Happy Halloween all! Last week, I threw out a bunch of questions I had been asking myself lately, and people seemed to enjoy the post, responding with some incredibly wise and insightful, or at least terribly smartass, answers. So, I figured I'd do it again, maybe even make it a weekly thing. Without further ado ...

1) Will there be more Jokers or Joe the Plumbers out there tonight? (If you're answering this and Halloween is already over, reply with the actual answer)

Take a step back from the day-to-day machinations and minutiae of the campaign for a moment. Put aside thoughts about the final stretch of polls and stump speeches and negative advertising and robo-calls and ground games and electoral map strategizing, and consider the enormity of what this country appears to be on the brink of doing one week from now: Electing an African-American to the highest office in the land.

Given the history of this nation, it is a remarkable prospect. It is exhilarating. It is almost unbelievable.

And that is why it is also very frightening.

Do conservatives read liberal blogs (I suppose this one qualifies) with as much disdain and condescension as I feel when I read right-wing blogs (hotair.com makes me wanna throw things every time I read it). For some reason, I feel like even the most liberal of blogs at least acknowledge the other side may have something of value to offer.

What is Genghis (not to mention SarahPalinGrrrrl) going to talk about after Nov. 4 (OK, I'll give them a week of post-game analysis posts, but what then)??

I've had it.

This country has been on engorging on a cheap credit binge for the last decade, stuffing itself on the sugar highs and empty calories provided by ultra-low interest rates and fancy derivatives and zero-down mortgages. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and everyone is looking for a way to get their butt saved.

You hear a lot of conservatives nowadays wanting to place blame for the country's current economic crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which encouraged commercial banks to lend money to borrowers in low-income areas.

The implication is that the CRA, enacted and significantly expanded under two different Democratic administrations, led to the creation and proliferation of the risky subprime mortgages that have brought the U.S. banking system to the brink of collapse.

OK, so I was a day or two early with my short-term bottom and violent rally call, but it's party time on Wall Street today with the markets almost up double digit percentages. (Uh, now more than double digits ...)

Damn, I thought I was going out on a limb when I called for a violent (though short-lived) rally to the upside. But if the press and the pundits who speak their mind in the press are any indication, that's a very crowded limb.

I've been watching CNBC A LOT for the past few days, and it seems like nearly everyone is looking at this crash as a great buying opportunity, telling people not to panic, saying a bottom is at hand and a violent rally is on its way.

I think we're about to get a much-needed reminder that stock markets don't always go down.

Could happen today, could happen tomorrow, and it may or may not happen after one last big selloff, but we're going to get a relief rally very soon. I don't expect it to last long, but I do expect it to be rather violent and dramatic. Maybe we get back close to 11,000 on the Dow.

So, the market is down 555 points, almost 5 percent. Yet so far this is no October Black Monday, like when the market dropped 13 percent on October 28th, 1929 or when it dropped 22% on October 19, 1987. (Note: Things are moving fast, market down another 100 points since I started writing).

This is, in many ways, even worse - just another Gray Monday, where we get the continued, orderly drip-drip-drip of a market with no confidence, and no idea of where we are headed.

So yesterday I wrote about how the Senate was making the bailout plan bigger but not better in order to get reluctant legislators aboard.

Oh man, you have no idea. It makes me want to cry.

According to the WSJ, A bill that was originally 3 pages is now more than 400 pages. Among the useless 'sweeteners' tacked onto the plan:

So now the Senate is going to try its hand at passing a bailout plan.

OK, I was wrong. Really wrong. I was sure politicians would approve this bailout bill, no matter how publicly unpopular it was. The short-term risks of not doing something seemed too enormous - a complete freeze of the credit markets and the subsequent collapse of the economic system that relies so heavily on that free flow of credit.

OK, the market's up big. The bailout plan is about to be unveiled. What does it all mean? Here are my thoughts.

We've been told for so long that everything is OK with the economy. Nothing to see here, they've said. McCain calls the economy fundamentally strong; his economic adviser calls the American people a bunch of whiners; Greenspan says we are nearing the bottom of the housing meltdown; Barney Frank dismisses the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as overstated.

So McCain wants to put politics aside in order to solve the economic crisis ...

Bah! Man, maybe I'm too cynical, but I can't even imagine a more political tactic.

McCain just gave a speech saying he wants to suspend his political campaign and postpone Friday's presidential debate until Congress agrees on legislation to solve this crisis.

That's just silly.

It astounds me, but my 'Please Fire Linehan' post from two weeks ago is still getting the most traffic on my blog. It seems people care a lot more about a crappy football coach on a crappy football team than the potential collapse of the stock market and U.S. economy ... Seems about right to me!

Ok, so I've admitted that the government probably had to do something to stem the financial crisis.

Now I'm going to talk about all the ways this bailout could - and probably will - go wrong (with the caveat that all the details still haven't been worked out).

The SEC has banned short-selling on financial stocks. The Treasury has guaranteed money market funds and is cooking up plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy distressed assets and save troubled banks. The market has rebounded huge, taking back all of this month's losses.

So are we all clear??

Hardly.

Whoo-boy. Another fun day on Wall Street. I just got done watching another episode of Jim Cramer's Mad Money and I gotta vent a little bit here.

I like Cramer. A lot of people think he's a buffoon, but I think he's incredibly smart, and he entertains and informs like few others in the business. And there is no denying his stellar record as a hedge fund manager in his former career (though I would venture that a lot of the practices he now rails against as a voice for the common man- like naked short selling - helped contribute to a lot of that performance).

Many people want to know how this country got into its current economic mess. The news this weekend that some of Wall Street's biggest, most prestigious financial institutions (Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG) are failing and need to be rescued will raise many more questions.

Of course, the full story is quite complicated, but one of the main drivers behind the current problems is the housing crisis, and the fact that these institutions allowed many homeowners to take on way more debt than they could handle.