On Saturday, lame ducks Bush and Paulson presented their “plan” – a $700 billion blank check to the Treasury secretary with no guidelines, no oversight, and not even a reporting requirement. (Did Bernanke sign off on this plan?)

Today came the predictable Democratic hand wringing response to Bush’s audacity.

It’s a little late in the game to be surprised by the Bush modus operandi. He’s never been coy about his process: he refuses to negotiate with himself. His first proposal is always maximum, never acknowledging any interests beyond his own.

Here’s a thought: Democrats should treat the Bush plan with the contempt it deserves and ignore it. Does anyone really believe there is a political downside to ignoring a proposal to give the Bush administration a blank check for $700 billion?

The Democratic chairs of the relevant House and Senate committees should convene with their staffs and, most importantly, with Obama’s economic advisers who would be staffing the upper levels of the bureaucracy next year if he wins.

Produce a plan that deals systemically with the toxic paper, doesn’t let the financier perpetrators off the hook, and provides relief to homeowners stuck with their own, solitary piece of toxic paper.

A cogent, comprehensive Democratic plan puts Republicans on the defensive, especially Republican incumbents. It demonstrates in the most tangible way possible that Democrats are prepared to govern from the White House as well as the Capitol.

And let those Republican incumbents know that ads are ready to run in their districts and states touting their support for giving George Bush a $700 billion blank check.

Americans are traditionally wary of British-style shadow governments. But this is different, not only in terms of the depth of the crisis and the hopelessly incompetent players in office, but because of the timing. The election is little more than six weeks from now, and the Bush administration finally expires in four months. Even operating with absolutely no oversight, Bush cannot possibly wrap this up before he leaves office.

It will fall to the Obama administration the Democratic leadership in Congress to clean up this mess. May as well get started now.

With the Bush administration it often feels as if it's somehow unseemly to state the obvious. Nevertheless, it's time to take a step back and recognize a truly mind-boggling development in the always astonishing Plame affair. 

And if not, why not? If the privilege is broken, why should Fitzgerald see them and not us?

Liberals are interested in expanding liberty. The term originally developed in British politics, as England evolved into a constitutional monarchy. Liberals wanted to expand the franchise and conservatives resisted. In the U.S. the terms were most useful during the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s. Everyone who believed African-Americans should have the right to vote was a liberal. Everyone who didn't was a conservative. There were no exceptions. Zero.

Adam Smith, too, was a liberal, because he wanted to expand economic liberty beyond royal concessions, and liberals remain market-oriented. The conundrum for liberals is that expanding liberty for those who do not have it inevitably pinches those who do, even if all it does is dilute their vote.

Liberals believe you should be able to do with your property as you please, unless you impinge on others. Conservatives, such as would-be appellate judge Janice Brown, believe zoning is theft. Liberals want to be confident when they buy a suburban house that their upwind neighbor can't turn the backyard into a hog farm.

Liberals believe labor should have the right to organize into unions, just as capital organizes into corporations.

Liberals believe liberty expands when people have reasonable expectations of each other through fraud and liability statutes; conservatives prefer caveat emptor.

Liberals understand that economic development sometimes destroys markets, leading to oligopolies and monopolies, and these must be regulated or commerce becomes extortion. Liberals don't resent Bill Gates for becoming wealthy by building a successful business, but they don't want him to have sole control of the software business, either.

Liberals have reluctantly concluded from the evidence that modern medicine has outstripped the privately financed, fee-for-service system, which now makes no more sense than private ownership of New York City streets.

Liberals understand that modern economies can have disastrous effects unforeseeable by even the most prudent. Poverty is poor soil for liberty, so they favor unemployment compensation and other temporary measures for those with the capacity to adjust, and a Social Security system for the disabled, dependents, and elderly, who cannot.

Liberals believe government should be constrained from interfering in private life. How we worship, what we read and watch, our reproduction choices, and how and to whom we make love (minors and coercion excluded) are private matters. The government need only acknowledge marriage as a boilerplate contract giving both parties certain rights and obligations. Whether they are the same race or same sex is none of government's business.

Liberals believe the public sphere should be governed by empiricism, which requires an intellectual discipline best developed through education and the free expression of ideas. Good public schools expand liberty for everyone, regardless of their parents' educational achievement.

Liberals believe that empirical utility is more likely to lead toward good policy than abstract ideology. Back in the day when SDS veered off into Maoism I never dreamed that conservatives would take so well to ideology, which used to be the province of Euro-socialists. Take David Horowitz, please.

In case we forgot, Kerry is a loner, and he never showed a deep commitment to anything since the POW/MIA issue. Since when does he have any track record on health care or children? The names that come to mind are Kennedy and Clinton, but they're never mentioned. And why a specific proposal on children? Why not a general attack on Republican inaction on the uninsured, including adults, who, you know, actually can vote? And then there are small business owners, the people whom Republicans ritually mention. They still have no way to join together into larger pools.