*COMMENTARY By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN:* So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: You dont know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldnt be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home. Now you know why I dont get invited out for dinner much these days. If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we cant afford them. Forget the grandstands; we dont need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and lets swear in Barack Obama right now by choice with the same haste we did by necessity with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One. Unfortunately, it would take too long for a majority of states to ratify such an amendment. What we can do now, though, said the Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, co-author of The Broken Branch, is ask President Bush to appoint Tim Geithner, Barack Obama's proposed Treasury secretary, immediately. Make him a Bush appointment and let him take over next week. This is not a knock on Hank Paulson. Its simply that we cant afford two months of transition where the markets dont know who is in charge or where were going. At the same time, Congress should remain in permanent session to pass any needed legislation. This is the real Code Red. As one banker remarked to me: We finally found the W.M.D. They were buried in our own backyard sub prime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them. Yet, it is obvious that President Bush cant.
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