It's not just me... it's nearly every other American

I'm not the only one bugging about the hideous new Bush plan to waste $700 billion (at least) on a Wall Street bailout that a growing number of economists are saying isn't even needed:

The Flick Filosopher - my Matron Saint of the Movies - is pretty pissed about it too.

She compares the current fiscal crisis to her own personal financial crisis of a few years back. Like the banks and investment firms had, she had put too much on credit and was facing massive debt. Bankruptcy loomed, she considered credit consolidators, and finally went with Option Three to knuckle down, work extra jobs, pay off her loans as best she could and stop living the high life on money she didn't have.

And now, she looks at these financial wizards, these CEOs and Captains of Industry who have created a massive Sh-tpile on Wall Street... and has no sympathy for them, and I completely agree with what she says:

I'm a good citizen. I literally help old ladies cross the street. I call police officers "sir" even when they look like they're 12 years old and I wonder if their mothers know they're out on the street playing with guns... and even when they're violating my civil rights with their warrantless, no-cause searches of my belongings in the subway. I replaced all the bad old-fashioned lightbulbs in my apartment with green low-wattage fluorescent ones. I recycle. I use mass transit, even though the fares keep going up and the service keeps getting worse and the trains keep getting more crowded.

I've adopted homeless animals, for Christ's sake.

And now, George W. Fucking Bush, after spending the last seven years wiping his ass with the Constitution, wants to finish his simultaneous looting of the American economy for his pals by taking $700 billion $1.8 trillion of money we never had for universal health care, better schools, researching new forms of low-carbon-emitting energy, cleaning up our environment, giving body armor to our soldiers and taking care of them once they come home, finding Osama Bin Laden, rebuilding Lower Manhattan, evacuating poor people from New Orleans, shoring up levees so New Orleans wouldn't have needed to be evacuated in the first place, curing AIDS and cancer, making college affordable for whomever wants to attend, creating an intercity train network that actually works, and a million other progressive things that would make life better for everyone, and give it to people who lied, cheated, stole, exercised poor judgment, and bitched about paying taxes on the small percentage of their ill-gotten gains that they weren't already hiding -- legally and illegally -- from the IRS. And he wants to give them this money with no oversight, no transparency, not even any demands that it be used in any particular way.

It's not just me. And it's not just her. The last two days at the library where I work, nearly every patron has griped about the bailout, griped about the corporate overlords who are about to take more money they didn't earn, griped about how unfair the whole scam is turning out to be.

The best thing I can tell people, I can tell you: stay angry. Please contact every elected official you have. Please rant to them that you want accountability. Please remind them that these people they're about to give money to are crooks and liars and incompetents. Please remind them that you have the power to vote their lazy asses out of office if they fail to hold Bush and his Wall Street buddies accountable for what has happened these past 8 years.

PLEASE. DO IT NOW!