention in private markets, unprecedented federal spending, unprecedented debt, and another huge expansion of federal government power.

And there was John Boehner, with the scraggly, battered remnants of the Republican party behind him, making a stand for fiscal responsibility, free markets, and a firm foot on the brakes to stop the slippery slide into socialism.

John Boehner, attacking Wall Street greed and corruption and vowing to protect the taxpayers.

John Boehner, standing squarely on the only spot of political real estate in Washington that wasn't under attack by ninety-nine percent of the voters.

And there was Nancy Pelosi, out on a limb, checking her watch yet again because Hank Paulson told her the stock market was going to crash by now, and she certainly wouldn't have put herself in a tree for any other reason.

We're not experts on the stock market here at America Wants To Know, but we're pretty sure that no stock market crash has ever been preceded by a week and a half of dire warnings that the stock market was just about to crash.

We're also pretty sure that being on the wrong side of ninety-nine percent of the voters six weeks before an election is a new experience for the Democratic majority. They must be too young to remember the 1992 House banking scandal, when voters were enraged--enraged--that House members were permitted to overdraw their checking accounts at the House bank, without penalty.

It seems so quaint now.

Certainly no one was overdrawn by $700 billion or anything close to it.

Still, the voters were furious and very quickly the Democrats were voted out of the majority after forty straight years with the gavels in their hands.

Maybe they're not too young to remember.

They do look pale.

America Wants To Know isn't going to wake up our team of psychics and fortune tellers to look into the future tonight, but we'll venture a guess without them.

The stock market will not crash.

The Republicans will defy all predictions and laws of physics and retake the majority in the House.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average will end the year at 14,000.

Nancy Pelosi will replace Whoopi Goldberg on The View.

Whoopi Goldberg will replace Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Keith Olbermann will replace Cindy Sheehan on the road outside the Crawford ranch.

Be sure to tune in next week, when we predict that Sarah Palin will leave her husband and run off with the president of Pakistan, just to get some much-needed experience handling nuclear weapons.


Copyright 2008

.