Bush asks Congress for $700 billion for Wall Street/Mortgage bailout.

John McCain: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

Late Update: Obviously, to rejigger that wonderful line, this is not excellent news for John McCain. If the Obama folks are smart — and they are — they’ll ride this one all the way to the election. But among ourselves let’s admit that you could only be surprised by this statement if you were willfully ignorant to what McCain and his key advisors believe. Remember, his top economics advisor is former Sen. Phil Gramm, the legislative architect of the banking and financial services deregulation that led to the current crisis. And his health care proposals are all off-the-rack Heritage Foundation-style initiatives based on the premise that people have too much, not too little insurance. The only thing jarring about the statement is the degree to which it has been overtaken by events as McCain now tries — a la Palin the Earmark-Killer — to rebrand himself as a Mr. Wall Street oversight and transparency when he’s been pushing deregulation for 25 years.

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We’ve got more on the pay cut that Sarah Palin claims she took as mayor. Bottom line is that she was still making more when her term ended than when it began. Greg Sargent has the details.

Did John McCain just make his first edge toward that (hollow) apology that Joe Klein says he’ll never accept?

(To be clear: Joe was referring to McCain’s established pattern of engaging in sleazy or dishonest behavior knowing he can latter come back to the Washington bigs, moral hat in hand, for absolution.)

So after running the sleaziest and most dishonest campaign in modern presidential campaign history, now McCain ‘regrets’ the negativity.

John McCain will tell you that if you’re against government bailouts of the private sector, he’s your man. But check out McCain’s track record on the three major bailouts engineered by the Fed this year alone:

John McCain, on the Bear Stearns bailout (March 2008):

“Asked whether the Fed went too far in helping Bear Stearns, McCain said: “It’s a close call, but I don’t think so.” He said he doesn’t support federal bailouts unless it has catastrophic effects on the entire financial marketplace and there were indications that a Bear Stearns failure would have rippled across the entire economy.”

McCain, on the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae bailout (July 2008):

“With combined obligations of roughly $5-trillion, the rapid failure of Fannie and Freddie would be a threat to mortgage markets and financial markets as a whole. Because of that threat, I support taking the unfortunate but necessary steps needed to keep the financial troubles at these two companies from further squeezing American families.”

McCain, earlier this week on the AIG bailout:

“Now on the bailout itself, I didn’t want to do that. And I don’t think anybody I know wanted to do that. But there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here. They were going to have their lives destroyed because of the greed and excess and corruption.”

Fair enough. But here’s what McCain had to say about bailouts just this morning:

U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain admonished the Federal Reserve Friday to get out of the business of bailouts and get back to managing money supply and protecting the purchasing power of the dollar.

“The Federal Reserve should get back to its core business of responsibly managing our money supply and inflation,” the Arizona senator told a group of business leaders in Wisconsin, an electoral battleground state.

“It needs to get out of the business of bailouts.”

Once the Fed gets through with all these bailouts McCain is supporting, it better get back to its real business!

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is trying to get TV stations in Alaska to stop running the DSCC’s ads against him — so far without success.