Sorry to go three in a row (or is it three and out?), but I did want to add one more thing...

While I am not a member of the STFU crowd, I do want to say that I am curious how this opening attempt at launching "Ask a Wingnut" made it past the editorial process. It truly is incredibly weak.

I'd have expected an editor presented with this opening stab to tell the author to go back and try again. About the only reason I could see which might explain why that didn't happen is that the editor(s), either consciously or unconsciously, hoped that this experiment would fall flat on its face. If so, this was a good way to start.

...and begin holding Obama to account? Bush is gone. Democrats control both houses of congress. What is the excuse?

Can people really still be pushing the 11th dimensional chess theory? Can they really believe that Obama is so superior to us mere mortals that we are simply incapable of understanding the game he is playing?

I reject all of that. And I salute Glenn Greenwald.

Sir, you deserved that Izzy. Keep speaking truth to power. Maybe some will listen. God, I sure hope so.

I think Mr. Leonard is taking the wrong thing from the sentence ("If its assumptions are correct, Treasury's current approach may prove a reasonable response to the current crisis.") he's reading. Elizabeth Warren is openly skeptical of TARP/Gaulson and has been openly critical of the bailout bonuses. She and most others who have looked at this thing without being somehow beholden to Wall Street know that TARP/Gaulson puts the cart before the horse.

Which came first, the meltdown in housing or the meltdown in finance? Answer: Housing.

Why did housing melt down? Answer: It was in a bubble and the bubble popped.

Why did the bubble pop? Answer: Because they ran out of buyers when defaults arising from the utter lack of credit underwriting began. And when defaults began, they had to start actually underwriting. And when they did underwriting, there were no new buyers. And to keep a bubble inflated, you need a source of inflation. And that source was gone.

Why did buyers default? Answer: The most fundamental reason is not even part of the real estate or financing equation. It's foundational. The reason people began defaulting is because they were paying too much (buying in a bubble) and were being paid too little. Real wages have stagnated or declined for years and the finance system's answer to that was to create EZ financing (which made it possible to buy stuff you can't really afford) and asset bubbles (which gave people the illusion of wealth.)

The TARP/Gaulson plan wants to go back to the days of EZ credit and asset bubbles. They want to pour money in the top and try to put a new roof on a house that has crumbling walls and a crumbling foundation. Sorry, but you have to fix the foundation first, otherwise the new roof is just gonna fall down with the rest of it.

Elizabeth Warren is a smart cookie. She knows the TARP/Gaulson plan stinks. She's just professional in how she says it.

If people really want to get a handle on where we are, they should start by educating themselves. Chris Martenson's Crash Course is an excellent place to start. Copy and paste the link or click my sig.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

Salon has a long standing discussion community called Table Talk. All through the Bush years, people I thought of as living-in-the-real-world progressives spent time evaluating what was going on, decrying it and posting excerpts and links to civil libertarians (like Glenn Greenwald) who were helping to expose and explain what was going on. Now?

Now when those of us who maintain the exact same principled stance as before on things like habeus corpus, state secrets, warrantless wiretapping etc. post links and excerpts to news of the new administration, we are labeled trolls, or told we hate Obama, or, even weirder, things like "Hillary lost. Get over it!"

It's a through-the-looking-glass kind of experience. I am left wondering sometimes if I am reading a forum dominated by progressives, or if I have mistakenly clicked over to RedState or The Free Republic and everywhere it says Obama, it really means Bush.

The Obama thread on Salon's Table Talk is here:

http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.773dbcf4

The "Constitutional Crisis: Bush Spies on Americans" thread is here:

http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.773b6390

I invite people to go to those links and read back several weeks or even months. It isn't pretty. It's...like a cult...that is so "convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that they will believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good."

As I said on Table Talk, I put my faith in no man. I put my faith in the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law. My country comes before any party, any candidate or any leader. Always.

I read the first installment of this column in the belief that it was meant to be taken seriously. The first was so bad that I figured there was nowhere to go but up. But now I get it. It's a joke. It's an unfunny joke (or more accurately, satire) but it's a joke none the less. 'Cause if it isn't a joke...well...I can't begin to ponder the implications of what it means if the editors and the writer mean for this "column" to be taken seriously as some form of exposition on conservative thought.