A selection of comments excerpted from other editorial pages regarding the national economic crisis.

Thursday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The president gave a forceful, if necessarily abbreviated, explanation of the crisis. Had he delivered this speech last Friday when he introduced the plan, he might have muted some of the criticism of it.

Thursday’s Washington Post:

Beyond its price tag, there are two legitimate concerns about the plan, both amenable to compromise at the White House talks. The first issue is ensuring that taxpayers do not get fleeced. By its nature, the plan asks government to pay above-market prices; the whole point is that no market exists for most of these securities at the moment. Congress and the Bush administration should create an option for the Treasury to take equity in institutions to ensure more taxpayer protection.

The second issue is oversight and accountability. Seeking maximum flexibility, Mr. Paulson asked for all-but-unreviewable power; Congress rightly recoiled. But there are other ways of making sure that the program runs honestly and efficiently without subjecting it to lawsuits or microscopic review by multiple federal agencies. As the president hinted Wednesday night, a control board, with full access to Treasury’s books and chaired by a figure of unquestioned integrity such as former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, could do the job. Many in Congress, along with the presidential candidates, want to limit the pay of executives whose institutions get federal relief, and Mr. Paulson this week agreed that “we must find a way to address this.”

Wednesday’s Kansas City Star:

Even as administration officials themselves were still revising the plan, they were sternly warning lawmakers that tinkering with the plan would be courting complete catastrophe.

This hard sell of a flawed plan rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and not just on the left side of the political spectrum. Allan Meltzer, a former economic adviser to President Reagan, scoffed at what he called the “scare tactics,” which he labeled “terrible.”

Yes, Congress should move quickly. But fixing the financial system has to involve more than simply allowing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to throw huge amounts of money at whomever and whatever he wants. It doesn’t help that he is a former CEO at Goldman Sachs with some potential conflict-of-interest issues.

The need for checks and balances in this situation should have been obvious. Yet the administration has squandered valuable time pushing its familiar mantra: We must have unchecked authority or we can’t do the job right.