Looks like the Senate got sick of waiting for the House to get its act together. From Harry Reid's office:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tonight announced a unanimous consent agreement to move forward on legislation to stabilize the economy, provide middle class tax relief, create jobs, and invest in alternative energy. Tomorrow evening, the Senate will vote on a package consisting of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, Senate-passed tax extenders, and an increase in federal coverage of bank deposits to $250,000.

“Senate Democrats and Republicans believe it is essential that we work quickly on this important legislation to restore confidence to our financial system and strengthen the economy,” Reid said. “We have worked in a bi-partisan way to do so, and it is my hope that with the improvements we have made to the Administration's proposal, the Senate will pass this legislation tomorrow and the House of Representatives will follow suit soon thereafter. I believe that this legislative package will ensure that the needs of Main Street are not forgotten.”

I'm told the bill will likely pass the Senate even though it will have to garner 60 votes, which means the hurdle remains the House.

I'm still waiting to hear if the ‘Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,' is identical to the bill the House failed to pass Monday. But, I'm told that with Chris Cox's mark-to-market changes today, the addition of the FDIC ceiling increase and the popular $100 billion tax extenders, the bill should win enough GOP votes to pass the House. “We think [it] will have substantial appeal to House Republicans,” said one GOP House leadership aide. “Boehner was consulted and gave the green light.”

The tax extenders are a hodge-podge of business tax measures that include the annual Alternative Minimum Tax fix, energy tax incentives, extensions of expiring tax cuts, including a popular R&D credit essential to many businesses, and a mental health parity measure that requires providers of health insurance to include mental health coverage. The mental health bill has passed the House before and becomes the Senate vehicle upon which everything is loaded. By constitutional mandate all tax bills must originate in the House but by attaching it to a bill that has already passed the House, that rule is circumvented and the mental health bill is so old it's original cosponsors were Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici. Gotta love the irony that this is all on the back of keeping American workers sane.

The Senate passed the tax extenders last week 93-2 but the measure has had problems in the House because the Blue Dogs don't like that they are only half paid for. Pelosi could lose some blue dogs with this move, but apparently will gain enough GOP votes to pass the measure. Though, Boehner has green-lighted things before, and look how that turned out…

From TIME's Amy Sullivan:

I'd missed this, but apparently Sarah Palin has taken to joking on the campaign trail that she's been listening to Joe Biden's speeches since she was a second-grader. The point, according to what she tells Katie Couric in a segment to air tonight, is to highlight the choice voters have in November between the new and the old:

"So he's got a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, I'm the new energy, the new face, the new ideas and he's got the experience based on many many years in the Senate and voters are gonna have a choice there of what it is that they want in these next four years."

Okay. Shelving for the moment the question of whether age should be fair game in politics and setting aside the fact that if you read Palin's statement above she could easily be talking about either Biden or McCain... Does it make sense to frame the election as a choice between experience and change when your running mate is the old Washington hand taking on the young new upstart? (And McCain, by the way, is 25 years older than Obama, while Biden has 21 years on Palin.)

If she's using this line on the stump, this isn't Palin going off the reservation. But I'll be darned if I can see the point of it. Maybe there are voters out there willing to support the GOP ticket because they value newness over experience when it comes to Palin but not with Obama. I'm not sure all three of them will swing the election, though.

I know I'm late getting to this:

The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.

After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

Leaving aside the whole unable-to-discuss horror (and, seriously, anyone who's watched more than one episode of "Law and Order" should at least get "Miranda"), her response makes me wonder if she'll employ the "total silence" technique in tomorrow's debate. And how much we'd have to pay Biden to do the same.

And then Palin can take herself off the ticket, to be replaced by John Cage.

As is often the case in situations like these, I'm finding that the lobbyists I talk to have a far keener understanding of the state of play of this financial bailout package than anyone else at the moment. The trade associations, in particular, are working this one very hard, as their members are saying they are already feeling the effects of the bill's failure in very real ways: no credit for basic necessities like meeting payroll and buying inventory, customers in automobile showrooms who can't get loans, that kind of thing.

For many lawmakers, voting against the bill yesterday was the most cynical kind of move. They figured that it was going to pass, so a "no" vote was essentially a free shot. They could tell their infuriated constituents: "Well, it wasn't my fault.." Calls from constituents are still running heavily against the bill (and take note of Jay Newton-Small's item below about the email servers crashing on the Hill), but the lobbyists are hearing some softening in the congressional offices they are calling. Yesterday, the aides they talked to were telling them: "My boss says not only no, but hell no." Today, it's more like: "He really can't see a way to changing his vote..." Hint, hint.

So what might bring them around? That, of course, is the hard part. The problem is that every move that might bring aboard a few Democratic votes (giving bankruptcy judges power to reset the terms of mortgages, adding an economic stimulus package) loses Republican ones. And the opposite is true for measures that might bring a few GOP votes, such as tossing in a few new tax breaks. Two things, however, do seem to be gaining bipartisan momentum: raising the limits of insured deposits to $250,000 and changing accounting rules, so that banks don't have to mark down the assets on their books to market value.

UPDATE: Commenter ny nick is skeptical about these reports that credit is drying up and asks: Where's the evidence to back this up?

Here's how our colleague Barbara Kiviat describes the situation at the moment.

If I were on the Obama campaign, I'd be more concerned about the sensitivities of our seasoned citizens voters if I didn't hear so many jokes about McCain's age from, you know, McCain.

First there were hundreds of calls. Now sources tell me that the House website has been crashing since yesterday afternoon as groups from the left and right have launched “write your rep” campaigns opposing the bill while business groups have started similar pushes to support the measure. Just in case there's a member left with no inkling: there're a lot of people upset by the bill and the vote.

The McCain campaign has released a 60-second ad that uses Bill Clinton's words to pin the blame for the mortgage crisis on Democrats. The link to Obama is tenuous -- and nowhere does the ad acknowledge the fact that Fannie and Freddie were not the primary causes of the broader crisis -- but it could undercut Democratic arguments that Bush and the Republicans are primarily responsible. One imagines this is not the kind of help the Obama campaign was hoping to get from the former president. Here's the ad, which the campaign claims will air "nationally":

TIME's James Poniewozik takes apart the latest act of journalism that CBS News's Katie Couric has committed on Sarah Palin. This time, McCain tagged along, and the results were only a little bit better. An excerpt:

Let's be fair: John McCain and Sarah Palin weren't claiming that a question from a voter was "gotcha journalism." They were claiming that for Katie Couric to have the temerity to take Palin's answer to a voter seriously was "gotcha journalism." That, of course, makes all the difference.

Some weeks back, Barack Obama's communications chief Robert Gibbs joked without any prompting that John McCain might have "misplaced the keys" to his houses. Hardy Har Har.

This morning on MSNBC, Gibbs returned to the make-fun-of-the-elderly joke well. "Just yesterday, John McCain said we shouldn't fix blame. He took a breath and then fixed blame. He said the fundamentals of our economy are strong, and he flip-flopped. He opposed the bail-out of AIG, and then he supported it. This guy zig-zags. Look, if he's driving a car, get off the sidewalk." (Video here.)

Hardy Har Har. Back in the 2004 presidential election, one in four voters was 60 years old or older. I am sure they find these sort of jokes from Obama's top message man hilarious. Just hilarious.

Here's what happened and the latest on the talks, or rather lack thereof. I'm starting to feel like we're in a Royal Bank of Scotland commercial, only there's no one who actually saves the day. And, of course, RBS's plate is full right now.