For all the shouting, grandstanding and partisan insults, it seems that Republicans in Congress improved on the rescue/bailout bill.  

Here’s a side-by-side comparison.

Betsy Newmark weighs in the politics of it all:

Nancy Pelosi is really despicable

First she tries to make a deal without consulting the House Republicans. Then she demands that the GOP House members provide 100 votes for the plan because she wants to protect her Democratic Representatives and make sure that they don’t take the blame for a deal that may turn out to be very unpopular. She could have passed the bill last week if she wanted because she has the majority in the House and could have pushed it through as she has pushed through so many bills since she became Speaker. She’d probably have even gotten a few dozen Republican market.

Then John McCain shows up and says that the House Republicans have to be included in negotiating a deal. The Democrats then all run for microphones to say that John McCain was gumming up the deal. But he was actually bringing in the House GOP so that they could voice their concerns and influence the bill and get the support that Pelosi herself was demanding.

But she just wanted them to rubber stamp the deal that the Democrats and Senate GOP had made with Henry Paulson. And when they insisted on having a role in crafting the bill and refused to go along with a the deal as negotiated earlier, she goes and calls them unpatriotic for not having helped out more earlier. As Allahpundit points out, even Paul Kanjorski, the Democratic chair of the House Financial Services subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, admits that the Democrats had not involved the House GOP enough.

If she really thought that this was a patriotic deal that was absolutely necessary for the country’s financial health, she wouldn’t have cared whether she had GOP support or not. That’s the way she’s acted on innumerable bills since she became Speaker. The fact is that the public doesn’t understand the financial crisis or the proposed bill. And she’s afraid that it will turn out to be very unpopular especially if people start understanding the role that the government has played in causing the crisis in the first place.

In 1995, the Clinton Administration issued rules that required banks and lending institutions to give loans to people who could not afford them. The lending standards were essentially gutted. This was an overt act of government.

The banks complied and gave the loans. They got the money to lend by selling the bad mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These semi-government entities “bought” the bad mortgages from the banks. But where did Fannie and Freddie get the money to buy the bad debt?

Fannie and Freddie got the money by packaging the bad debts into bundles and selling them to investors. Now, most people would never have bought these “mortgage backed securities” except for one thing: Fannie and Freddie marketed them as backed by the U.S. Government.

So, naturally, investors bought them. And over time, these securities were traded and treated just like real money. But of course they weren’t “real money.”

They were backed by little more than hope; hope that people with insufficient income or prospects would somehow be able to pay the mortgage.

When those mortgage payments failed to materialize, the securities couldn’t pay the dividends and the whole sordid deal started to fall apart.

Now, should investment companies and large banks have been aware and defended themselves and their stockholders? Yes, of course. But they were told from the beginning that the government had their back. It was “risk free.” Now they are calling the government’s bluff and we, the taxpayers, are getting stuck.

There was ample warning. Since 1999, responsible members of Congress and the two presidential administrations have attempted numerous times to tighten the lending standards and force reform of the system.

But using millions in political cash, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac blocked all moves at reform. And people like Frank and Dodd – and, yes, Barrack Obama — were there to defend the government social policy, while raking in tens of thousands of campaign contributions for themselves.

So now all of us will pay dearly for this failed utopian government policy.

No wonder that Nancy Pelosi wants cover for this vote and is ticked at the GOP House members for not dancing to the tune.