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Sec. 8. Review.

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.

They’re going to rob the tax payers blind, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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Staff at Lehman’s New York office who helped to cause the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza.

The bonus, which has been described by London staff as a “scandal” has been pledged by Barclays Capital, the British-based bank that last week acquired Lehman’s American operation and took on 10,000 staff.

The $2.5 billion (£1.4 billion) pot, which has been ring-fenced as part of the acquisition, has caused huge resentment among the 5,000 staff in the firm’s European and Middle Eastern operations who are not guaranteed to be paid after this month. There are, however, hopes that half the jobs in Lehman’s Canary Wharf office could be saved today by either Barclays or Nomura. Bids are being submitted for its UK equities and investment-banking business.

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The Obama and McCain campaigns have agreed to an unusual free-flowing format for the three televised presidential debates, which begin Friday, but the McCain camp fought for and won a much more structured approach for the questioning at the vice-presidential debate, advisers to both campaigns said Saturday.

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.

McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

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A new AP-Yahoo poll deals with the sensitive subject of race, the real third-rail of American politics. Polling on the subject is difficult. Asking “Are you a bigot?” doesn’t usually turn up a lot of bigots. The polls were conducted online because experience has shown people are less willing to admit to prejudice to a human interviewer than to a computer. Psychological techniques were also used, such as displaying images of people of various races before coming to a neutral screen. The bottom line is that Obama’s race may cost him about 6% of the vote.

Since the current “national” poll on CNN has Obama on 47% and McCain on 44%, that would mean the “real” numbers might have been 53% vs 38%, if the US hadn’t been as racist as it is. Which is more in line with what the rest of the world would expect of this race…

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Democrats are drafting a joint House-Senate bill to expedite action on the Treasury Department’s $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets but want the government to use its new leverage to slow foreclosures and cap compensation for the Wall Street chiefs whose companies are being bailed out.

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[House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney] Frank, who has been in phone discussions with Paulson, said the secretary appeared receptive to adding some foreclosure-relief language. The second Democratic proposal — to impose compensation limits on Wall Street executives — is meeting more resistance.

“Hank says it’s a poison pill,” Frank said. “I say I don’t think it’s very patriotic for someone to not give up his golden parachute when we’re trying to save the markets.”

A poison pill – yeah, right, because we don’t want these robber barons to stop earning their multi-million dollar bonus packages, right?

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A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

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In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

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What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.