For a while it looked like the only two guys in Washington who wanted to flush another $350 billion down the unaccountable black hole of Hank Paulson's discretion were George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

President George W. Bush's (decided) Monday to act on Obama's behalf and ask Congress for access to the remaining $350 billion of the money Congress authorized to rescue the nation's financial sector.

What a beautiful bipartisan moment!

Meanwhile Democrats were promising to make the next $350 billion give-away much more transparent than the previous $350 billion give-away, which means about as much as saying that a peanut is much more massive than a subatomic particle.

What else could you do with a grand total of $700 billion, except give it away to the same sub-prime speculators who destroyed the American economy?

Well, since sub-prime mortgages comprise less than 7% of all mortgages in the United States, meaning 7% of $10 trillion, meaning $700 billion...

You could pay off all the sub-prime mortgages in the United States for the same amount of money that Bush/Obama are disappearing into an almost unaccountable give-away to financial speculators.

So why is it so much more bipartisan to give away $700 billion to financial speculators instead of (for example) erasing all the mortages that made this huge mess?

For Barack Obama, it's just a matter of paying his existential debt to Penny Pritzker, the Queen of Sub-Prime Banking who created him out of nothing.

But what is it for the rest of us?