It's presidential election time, and along with the campaigning and incessant TV ads we get Presidential Debates, those forums where the candidates go head-to-head answering questions from TV moderators with the imaginations of fence posts. They pose the same old tired questions about foreign policy, the economy and the candidates' domestic agenda. Here's 20 questions the voters might like to pose to our next president:

1. What is your plan for doing something about our ugliest state, New Jersey?

2. Is there any chance of the Federal Government taking over something profitable like a big oil company, Walmart or Microsoft or something to offset the huge losses of the bank takeovers?

3. Will your administration do anything about Reality Television or are we stuck with this abomination?

4. Will anything other than cantaloupes ever again bear the label "Made in America?"

5. Where do you stand on mandatory re-education camps for former banking executives? And would you start with remedial math or anger management?

6. Who gets Bill O'Really's job as Minister of Propaganda?

7. Is is too much to ask that in a war where we annihilated their army and hung their leader, two fairly solid indications of victory, we can just call it a day in Iraq and let them figure out what's next for their nation?

8. How about creating a new government agency, The Department of Peace?

9. When you are President, will you require your Vice President to live in a disclosed location?

10. What are your positions on the designated hitter and artificial turf in Major League Baseball? What about mandating a few daytime games in the World Series for the kids to enjoy?

11. What about the immigration problem? Specifically: Can you find a way to shut up the critics of immigration in a nation completely made up of immigrants?

12. How do you plan to address the Donald Trump problem? Can he be made to go away?

13. What are your plans to correct the overabundance of nerdy wimps in the rock and roll star business? Do you have a Wild Man Initiative in place to correct this unsettling turn of events, perhaps a system of warning labels for the records put out by the timid sissies?

14. As Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, what changes would you make in the stale repertoire of songs of their marching bands? Is a Stevie Wonder song out of the question?

15. Will you continue to enforce the James Crow laws against gay people?

16. As president, will you call for a truce in the War Against Fat Guys?

17. How would you rate your brush-clearing skills with those of Ronald Reagan and Bush The Younger?

18. What is the bigger threat to our national security: Congress or the Executive Branch?

19. Is there any plan in place to restore the Bill of Rights?

20. Will torture be outlawed in your administration, specifically waterboarding and synchronized swimming?

The people who run J.P. Morgan-Chase Bank must think Christmas came early this year. The Federal Government seized Washington Mutual Bank, with assets worth $300 billion, and sold it to Morgan-Chase for less than $2 billion. That's less than a penny on the dollar. The news stories say that included in those assets is $31 billion in losses. Well, okay, but that leaves approximately $269 billion that are not losses. So, if you pay two bucks for a three hundred dollar item, then pay 31 bucks to have it fixed, you're ahead 267 dollars, no? Math doesn't change when you add a bunch of zeroes to it, does it? Why the fire sale in the middle of the night? You think maybe someone else would have bid another few billion for those 267 billion dollars worth of solid assets?

But most of us are not finance industry professionals so presumably that's a naive view to compare a 300 dollar item to a 300 billion dollar item. The workings of the world of high finance are a mystery to most of us, and apparently also beyond the grasp of the current crop of corporate leadership in that industry judging by the rash of bank failures, takeovers, government bailouts and fire sales. Didn't there used to be a bunch of careful, pudgy guys with rimless glasses running the show in those businesses? People who crossed every t, dotted every i and would never dream of gambling like a drunken sailor with their investors' money? What happened to those guys?

When did the solid bankers get replaced with the greedy punks who are killing an industry? And if they screwed up so badly and broke all kinds of laws as they looted their companies' treasuries, why aren't they in handcuffs and why aren't their personal assets being seized? What about the RICO laws the Feds use to seize the ill-gotten assets of gangsters? Gangsters and drug dealers are small potatoes compared to these corporate princes. It looks to the untrained eye that a systematic and coordinated violation of the laws of the land in order to gain illegal profits has been going on for years, the definition of organized crime. And like a lot of mob organizations, there seems to be a lot of public officials on their payroll. How else could Morgan-Chase have made a $267 billion profit with the stroke of a pen in the middle of the night?

Why treat the CEOs and corrupt officials differently than mob bosses? If you believe the government's pitiful blathering on the subject, these corporate princes will hurt more Americans than any gangster organization ever has. With the gangsters, you have to seek out their services; drugs, gambling, prostitution and the like. The CEOs are running mainstream public institutions that everyone must deal with in the course of their ordinary lives. So, who's worse? Gangsters know exactly what business they are in and don't pretend otherwise. Corporate princes, on the other hand, have proven equally corrupt and amoral and yet insist upon being cloaked in a blanket of respectability, even of superiority as they approach the government for a handout not with hat in hand, but with threats and bully tactics.

To respond to these strong-arm tactics, lock them up, seize their assets and show them no one is above the law. Use the RICO statutes and give the real gangsters some company in Federal prisons. Instead of acting like Santa Clause coming early, the government should just throw them all in jail. Nobody's coming to the rescue of middle class people struggling mightily to make ends meet in an economy ruined by these clowns, so why worry about super-wealthy pigs who just might be criminals? You try pulling half the crap these guys have pulled and see how long it is before you're looking for a good defense attorney. And no one in the halls of government will move heaven and earth to help you. A bail out? You'll be lucky to make bail.

Senator John McCain has decided to suspend his campaign for the Presidency to return to Washington to work on a solution to the financial crisis. What? Can you do that? Can you suspend your campaign for the presidency in what is one of the most crucial turning point elections in American history? Guess so, because that’s just what he did, even canceling the first of 3 presidential debates this Friday. He did this, he said, “to put politics aside” in his quest to serve his nation, even though he is on record as saying that he knows very little about the American economy. So how’s he supposed to help the Senate wrangle with an issue he knows nothing about? One supposes that’s what politicians do; never let their ignorance stand in the way of putting their 2 cents worth in on any issue, no matter how complex and beyond their grasp it might be.

And to Republicans, this crisis is real and dire. It’s rich people losing money this time, not your usual working class chumps getting screwed by their kind. Like the movie voice-over guy says: “This time, it’s personal.” So personal that John McCain drops everything to help his fellow super- wealthy people when they are in danger of becoming somewhat less wealthy. Not injured, not destitute, not horribly maimed or infected with some dread disease. Nor being made poor, or middle class or even moderately well off, but less wealthy. Well, boo friggin’ hoo! What we have here is the unbridled greed of corporate princes coming back to bite them in the ass. It’s only an emergency to them, not regular people.

So why would they let McCain sit in on this latest attempt to use the United States Treasury as an ATM for wealthy corporate princes? The doddering old fool just might say something honest about his Republican puppet masters and screw up the whole process, maybe wonder out loud why super-rich former investment banker Henry Paulson gets to have control over the $700 billion to be distributed amongst his former colleagues, no questions asked, no oversight or appeal allowed, with not a nickel of that dough going to worthwhile social programs like medical coverage or education. Why should the Treasury re-line the pockets of rich guys who just gambled away a trillion dollars of their fellow wealthy people’s dough? Now they want ours too?

Why not suspend this Paulson guy from his job as Secretary of The Treasury? Being a former Goldman/Sachs partner who built a $700 million personal fortune, can he really say that he didn’t see any of these banking collapses coming? Or was he hoping he’d be out of office when the dominos started falling? Either way, like most Bush The Younger appointees, he wasn’t up to the job and should not be the guy administering a solution, that solution basically being to give the rich guys back the money they lost. Doesn’t seem to be any thought given to the other 99.5% percent of the population who aren’t in their (no)tax bracket.

The rest of us are being asked to suspend our powers of reasoning and deduction. We are being told that this banking crisis is going to affect our lives dramatically. Exactly how has yet to be explained. Perhaps the Republicans think that most Americans would be demoralized if we had fewer billionaires next year that we have this year. Maybe it will come as a flash to them that most of us don’t give a rat’s ass about the super wealthy, since no worry need be expended on people who are insulated from reality by thick blankets of money. Most people tend to worry about people who are hurting and vulnerable, and multi-millionaires and billionaires don’t qualify for our sympathy. Even if they do lose millions, they’ve still got millions more to keep the wolf from the door.

You have to figure that if regular people were going to suffer, it would have happened already since they’re always the ones to take the first hit in hard economic times. And you further have to wonder how much these rich people are suffering, what with the sky-high salaries they’ve been enjoying and the bonuses they kept awarding themselves out of their stockholders’ money. Angst doesn’t count. Last year alone the financial industry awarded their executives $55 billion in bonuses in an industry less than a year away from collapse. So how bad a crisis is this scandal? If it’s that extreme, shouldn’t there be some criminal investigating going on? Some corporate heads rolling? The way it’s shaping up it’s simply a bank robbery with the aid of an inside man named Henry Paulson. Call the police and let them sort it out.

Other than a few rich guys bounced from their jobs with millions in severance pay, everybody’s lives are pretty much the same, nobody’s starving and no enemy is threatening our borders. So maybe we should suspend our belief in what others tell us is a huge calamity and save ourselves $700 billion. If John McCain decides that saving the fortunes of the super-wealthy is more important than being president, well, we can accommodate him and elect the other guy, the guy who’s not one of the super wealthy and forgets how many houses he owns. The guy who’s not suspending his efforts to put his case for election before the American people.

Let’s elect the smart guy, Barack Obama, the guy who’s not in the pocket of the people trying to shove a $700 Treasury heist down our throats. Welfare is for poor people, not the wealthy, and when poor people gamble their money away on lottery tickets the government doesn’t trip all over themselves to replace it. Let the chips fall where they may and let the super wealthy become merely wealthy. Then we ought to greed-proof our banks so they can’t use these public institutions as personal ATM machines. Until then maybe the government can suspend all this talk of a dire crisis where none exists.

It's that magic time in New York City again, the General Assembly of the United Nations, when world leaders gather together to pay lip service to the U.N. before going back home to do the unneighborly things the U.N. is designed to discourage. Stuff like oppressing their people, making war, practicing genocide, letting large chunks of their populations starve to death, stealing the wealth of their nations, harboring terrorists, those sort of things. But for one week in the city that never sleeps, all the various heads of states get to pretend that they are the nearest thing to Ghandi. It's all a farce, we know it, they know it and we just put up with their blowhard lies and move on.

So, the only interesting thing to happen this week is the revelation of what keeps the spring in the step and the smile on the face of the President of France, one Nicolas Sarkozy. That would be Carla Bruni Sarkozy, his beautiful and sexy wife. Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy is a model, singer, songwriter and actress born in Italy. She was the daughter of a Brazilian classical guitarist with whom her mother had an affair but was raised by her mother and her husband, a wealthy Italian industrialist and classical composer. Not exactly the life path one expects from the First Lady of France, but she is adored by the French anyway.

And getting a look at her, it's easy to see why. A long legged, slender beauty with a beguiling smile and a model's poise, she charms and disarms any potential critics of her past nude modeling sessions. Why anyone would complain about naked photographs of a beautiful woman is another matter, but the French are pretty okay with that stuff. What her politics are is not so clear, but then again, who cares? It's her husband who's President of The French Republic, not her. As First Lady, she dutifully attends luncheons on world literacy and shows up on her husband's arm when he makes a public appearance, and that's petty much all any nation should expect from their first ladies.

So, to sum up The United Nations General Assembly of 2008, a bunch of politicians got up and lied, nothing was done about the 36,000 people who die every single day of starvation, little was said about the pockets of genocide in Africa, no mention was made of all the wars the world is currently waging and no word uttered on the continued enslavement of Muslim women, like half of a billion of them. It was all about the stock market collapse and Carla Bruni, and Ms. Bruni was by far the more interesting subject. Here's hoping her husband what's-his-name keeps getting elected so we can see more of her around here.

Henry Paulson is a former partner in Goldman Sachs investment bank, a place where he made a $700 million dollar personal fortune. Under his watch as Secretary of the Treasury he watched and did nothing as a financial Hurricane Katrina drowned his industry in red ink. Untold billions were being lost daily. His former business rivals bit the dust in rapid succession, and he refused to lift a finger to save Lehman Brothers, but promised to bail out several others in a sweeping plan that will give himself sole discretionary power over an estimated $700 billion dollar fund, with no oversight from Congress and no appeals via the courts. The Bush The Younger Administration has gone into overdrive to shove this last bit of treasury-looting down America's throat before it closes up shop in January, leaving a fine mess indeed for the next president.

The last time Congress bent over for Bush The Younger to grant him unilateral power to act, the man attacked the wrong country! Is there any reason not to shudder when he decides to tackle a problem by handing it over to a subordinate to do with as he will? So instead of Rummy in Iraq and Brownie in New Orleans, now we get Paulie in New York rounding up hundreds billions of tax dollars to be distributed as he sees fit? This would be a good time for Congress to say Fuck you! And when asked to clarify their position, just say it again louder; Fuck You!

Before we go handing more good money to the guys who gambled so much away and awarded themselves billions of other people's money in bonuses, shouldn't we see the plan? Shouldn't this guy Paulson have to answer to this government of the people, by the people and for the people? And shouldn't he have been fired for fiddling while Rome burned? He's probably on a first name basis with half the people he's supposed to be regulating, like good old Shotgun Dick Cheney and the Haliburton boys. Fire his useless scheming ass too or you'll have the wolves in charge of the hen house and the whole chicken farm. You just know that that 700 bil is going to get divvied up between all these decadent jackasses and none of the problems that created this mess will get corrected.

Is there something that the Congress isn't getting here, something new they have to learn about this administration? For 8 years its been government-by-disaster with the result always being more corporate pigs being allowed at the public trough. There have been no exceptions, from 9/11 to Iraq to New Orleans to Wall Street, that answer has always been to hand out keys to Fort Knox like it was the executive rest room. Or will Congress simply be shut up again, bought cheap for all the pork barrel earmarks sure to be included in that $700 billion? That will be one more thing for the next president to restore along with the Bill of Rights; accountability.