And people say that Bush has lost his mojo. Buried in the weeds of the Treasury Secretary’s demand for $700 billion in Wall Street bailout we find this little gem, a power grab with all the panache of Administration attempts to put Iraq up for no-bid contract: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” Lame ducks can’t fly, but Lordy, they can steal.

Like all Great Ideas, Michael Abadi’s was a simple one: leverage the resources of existing community television against the growing reach of the Vermont blogosphere. The result was VTBlogosphereTV, and the episode we taped together has several points in its favor. First, Bill Simmon manned the cameras; second, the production values are correspondingly high; and third, we put to rest the notion that blogs are parasites feeding off traditional new outlets (except at the few buffets we’ve been able to crash). A chunk from the middle of the interview embedded below: