this is the end, beautiful friend

when you've lost bill o'reilly ...

alright, more economic choas today ... don't panic! uh, it'll, uh, flip around, but, uh, this is the end of president bush’s legacy. that's — he's done, he’s through. ... um, y'know, i like president bush personally, i think he's done some good things in the war on terror, but he will now go down in history, alongside jimmy carter, as a, uh, ineffectual leader, particularly with the last four years in iraq, and now the economy just imploding. and i’ll tell you the reason why, it's, it’s poor leadership on his part, and the people that he picked, uh, to run certain things have been disastrous. and no leadership and now americans are getting, getting hurt. and it's my job to, uh, put an end to that, and i'll do the best i can. we'll start today ...

it's true — if you've got no leadership skills and you can't even choose the right people to delegate to, what else is there to being president? charm? well, let's not go there, folks ...

so welcome aboard, billo, but this bus left the station seven years ago.

no, you've got a problem

the man who built and ran global insurance giant american international group for more than 35 years says it is in the "national interest that aig survive." speaking in an interview on cnbc-tv, maurice "hank" greenbeg, former aig chief executive officer, said that aig is facing a liquidity problem, not a solvency problem, and that if it can't raise cash from private markets, the federal reserve should step in with a bridge loan. "it's not a bailout; it's a cash problem," he said.

if i showed up at your door and told you that i needed a million dollars in cash and i needed it tonight — not tomorrow, but tonight, dammit — you'd probably intuit that my liquidity, my ability to raise that much money at will, or my solvency, my ability to raise that much money at all, was actually the least of my problems. you'd certainly want to know why i needed so much money so fast.

but, looking at me, digesting my unusual-to-say-the-least request, and listening to me explain that it's only a problem of liquidity ... well, you would already know the answer to that question.

and the answer, of course, is that i'd done something horribly, horribly stupid ...

it's just a liquidity problem, really.