Noted.

PAGING JON STEWART: Of course it was fun to watch the meltdown smackdown where The Daily Show's Jon Stewart grilled CNBC corporate cheerleader Jim Cramer for pitching "snake oil as vitamin tonic." Stewart was doing what journalists are supposed to do, calling out a "business news" huckster with the admonition: "Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months--the entire network was. So now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming was disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

You could almost hear the collective cry of "Yes! Finally!" ACORN hailed Stewart for "taking on the banks, speculators and financial commentators who caused this economic crisis" and especially for saying it was "insane" to blame mortgage holders. Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee launched a campaign to "Fix CNBC!" with a call to hire hosts who actually know something about economics.

But let's not stop with CNBC. What was so refreshing about Stewart's interview was the unrelenting, unapologetic demand for personal and institutional accountability for the commentators who threw gasoline on the fire. But what about the guys who started the fire? During the Great Depression, Congress called bankers and brokers--including J.P. Morgan himself--before investigative committees and forced them to come clean. That's how legislators figured out how to regulate the speculators and protect working Americans from the robber barons' greed seventy-five years ago.

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