Sure, our own Daniel DiRito wrote quite ably about Carly Florina’s foot in mouth disease yesterday, but to recap you, Fiorina was once the CEO of Hewlett Packard until she got canned a couple years ago. She was asked if Sarah Palin was experienced enough to run HP. Carly said Palin did not have the experience to do so, but to be fair, she also claimed the skills needed to run the country were different than those needed to run a company, and additionally, Biden, McCain and Obama couldn’t run a company anyway.

Those of us on the Left Blogzome have had a whole bunch of fun making fun of Carly Fiorina, but this is likely the last of such posts for a while. Why? Carly Fiorina has now been muzzled by the McCain campaign. Read it here at ThinkProgress. Here’s one of the McCain campaign’s biggest assets, because she can legitimately be said to know the economic system in the US, but she was either too honest or too thoughtful with her answers to questions. That sort of honesty sure isn’t something a straight talker like John McCain can tolerate, is it? Who does this leave to talk about economics for the McCain campaign? They sure as heck aren’t going to call on Phil Gramm, not with the failures we’re seeing on Wall Street.

Elsewhere on the economic front, AIG has been absorbed by the Borg that is Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson. It appears they made the unprecedented move of propping up a private company out of stark fear that if AIG went under it would take substantial sections of the world’s economy with it. Stark fear rules their actions in this world where John McCain, at least, thinks our economy is fundamentally sound. Here’s some reaction to the bailout from the article from The New York Times via the Seattle Pilot:

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Paulson and Bernanke had not requested any new legislative authority for the bailout at Tuesday night’s meeting. “The secretary and the chairman of the Fed, two Bush appointees, came down here and said, ‘We’re from the government, we’re here to help them,’ ” Frank said. “I mean this is one more affirmation that the lack of regulation has caused serious problems. That the private market screwed itself up and they need the government to come help them unscrew it.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly criticized the rescue, calling the $85 billion a “staggering sum.” Pelosi said the bailout was “just too enormous for the American people to guarantee.” Her comments suggested that the Bush administration and the Fed would face sharp questioning in congressional hearings. President Bush was briefed earlier in the afternoon.

A major concern is that the AIG rescue won’t be the last. At Tuesday night’s meeting, lawmakers asked if there was any way of knowing if this would be the final major government intervention. Bernanke and Paulson said there was not. Indeed, the markets remain worried about the financial condition of major regional banks as well as that of Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest thrift.

I’m wondering which other industries the Bush Administration plans to nationalize before it leaves office. No, I’m not kidding. This place, ruled by Bush policies, is starting to look decidedly third world. The government is absorbing huge companies at costs that add to our already record debts. The price of bailing out AIG could let us pay for another seven months or so in Iraq, for God’s sake, and we know that’s a priority, right? Yet, except for Democrats who were against the deregulation binge on the part of Republicans that caused this whole mess, I’m hearing hardly an alarm. Let’s put it simply, the Republican-led anti-regulation movement, led by McCain adviser Phil Gramm. . . well, in hindsight it looks like some scheme cooked up over a shared crack pipe.

We’ve known for well over 100 years that unregulated, unfettered capitalism harms people. We’ve instituted labor laws and food safety laws and securities provisions because philosophically we don’t trust unregulated capitalism. Along comes the deregulation crowd, with Phil Gramm at its head and John McCain following loyally along. They eliminate regulations, and we pay for it with, at the least, record deficits upon record deficits. Now McCain thinks it can all be fixed with a commission. They disgust me.

Bonus Palin: What would your name be if you were Sarah Palin’s baby? Mine would be “Froth Moonshine” Palin.

Double Bonus Palin: She put McCain up for sale on EBay. Nobody has bid so far.