Stock markets rebounded this morning with the news that the US Treasury and Federal Reserve are taking action to shore up struggling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the dominant providers of funding for home mortgages in the US. Federal regulators are temporarily opening their so-called discount lending window to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We speak with Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight, an economic analysis firm. For two months this summer, U.S. and coalition troop deaths in Afghanistan surpassed casualties in Iraq, raising questions about the strength of the Taliban and the NATO forces fighting them. Anna Mulrine, a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report just spent a month with U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan and joins us to talk about what she saw. This month, commissioners in Cook County, Illinois voted to raise the county's sales tax by a full percentage point - up to 10.25%. The county now has among the nation's highest sales tax rate. Th Less