Toothless Bailout Oversight:

When the bailout was proposed, congress postured with a lot of talk about oversight. Today's Washington Post reports a congressional aide as saying, "It's sort of a joke in terms of oversight." There is a board that includes Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, but the five member Financial Stability Oversight Board has no staff. In other words, it's like having a prosecutor with no police department. You can't send any crooks to jail if there's no one to catch them.

It Ain't Sci-Fi:

"A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations" The New York Times reported in today's late edition.

It might sound like the latest Steven King thriller, straight from a Hollywood back lot, but it's a description of what's going on in Asia. According to the report, a brown layer of haze is sometimes more than a mile thick and has drifted at times as far as California.

Such clouds of pollution sometimes emanate from the U.S., Latin America, and Africa as well, but none of this bodes well for the planet, regardless of where they derive from.