With his $2.5 trillion bank rescue plan - $350 billion from the $700 billion originally allocated by Congress, the rest from private investors and the Federal Reserve - the consensus is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has laid an egg. Noting that the bailout “is far bigger than anyone predicted and envisions a far greater government role in markets and banks than at any time since the 1930s,” The New York Times reports that “the initial assessment of the plan from the markets, lawmakers and economists was brutally negative.”

How negative? Well, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard and Poor's 500 Index both dropped nearly five percent (the DJIA plummeted 382 points, to 7,888.88; the S&P 500, sank 42.73 points, to 827.16). Nasdaq also index fell 4 percent, or 66.83, to 1,524.73. Finally, the Rasmussen Consumer Index, a daily measures of the economic confidence of consumers, also fell to all all-time low of 56.6 (to put this in perspective, this is lower than in the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks).

How brutal? Here are several representative assessments from financial analysts, economists, columnists and lawmakers: 

† “Judging by the hissing in financial markets, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's opening act as Rescuer in Chief yesterday was a bomb. What everyone saw was Geithner at the Improv, a routine with a few good lines but a lot of material that needs more, well, practice,” opines The Wall Street Journal.

In an op-ed published by the paper, Andy Kessler, former hedge-fund manager and author of "How We Got Here" (Collins, 2005) writes: “One of the cool things about being Treasury Secretary is that you get your signature on dollar bills, giving them authority, defending their honor. Timothy Geithner's plan to save the struggling banking system probably does the opposite, throwing good money after bad to a banking system struggling under the weight of its own mistakes.”  

† The Times observes: “For Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner as much as for the troubled government program to bail out the financial system, Tuesday amounted to a do-over.  Initial reviews for the man and his plan were not good, however. Stock markets slid through the day, perhaps spurred downward by withering punditry on the business-news cable channels faulting Mr. Geithner for not providing more details, particularly on stemming home foreclosures.”

 “Someone should have told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that the one thing to avoid at a time of uncertainty is raising more questions,” chides the paper in an editorial, adding, “[t]he lead-balloon reception of Mr. Geithner’s plan is unfortunate because the success of the stimulus is intertwined with the success of the bank bailout. The administration has to figure out the details - and get back to the public with answers.”

† Lawrence Kudlow, former Reagan economic advisor and host of CNBC's “The Kudlow Report,”  points out that after Obama’s pessimistic press conference, stocks opened 75 points lower, but  “really started to tumble when Tim Geithner stepped to the microphone. He totally bombed in his debut.” Kudlow wonders whether Geithner “is ready for prime time.”

† Bloomberg News columnist David Reilly asks: “That’s it? That’s all Geithner had to offer? Rather than offer the kind of comprehensive solution he had promised, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner yesterday served up a plan for banks and the financial system that was long on platitudes and short on specifics. … This is the sort of float-all-boats thinking that led to Congress’s misguided stimulus package. … [T]he Obama administration’s first, grand effort to fix the nation’s economic ills probably won’t be its last.” The headline of his piece is especially harsh: “Geithner Can’t Find Gun, Let Alone Silver Bullet.”

† Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes: “Geithner's package makes sense if you think that a financial "catastrophe," to use President Obama's word, may be approaching. But it's possible that Geithner, after spending the past year imagining worst-case scenarios as president of the New York Fed, may be shellshocked. For a nonfinancial analogy, think of the "war on terror" decisions made in 2002 and 2003 by a Bush White House that began every morning with hair-raising threat assessments.”

† Ethan Harris, co-head of US economics research at Barclays Capital calls the plan “shock and uh” and tells The Times that the Treasury made a “tactical mistake” by building up expectations about a plan before it had much to announce.

† Thomas Barrack, CEO of LA investment firm Colony Capital, tells The Washington Post: “What they did is over-promise and under-deliver. They said there was going to be a plan, so everybody expected a plan. And there was nothing."

† Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee who voted to in favor of the bailout last fall, called Geithner’s plan “more platitudes,” while his colleague The Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-AL) dubbed it  “son of Paulson."

Geithner was billed as “the only man who could save the economy,” which somehow made it OK that he was a serial tax chisler. So if he continues to underwhelm or his plan fails to "jump start the economy," people will remember that it’s not OK to cheat on your taxes and Obama will have to cut him loose.   

Editorial Note: With all the reading The Stiletto did on the bank bailout, she found just one expert who deemed the plan “a smart move,” Douglas Elliott, a former investment banker and a fellow at liberal think tank The Brookings Institution: “In addition to more capital infusions into weakened banks, Secretary Geithner’s plan proposes a major expansion of a new program by which the Federal Reserve, with support from Treasury, would encourage new lending to consumers, small businesses, and commercial real estate.  … Of course, there are risks in involving the Fed and Treasury so intimately in the business of day-to-day lending to consumers and small businesses. This kind of government support can become politicized or bureaucratic, resulting in large credit losses or the playing of favorites among borrowers. But in this environment, those risks seem well worth taking.”

BTW: A Rasmussen survey of U.S. voters finds that three-quarters do not want the federal government taking over the banking system  - ditto 78 percent of investors.

The “Do-Nothing” Congress Does The Wrong Thing: Part II

"The difference between the Senate and House versions we've resolved," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters this afternoon.

"The middle ground we've reached creates more jobs than the original Senate bill and spends less than the original House bill," he said. The bill passed by the Senate yesterday totaled $838 billion. The House version approved last week had a price tag of $819 billion.

Reid said the bill would create 3.5 million jobs and fulfill one of President Obama's campaign pledges, "cutting taxes for 95 percent of American workers." He said the final bill would be put to a vote on the Senate floor "within the next few days, maybe as early as tomorrow." …

However, House and Senate leaders had not resolved every detail as of late Wednesday afternoon, and they delayed the start of a final conference committee meeting to work out differences on school construction funding, a major source of contention throughout negotiations.

The deal didn’t go down without a last-minute brouhaha, reports Politico’s Glenn Thrush:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid played a little high-stakes chicken with each other at the tail end of Wednesday’s shotgun stimulus talks.

It’s not clear who won - or who blinked.

According to a half dozen Congressional aides and members, Reid went before the cameras Wednesday to announce a stimulus deal before Pelosi had agreed on all the details of school construction financing. …

The problem, according to people familiar with the situation, was that Pelosi hadn’t completely signed off on the Senate’s approach to restoring some of the $21 billion in school construction funding. …

Pelosi summoned Reid to her office - her turf - to hash out unspecified modifications to the package prior to a 5:15 re-convening of the conference committee. …

Pelosi …. strategically permitted Reid to make his announcement – and then held up her approval to extract a slightly better deal.

Of the 219 Republicans in Congress, only three “brave” (Reid’s characterization) Senators - Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of ME and Arlen Specter of PA – backed the bill. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tells CNN the bill is not bipartisan: "You couldn't pick up one Republican in the House, and you lost 11 Democrats. You've lost more Democrats than you've picked up Republicans. That's not bipartisanship. We're disappointed in the process and the substance." He added, “This still creates more new government than it does new jobs. This is worse than nothing."

The Evolution Of Darwinism

G-d is not on the guest list, it seems. But though Darwin became agnostic towards the end of his life, he also thought it  “absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.”

In an op-ed for The Times of London, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster explores the relationship between science and faith:

One of the things that mars our culture is the fracture between faith and science. It impoverishes our inquiry into the realities that make up our life and world. This is a false opposition.

If we see the two as fundamentally opposed - science endangering and undermining faith, or faith obstructing knowledge - then distortions are produced on both sides. …

It is a mistake to treat the theology of creation in the Book of Genesis as a scientific textbook. … That wonderful narrative of creation offers us a first vision of an “ecology of holiness” in which every material and living thing has a place and its creativity is consecrated in goodness by God. The account of creation in Genesis is pointing us beyond the question “how?” to the question “why?” Ultimately, science as well as faith must come to that most fundamental of all questions: the question of meaning and purpose.

If there are ways of misusing Genesis and the Christian understanding of creation, there is also a danger of misusing Darwin. We should be worried when his theory is distorted into “the survival of the fittest” and becomes a way of legitimising policies that discriminate against the weak and vulnerable. I think the majority of us believe it is grossly wrong to use Darwin's theory to justify social engineering or eugenics. …

The anniversary of Darwin's birth is an invitation to renew the conversation between science and faith. Christianity can contribute to the progress of science, not only by encouraging scientists in the search for truth, but by inviting them to consider these wider questions that go to the heart of our common and necessary search for understanding.

“Survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean what most people think it does, cautions New York University psychology professor Gary Marcus in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Few phrases in science are as powerful or as widely misunderstood as "survival of the fittest." Virtually everyone associates it with Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago this week.

The phrase was actually coined by Darwin's 19th century contemporary Herbert Spencer, and it is perfectly ambiguous. The phrase could mean that "of all the possible creatures that one might imagine, only the fittest possible survive." Or it could mean something considerably less lavish - that "only the fittest creatures that happened to be around at a particular moment tend to survive." … 

Evolution is often likened to a process of climbing a mountain. If one follows the strategy of taking small steps, only going up (never down) and is willing to keep at it long enough, one will inevitably make it to the top of the mountain. …

Darwin's theory of natural selection tells us that a one-eyed creature may outcompete a blind creature, but that doesn't mean that a creature with two eyes couldn't come along later.

This seemingly subtle difference - between "fittest among the choices that happen to be lying around" and "fittest imaginable" - makes all the difference in the world.

In an op-ed published by The Christian Science Monitor Jeremy Kutner observes that “[t]wo centuries after the famed naturalist's birth, more than 40 percent of Americans believe human beings were created by G-d in their present form, according to recent polls from Gallup and the Pew Research Center - a view impossible to reconcile with evolution propelled by natural selection.” These folks have an alternative to Darwin Day:

Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that had supported the teaching of "intelligent design," which claims that life is too complex to have simply evolved without the hand of an intelligent designer … is offering an alternative to Darwin Day that it is calling "Academic Freedom Day." "We're doing sort of a counter to Darwin Day, which has become a sort of quasi-religious celebration," says John West, a senior fellow at the Institute.

You could say “academic freedom” evolved from earlier attempts to teach the intelligent design and creationism alongside evolution in classrooms. According to Kutner:  

Opponents have tried an array of challenges over the decades, and the latest tactic recently scored its first major victory. It's a tack that is changing the way the cultural battle over evolution is fought.

In June of last year, Louisiana became the first state to pass what has become known as an "academic freedom" law. In the past, fights over evolution took place at the local school board level, but academic freedom proponents specifically target state legislatures.

Such laws back away from outright calls for alternative theories to evolution, electing instead to legislate support for teachers who discuss the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of issues such as evolution in the name of protecting the freedom of speech of instructors and students alike.

In 2009, bills have been introduced in Oklahoma, Alabama, Iowa, and New Mexico. Their likelihood of success is uncertain: In the wake of the Louisiana result last year, similar bills were introduced in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, and South Carolina, all of which failed.

But it's a strategy shift, opponents say, which is disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst.

As far as The Stiletto is concerned, neither intelligent design nor natural selection offer complete or completely satisfactory explanations for the basic question of how the very first organic molecule came into existence and then formed into increasingly complex structures. No one would insist that the strengths and weaknesses of each competing theory be taught side by side in schools if Darwinists were able to rationally discuss the weaknesses and limitations of evolution, instead of defending it with a religious fervor that brooks neither heterodoxy nor skepticism. The first step is to  kill the cult of Darwin, argues MacArthur fellow Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute (“Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology.”)  

Editorial Note: Final paragraph of Darwin post updated with additional links.