Salon's Mike Madden asks, "Dude, where's my $700 billion?

Now, even the people who designed the bailout say they're not happy about it. In the rush to action they didn't place enough controls on how the administration doled out the money, or what the institutions did with it once they got it. They also acquiesced to a one-sentence change requested by the Bush team that effectively protected the massive pay of Wall Street execs. "I don't think there's any way, under these circumstances, the administration would be able to get the resources," Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, told reporters Friday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reduced to scolding Bush and Paulson after the fact for their failure to use the money to help homeowners. "It was very clearly spelled out in the initial legislation that funds would be used for mortgage foreclosure forbearance," she said Monday. "It wasn't until ... we intensified the provisions that related to keeping people in their homes that this legislation even passed the House of Representatives. But it's been totally ignored by the administration. Absolutely nothing has been done to respect that part of the legislation, which is the only part of the legislation that had support in the Congress and enabled it to pass and become law."

Oh noes! No one could have predicted that the "administration" would totally ignore key parts of this (or any other of hundreds of pieces of legislation) and do absolutely nothing to respect them, even if they're the only parts of the legislation that had support in the Congress and enabled it to pass and become law!

This is one sorry $&%#ing statement, folks.

Oversight has been absolutely for shit in this Congress, and everyone and their mother knows it. What's the point in pretending you're shocked about this?

Please. The eventual failure of the "administration" to honor the intent of the legislation, or to acknowledge the prerogatives of the Congress in setting policy statutorily was never in doubt, and was as plain and obvious to any observer as could possibly be imagined.

Don't let anyone tell you the consequences of the FISA capitulation were isolated and confined to the particular situation.

The door was open for anything once we adopted the position that the executive is unrestrainable and unreviewable. Things like... $700 billion bailouts with no possibility of court review, for instance.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Abdication of oversight responsibility is abdication of oversight responsibility. The fact that it's cash money at stake versus abstract rights doesn't change that. Neither genie goes back in the bottle easily.

And in reality, there's only one genie.

By the way, does anyone actually know what provisions there are in the law (as though they would be worth referencing, at this point) that allow us to check and see that the money isn't simply being stolen? I mean that literally, although if you're a certified Very Serious Person^TM and require this kind of cover in order to agree to give the matter your Very Serious attention, I'm willing to accommodate you by calling the theft "retention bonuses" instead. What kind of accounting do the banks who got this money -- $15 billion for Bank of America, $45 billion for Citigroup, $3.5 billion to Capital One, nearly $6.6 billion to U.S. Bancorp, according to Madden -- have to provide to us about what actually happens to it?

Hell, at this point, I almost do hope it's all just literally been stolen. God only knows what it's going to take to wake the Congress up to the fact that they're eight years behind the curve on understanding how these guys play the game.

In light of the Madoff scandal -- and really, just about everything else the "administration" has ever touched -- can anyone really afford to dismiss the "givens" anymore? That's what got us here in the first place. And by "here," I should be understood to mean having watched the entire world economic system teeter on the brink of collapse (during what was supposedly the most pro-business "administration" in history, mind you), watching the manufacturing backbone of the country teeter on the brink of collapse, watching the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world stretched to the point of collapse, having watched a major U.S. city collapse without even the hint of organized federal assistance, having watched the post-WWII international legal order collapse, having watched the post-Watergate domestic surveillance regime collapse, and a ton of other crap I'm too aggravated to bother organizing my thoughts about right now, too.

Let's face it. At this point, no question is too dumb to ask about something, well... something this dumb.