Now, we wait. Will the $700 billion bailout loosen up the credit markets? Does it matter, if the economy continues to grind to a halt, as recent news seems to indicate? What is the political fallout going to be?

Michael Barone says recent events are just the latest chapter in a year of campaign chaos.

Bill Kristol says that while McCain-Palin are behind, they can still catch up.

But how? The latest RealClearPolitics Electoral Map shows the Obama-Biden ticket only six Electoral Votes aways from victory, if the polling data is at all accurate. People vote with their guts as much as with their heads. The crisis on Wall Street is incomprehensible to most people, so they fall back on their prejudices, which means that the Republican Party is the party of Wall Street, the greedy bankers and hedge fund managers and the other rich folks in Manhattan robbed the people blind and then left us to hold the bag, therefore, the GOP is to blame. They will not be convinced by the alternative explanation, which is that the Democrats in Congress passed laws that sought to increase the level of home ownership in America and that to do so, the standards for making loans were relaxed. Lenders happily joined the party because it seemed that real estate prices would continue going up, so the fact that they were making loans to people who wouldn't have qualified under prior conditions didn't seem to matter. Then, when the bubble burst, they were left holding all these bad loans.

Why doesn't this explanation work? Because the average American will not be convinced that the people who wanted to own a home shouldn't have been given that opportunity. Home ownership is "good". Bankers, speculators and financiers are "bad". People who had bad credit and were given a loan anyway are "victims". The people who gave them the loans are "predators". All the Democrats need to do is to hammer away at this theme, and they will win in a landslide.

Meanwhile, Russia continues it's bid to control Caspian oil, and the West cannot come up with a coherent policy to deal with Moscow's aggressive policies.

Finally, justice finds O.J. Simpson, 13 years too late.