I'll have a little more to say about the Biden-Palin debate over the weekend, but their exchange on the issue of same-sex marriage and civil unions shows that both parties have moved ahead since 2004. Read more...

Banned Books Week began on Saturday (related: Top 10 "Obscene" Literary Classics), but the hot topic of the weekend was a proposed bill that would allow the president to spend up to $700 billion on corporate bailouts, primarily targeting the banking and loan industries. I'm not an economist, so the details on the specific conditions of the bailout are better left addressed by my colleague Kimberly Amadeo of About.com: U.S. Economy, who has put together a quick and easy guide to the largest proposed private-sector bailout in U.S. history.

But the generalities do have civil liberties implications. Among them...

• The Imperial Presidency: One of the frequent criticisms made of the bailout proposal is that it doesn't contain adequate checks and balances--that it gives the president too much latitude on how this massive amount of money is to be spent when Congress is really supposed to control the budget. Is this one more sign that the executive branch, the most dangerous of the three branches of government, has grown too powerful?
• Capitalism and Civil Liberties: Right-wing libertarians argue that the government should let free market capitalism do its work, but bailouts are, literally, a form of socialism--the government buys private industry, and it's owned collectively by the taxpayers. Paleoconservatives and right-wing libertarians have argued for decades that the neoconservative movement is not adequately committed to the pure capitalism of traditional fiscal conservatism. Does this bailout, which will bring the national debt close to $12 trillion, prove it?
• A Question of Human Rights: From universal health care to early childhood education to the levees in New Orleans, the U.S. government's position on what most U.N. documents agree are basic human rights--to food, shelter, education, and health care--has traditionally been that there are some people that it just can't afford to take care of. Yet in a country where 45 million people have no health insurance and entire local communities are denied a meaningful education, where prisons lock up lawbreakers in human kennels instead of trying to rehabilitate them, and where Social Security provides what could only generously be called a subsistence income--why is it that as soon as the wealthy call for a tax cut or civilian defense leaders want to invade a country or a bank needs bailing out, our leaders in Washington suddenly discover trillions of dollars worth of unspent revenue? What does that say about our leaders' commitment to human rights?
• Predatory Lending and the Civil Rights Community: And then there's the question of whether all of this is ultimately an example of economic karma in action. Organizations like ACORN have complained about predatory lending practices and subprime mortgages for years and years, arguing that it would ultimately destroy the economy in addition to the lives of those exploited by these practices, but gone ignored because community organizers are not taken seriously by the Washington establishment. But it turns out they were right where Greenspan, Paulsen, and Bernanke were all wrong--and if the government had listened to the civil rights community years ago, none of this would have happened. Doesn't the government owe ACORN and other groups an apology? And does this whole crisis indicate that a government that ignores any subset of its population--including the poor--will ultimately suffer financially for it?

Share your thoughts below. For my part, I understand the necessity of the bailout now--but I don't see why the corporate leaders in question didn't see it coming a mile away. Maybe it's just because they don't subscribe to ACORN's newsletter. Or maybe it's because they knew that they could reap early profits from these policies, then count on the Bush administration to pay their tab for them when the chickens came home to roost. I don't know. But it's clear that we're not paying enough attention--not to Washington, and not to the business leaders whose lobbyists and donations run it.

Related: What is Community Organizing?