Going Blank

In a commercial for the local news team, there was a clip of a young woman talking about the government bailout. The sound bite they used was, and this is a direct quote, "They aren't just going to give them a 700-billion-dollar blank check." Now I pose to you, if the check has been written for $700 billion, is it blank? It seems that the idea of a blank check has gone beyond its original meaning to indicate an amount of money that is given without specification of how or where that money is to be spent. Supposedly, it's a large sum of money, but "large" is of course relative. The strange part, as far as I'm concerned, is that the local TV station chose to include this specific sound bite in the commercial, which probably airs a couple dozen times a day.