I watched the recent "60 Minutes" interviews with McCain and Obama.

McCain was specifically asked if he regretted his actions that pushed for financial de-regulation. His answer was that he didn't see that there was any relationship between the financial de-regulation he promoted and the current economic problems.He laid the problems at the foot of the current administration.

When we are very young, we learn about cause and effect in fundamental ways: fire = hot = don't touch. As we get older, our capacity to predict outcomes grows with our understanding of how things relate to one another.

If John McCain does not believe that there is any link between the  financial de-regulation he promoted and the financial conundrum that is unfolding should cause everyone to wonder about the state of McCain's mental capacity to make decisions.

I am sick and tired of McCain's wrong-thinking about greedy shareholders. I, like many others, am a shareholder in a variety of publicly traded companies.

The disappearance of long term employer/employee relationships; the evaporation of employer pension plans; the fear of the lack of social security has caused many people to become shareholders. There are few options available if one is concerned about being able to forsee an after retirement life somewhere above the poverty line.

Yes, there are greedy shareholders, most of whom work for the firms that the US taxpayer is being asked to bail out.

It's time to wake-up Mr. McCain. Get your "straight talk" straight in your head before it falls out of your mouth.

For a government that espouses less government as a fundamental principal, their solution to the problems they help create are always big government solutions that follow the same dribble down philosophy that Regan promoted.

This bailout should be carried out from the bottom up. I don't think it would be all that difficult to find those who were given mortgages that lenders knew were unpayable. By shoring up those who have lost or are about to lose their homes, the economy will also recover. Banks will start to receive payments and the economy will move.

Throwing big dollars to bail out firms who benefited from irresponsible lending practices is not the answer. Ssome banks will fail; they should.

It's time to deal with this problem at a grass roots level, not a corporate bailout level.

As we now know, Sarah Palin participated in the building of the "Road to Nowhere". According to her Alaskan assistant, the earmark was to be used ONLY for this road, that the contract for the road was initiated under the previous governor, and that since the contract was signed, there was nothing she could do.

If she is, falsely, taking credit for saying "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere, and it preceded the Road to Nowhere, why was she silent on this?

All contracts can be stopped; its done all the time, and governments have good success in this. There may be a cost to stopping a contract, but it wouldn't have been the full cost of the contract.

She could have stopped this wasteful spending, but simply chose not to do so. She chose to allow the taxpayers to spend an earmark on a useless project. Her record on getting the government on the right track is clearly questionable. Do you think her policies will change if she becomes VP, or worse President?