In trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a $700 Billion bailout for Wall Street, I remembered a folksy rule of thumb from a long-ago astronomy lecture: one billion is roughly the number of grains of sand that will fit in the trunk of a car. That's one billion. You need to multiply that by 700 to get where we need to go. Now, take one dollar for each of the grains of sand in the trunks of those 700 cars and turn it all over to the Secretary of the Treasury, to do whatever the heck he wants, with absolutely no oversight or control by any branch of government. Seriously. Read the proposed legislation:

Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Yes. He can do whatever he wants. With 700 Billion dollars. Is that the Republican ideal of small government? Breathtaking.

For your consideration, the number 700 billion:

• Would take you more than 21,000 years to count out loud, if you started right now. (assuming you count real fast and don't die.)
• Equals 3.5 times the total number of pennies in circulation.
• Would be equivalent to about 3 Milky-Way galaxies worth of stars
• Is roughly the number of neurons in seven human brains

Update: Looks like I wasn't the only one doing the math. Electricgrendel at DailyKos points out $700B would be over 7,000 tons of $100 bills. And believe me. You want this in large bills. Unmarked, and no dye pack in the bag, thank you, now make it snappy before anyone realizes the joint is being robbed. Just palletize it and load up those trucks there...yeah, the ones with "FEMA" hastily painted over and the logo of the "Big Bag O' Crap Resolution Trust" stenciled on...