OK, I was wrong. Really wrong. I was sure politicians would approve this bailout bill, no matter how publicly unpopular it was. The short-term risks of not doing something seemed too enormous - a complete freeze of the credit markets and the subsequent collapse of the economic system that relies so heavily on that free flow of credit.

We've been told for so long that everything is OK with the economy. Nothing to see here, they've said. McCain calls the economy fundamentally strong; his economic adviser calls the American people a bunch of whiners; Greenspan says we are nearing the bottom of the housing meltdown; Barney Frank dismisses the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as overstated.

It astounds me, but my 'Please Fire Linehan' post from two weeks ago is still getting the most traffic on my blog. It seems people care a lot more about a crappy football coach on a crappy football team than the potential collapse of the stock market and U.S. economy ... Seems about right to me!

The SEC has banned short-selling on financial stocks. The Treasury has guaranteed money market funds and is cooking up plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy distressed assets and save troubled banks. The market has rebounded huge, taking back all of this month's losses.

So are we all clear??

Hardly.