The leaders of the free world — at an emergency meeting of G7 finance ministers and central bankers — are talking with grave seriousness about nationalizing the sectors of the global finance system under their respective hands.

The November election, less than a month away, suddenly seems about whether something like global socialism or global fascism is the future.

The globality business is rather ominous either way. But here it comes. Sign on the back of a high 18-wheeler: “If your brakes don’t work, smile as you go under.”

Gee, wish I’d traded my own line …

Here’s the finance minister of Germany announcing the end of Wall Street and American power as we know it, where all five big brokers have been bought or reduced to Fed-controlled banks.

To begin with, I think Hillary is really wrong for the country at this point. It’s a separate issue that I haven’t liked her since 1991.

I certainly have concerns about Obama’s experience—if he becomes president, his success will turn, perhaps more than has been the case with most presidents, on his wisdom in choosing the people around him and his ability to delegate. But it’s reasonable to hope that he’d be good at those things.

I don’t think it’s likely that capitalism is dead. Whether there’s a market solution to present woes depends on how you define “solution.” Would people starving in the streets constitute a solution? There are certainly plenty of closet social Darwinists out there. One thing is sure: change is coming, with or without Obama. And change is almost always associated with pain. There’s going to be plenty of that.

Otherwise, I enjoy the blog and read it regularly.

Hard to say.  In any case I think Hillary would make a fine president, and would be a shoe-in in November against any GOPher.  Unless Vince Foster were to rise from the grave.

Obama sings the song of my spirit. But he remains re policy largely a cipher, and his apparent admiration of Reagan bespeaks a surprising lack of historical and socioeconomic awareness.

He was a teenager during the Reagantime.  Brainwashed a bit with the rest of his cohort?

But I like — and find a clue to the cipher in — the way his silky voice turned briefly and uncontrollably to a growl in the Ohio debate the two times he uttered the word “Cheney.”

I continue to think Barack a riskier bet for the Donkeys than Hillary. The country was ready for a woman president when the campaign season kicked off a year ago. I don’t think it was ready for a black man.

But ready or not, here he seems to come, beating Hillary with those two bedrock policy points: NAFTA and Iraq. I do think he’s winning fair & square: on the issues not the show.

I imagine he would face more resistance than she as president, and perhaps spend his first years in chaos, simply trying to stay on his radical feet — precisely the JFK precedent — while articulating in policy proposals his visions of Change. And to the extent here successful, his chances of holding a Donkey Congress in 2010 would likely decline, as the people who own & operate the country dig deep, as they did in 1994, to resist.

(JFK’s early “radicalness” was simply to say No to the bristling and radical military-industrial complex, which had struggled effectively behind the scenes to defuse Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace and looked forward throughout the 1960 campaign to new freedoms under a Nixon administration. And then, frustrated, tried to stampede the callow new president in Laos, Cuba and Vietnam. This battle — of a frustrated Cowboy MIC versus a clan of talented and stubborn Yankee intellectuals — as JFK struggled to re-educate himself (quickly discovering, eg, that the “missile gap” was a fiction of MIC publicity), was the essence of JFK’s dangerous first 22 months.)

But, despite the resistance a President Obama would likely face … Change comes when s–t happens, and we’ve had an unprecedented amount down our throats since November 2000. The future is a mist, but this seems an improvement over the vista post 2004 elections, a spiritual nadir that (I dare hope, Federico) we now seem unlikely to re-test.

She would be the next president absent Lewinsky.

Comforting that there is some homeostatic trigger correcting outrages, synthesizing theses.

If Obama wins the presidency it will be thanks to the real disasters of the Baby Bush years, and those disasters are still with us.

May God have mercy on more of us.