But … I’m about ready to discount this one.

Seriously, there isn’t a market for a Snoopy Snuggie, is there?

Many distinct sides to this equation: Can democracy prosper without detailed coverage of its inner workings? Does anyone care any more? Do news consumers want to be affirmed, rather than informed? Can the best interests of readers be preserved with government as an equity stakeholder in a journalistic organization?

Is it a good idea to have government as a stakeholder in journalism? Your thoughts?

Local banks continue to reassure us that they’ve been conservative with their commercial lending, and no such calamity awaits Wichita.

But it’s interesting to note how commercial lending has evolved, even in conservative Wichita: Even the region’s most accomplished developers are laboring to find credit for projects.

Those critics, who largely are justified because as taxpayers they’re equity partners, have reason to be heartened by the aggressive first steps announced by the new man in charge on the east bank, veteran Wichita entrepreneur Jack DeBoer.

A very sage developer told me years ago that there are two kinds of Wichitans: The people unafraid to act, and the people paralyzed by fear, more intent on pointing fingers.

Make no mistake about it: DeBoer falls into the first category, and his decision to pursue commercial traffic at WaterWalk is a decision playing very well, even with some of the project’s harshest critics in the local development industry.

DeBoer is a unique guy: A fountain of ideas, and a man who’s willing to crank out and try a dozen of them, secure in the knowledge that one or two are going to succeed.

Add to that his decision to retain Marlin Penner, the president and managing broker of NAI John T. Arnold Associates, to market the development’s commercial property. When you cover real estate, you learn quickly – and often by the hard way – whose word is gold and whose word isn’t worth the air it occupies. I’ve known Penner for 20 years, and he most assuredly falls into the former category.

I’m not here to tell you that DeBoer will succeed. I doubt that even Jack would be that presumptuous.

But I am here to tell you that his decision to shift focus to market-driven traffic down at the WaterWalk is the development’s best chance for success.

It’s time for the finger-pointing to stop. What went wrong at WaterWalk has been rehashed enough. Let’s sit back and watch a veteran entrepreneur at work.

It becomes a little more obvious, doesn’t it, why all the great verve to convince the easily fooled that commodities markets are governed by supply and demand? Greed.

I remain annoyed, frankly, that President Obama continues to fiddle while these scandals burn.

But as the article points out, the depths to which people have gone over the past 60 years to turn the commodities floor into a casino where only the ordinary man loses probably aren’t correctable in one presidential term.

Or two. Or three. Or four.

Chris Dodd, the day-late and dollar-long U.S. senator from UConn land, has stepped to the plate with a bill to freeze credit card rates immediately – a month or more after those moneychangers stepped out of their temples long enough to jack the rates up to loan sharking levels.

At the risk of causing the heads of all our free market pals to explode, Dodd’s bill, while doubtlessly well-intentioned (Editor’s note: Well-intentioned, meaning “a meaningless cosmetic action designed to fool the electorate into thinking we’ve done something”), is predictably dead on arrival in the Senate, where the poor, unfortunate banks – some of them flush with TARP funds – have convinced senators (read: sent contribution checks) they need more time to comply with the stringent new regulations (read: blast our card holders into bankruptcy to help cover our bad loans).

It evokes memories of President Obama’s pledge to reel in financial derivatives and oil speculators – which has now been quietly replaced by a Barney Frank bill to help both continue running amok.

As does my cynicism about this extremely belated piece of legislation from Sen. Dodd.

Funny how the nonsense about supply and demand has died down, isn’t it?

And we’re going to find out soon how much fastball Jack DeBoer has left, because the bases are loaded down there on the east bank and WaterWalk has nobody at all out. And the fans in the stands are hot under the collar, pointing fingers all the way.

DeBoer’s got a ton of challenges on his plate: The public’s angry about their investment and the lack of progress at the development, retailers and restaurateurs are running, not walking, from leases in this credit environment. His one retailer down there  has a front door pointing the wrong way.

And perhaps most significantly, as we’ve seen this week, the only support he’s going to get from City Hall – the same building where the 2003 budget cuts that doomed the project got their start – is moral. This city council certainly wants DeBoer to succeed. But they’re out of money.

City Manager Bob Layton on Friday professed his confidence in DeBoer, which is more than some of the city’s commercial development crowd voiced this week. Some fear that the development will fail, leaving a financially strapped City Hall on the hook for $41 million in infrastructure scheduled to be paid back by the tax revenues WaterWalk has yet to generate.

DeBoer is a brilliant man, a fountain of ideas that he maps out on his trademark legal pad.  He’ll need all of them to strike out the side down on the east bank.

But don’t bet against that happening quite yet. It’ll be fascinating to watch DeBoer’s work in the bottom of WaterWalk’s ninth inning.

There were several calls to action, including one from Mayor Carl Brewer, who said, “We cannot be intimidated.” Others called out Wichita blogger Bob Weeks and one near the front of the room, away from me, said bluntly, “We have to watch who we elect.”

Quite clearly, the information battle on downtown redevelopment has been joined. I’ll have more on the brainstorming sessions, including the focus on the anti-tax crowd, in Saturday’s Eagle.