In this financial mess, there's enough crow for everybody — so eat up, Washington and Wall Street

Breaking: The Wall Street bailout measure appears at this point to be headed to passage in the Senate tonight. Word is that the House will follow due to a bit of sweetening:

• Raising the FDIC insurance cap for savings accounts from $100,000 to $250,000 (Interesting aside: France and Ireland guarantee an unlimited amount)
• Easing rules about how companies count devalued (read: mortgage-backed) assets on their balance sheets
• An extension of some GOP-friendly tax relief

Also breaking (literally): YouTube is getting absolutely hammered right now, so the above video barely plays in the air-conditioned splendor of Daily News HQ in lovely Woodland Hills, Calif.

And now we begin this Friendly Fire rant:

Republicans contend that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's baldly partisan floor speech before the White House's Wall Street bailout bill came up for a vote blew a big hole in whatever was keeping restless Republicans on board the measure sent to them by their own president.

I won't point out the president's popularity ratings, if only because those for Congress are as low, if not lower.

The fact that Speaker Pelosi was supposed to carry water for President Bush aside, remember triangulation as practiced by President Clinton? Before Monica (should we call it "BM"?), President Clinton was the master of working with a Congress from the opposing party. Now we have a president, albeit the most lame of ducks, not able to get his own party in line behind a measure he says is critical to the economic life of the country.

Yeah, I know that the Democrats have the slimmest of slim majorities in the House. Maybe its too slim. It sure isn't enough to get much done. If the Dems had their own brand of triangulation in place, there might be more happening on the House floor, but Rep. Pelosi and company seem to be waiting for the November election to sweep in enough new members from their party to allow them to not just control the agenda but marginalize the GOP in the process. (Hint: Don't count on it).

Ever since Social Security reform (remember that?) failed, we haven't heard much from President Bush either in terms of game-changing legislation about ... anything. "Surge is working" ... that's about it, right?

From the way the lending industry has conducted itself over the past five or more years to the dependence of the entire financial sector on mortgage-backed securities and other doomed financial instruments that depended on the continued, unabated rise of real-estate values, even as the rest of the economy remained stagnant, there have been plenty of signs that the country was headed for an economic thumping.

Who knew that the thumping would be this hard — and felt worldwide.

We weren't the only ones throwing the old lending rules out and turning the land under our feet into a continually barfing money machine.

Bottom line: Housing prices didn't shoot as high as they did because the properties got more valuable; banks made the money needed to move into them way, way less valuable by giving more and more of it to people with less and less ability to pay.

Endlessly increasing "flip this house" equity was supposed to cure all ills.

It was a pyramid scheme, pure and simple, and those who got in too late and didn't get out are now holding the bag. If prices were such that the traditional 30-year-fixed, 20-percent-down loan would work, most would choose that. But the no-money-down, equity-in-5-years-or-bust loans flooding the market kept pushing up prices for no reason other than that banks made money — lots of it — with every new loan, every refinance job.

Too bad America's banks and investment houses set themselves — and the rest of us — up.

Here's the scorecard:

• President Bush would get a pass ... if he weren't in the eighth year of his eight-year presidency
  
• The Democratically controlled Congress would get a pass if it had sent any legislation at all on mortgage reform to the president's desk
  
• Wall Street? Sure, they didn't have regulation stopping them, but it's pure, unadulterated greed: No pass for them.

Bush, Congress and the financial industry: Get a crow-filled feedbag and start eating.