A number of Republican House members and staff, along with others who are plugged in, are telling me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will come back with a new bill that includes all the left-wing stuff that was scrubbed from the bill that was defeated today in the House.

The single-biggest mistake in the Paulson bank-rescue-plan marketing effort has been the failure to explain clearly how taxpayers are going to recoup $700 billion used to buy toxic assets at auction in order to unfreeze the banking system.

Honestly. A clean bill as requested by Treasury man Henry Paulson, along with John McCain’s oversight board, can help fix the credit-crunch problem. It needn’t be this hard.

We can fix this. If nothing else, that's the message I hope readers take away from this column. Of course, the "this" is the run on the world banking system. Stock markets have plunged globally, gold prices have shot up, and U.S. Treasury bill rates have plummeted to 10 basis points, the lowest since the 1950s.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is the man of the hour. This weekend he drew a clear line in the sand: no more federal bailouts. Not for Lehman Brothers. Not for global insurer AIG. Not for Merrill Lynch. Not for anyone, at least as of this writing.

It's so much fun reading the newspapers these days. The Sarah surge continues to dominate all the political news, while the Palin-McCain -- er, McCain-Palin -- ticket is forging ahead in the polls.

On CNBC Wednesday night, Jack Welch, GE's CEO from that firm's salad days in the '80s and '90s, pointed out the dangers of a three-house Democratic sweep.

The No. 1 economic issue this election is gasoline prices at the pump. The tax-hike effect of surging oil on global markets that has translated to a huge spike at your local gas station has drained the economy of its vitality. It has damaged consumer purchasing power, made it tougher to pay mortgages on time, worsened the credit crunch, raised the inflation rate, undermined corporate profits and thrown stocks into the first bear market in five years.

There's no Obama-Biden bounce, according to the latest tracking polls. In fact, as of Wednesday morning, Scott Rasmussen reports a 47-46 one-point lead for John McCain. Gallup has the race even and indicates that conservative Democrats -- including married women -- are peeling away from Obama-Biden.

As Sen. John McCain and the GOP leadership nationalize the drill, drill, drill message, the Republican Party might conceivably be riding a summer political rally. The question of offshore drilling, along with expanded domestic energy production, has suddenly become the biggest political and economic wedge issue of this election. Is there a Republican tsunami in the making?