Can we Please Bailout on the Bailout?

I was starting to chill on the financial bailout a bit. Partly because it looked like they were improving the plan from frighteningly bad to merely bad, and partly because of just what they were counting on, inertia and laziness. Well, with the changes to the AIG deal that have been made, and the refusal to have transparency in the plan, I am back to being 100% deadset against it. This is straight out corporate welfare, end of regime looting, crony capitalism, banana republic emulating transfers of wealth to the major financial players. I do not trust Hank Paulson or Ben Bernanke; they've used up all the benefit of the doubt that they were entitled to. If you want more in-depth analysis of the economics, Yves Smith has a superb post. More philosophically, go to Waldman. Also, if you have the time (they're both over an hour), Arnold Kling on EconTalk (Talk 1, Talk 2) provides excellent background to the situation; you can benefit from listening to #1, or #2, or both.

I don't know what (if anything) we can do to stop this atrocity from going forward, but please at least take from this that we have to always be extremely skpetical (to the point of being obnoxious) of any expansion of government power.