The fearful are crushed and bereft. Few can afford gold at $900 an ounce.

Still, the sense in Washington is of urgency, that the $1 trillion stimulus will work -- simply has to.

Can you identify any effort to stabilize the dollar? Can you identify any Democratic proposal for meaningful tax cuts? We are heaping debt upon debt -- and inviting wreckage. Somebody -- some generation -- supposedly will have to repay these obligations. Yet even with $700 billion in emergency funds last fall, and the $1 trillion now, the Obama administration is contemplating $2 trillion in additional "emergency" spending.

So, you're saying the sky is falling?

No -- it has fallen. Globally. The desolation is everywhere.

And you don't have faith in those set in authority over us to fix it?

Nowhere -- in anything -- has the candidate of "reform," now the nation's president, ever shown himself to be a true reformer. Do you have faith in the abilities of a John Kerry who views the election of Obama as the country's singular historical event in the past 230 years? Do you have faith in the abilities of his Senate colleague Dick Durbin, who declaimed before voting to seat Roland Burris (nominated by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to succeed Obama in the Senate): "No appointment by this governor under these circumstances could produce a credible replacement"?

Do you have any faith in the willingness of these leftists -- restyled self-servingly as "moderates" -- to practice selfless bipartisanship in the interest of national economic salvation?

The other day The Washington Post headlined its lead story, "Economic Signs Turn From Bad to Worse." Any parting thoughts?

In those signs, we should be discerning several things: That the hottest incomprehensible fads -- like derivatives and subprime lending and Enron-like practices -- are shams. That from Wall Street to K Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, from Bernard Madoff to the U.S. Congress to Social Security, a Ponzi scheme is a Ponzi scheme -- even the jazziest federal scheme to clean up the mess caused by the last failed scheme.

Oh, and that Shakespeare was spot-on when he said in "Richard III," "This is the winter of our discontent" -- for truly it is.