A Mandate To Loot

Allow me to introduce you to the independent oversight board charged with monitoring the $700 billion bailout.

You want me to appoint some folks, you shiftless Congressional layabouts. You make me sick:

In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury's massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country's largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.

Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.

Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

So let me get this straight: We now approach 50% of the initial bailout fund - the big block of stinky government cheese - dispatched into the financial markets (and car markets, and insurance markets, and perhaps the credit card markets, I hear Spencer Gifts just received aid to bolster its dwindling lava lamp inventory) without a single overseer appointed, without a single status report filed?

F**k it, let's loot the coffers! "Yeah, no cops!":