Run For Your Life

Barack Obama reportedly wants to cut spending on new military technology, jack up the capital gains tax and put Al Gore in a top cabinet position.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is already improving our image abroad.

The Bosnian girl who famously read a poem to Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 1996 visit to the war-torn country is shocked - and her countrymen infuriated - that the former first lady claimed to have dodged sniper fire that day.

Emina Bicakcic, now 20 and studying to become a doctor, told The Post she stood on the tarmac at the air base in Tuzla, greeted Clinton and even had time to share the lines of verse she'd written - all without fear of attack from an unseen enemy.

Sema Markovic, 22, a student, said she has long respected Hillary as a strong leader but was angered by her remarks.

"It is an ugly thing for a politician to tell lies,' she said. "We had problems for years, and I don't like when someone lies about them. It makes us look bad."

Now, Bill says she tried to join the Army after law school. Who are they kidding with this?

Only the superdelegates have the wisdom to choose between these two mighty titans of the "progressive" movement.

A Valid Point

Truckers want their cut.

With the price of diesel fuel reaching record highs, independent truckers today stood together protesting the companies they contract with, saying that while those companies are charging fuel surcharges on their freight, they are not sharing that increase with drivers.

Freight rates have not risen in years, the truckers said, even though the price of fuel has quadrupled.

This is a valid issue, and it's true even for smaller haulers. A member of my family contracts for a regional newspaper and has the same problem, just driving a minivan. Fuel prices have gone up dramatically in terms of nominal dollars, but the per-mile compensation has not. It creates, to put it gently, a financial challenge.

Market analysts say the rising diesel fuel prices are reflected in the increased cost for goods at the supermarket and department stores. Virtually everything that reaches the shelves today at one point is transported by truck.

Santiago said he transports everything from ice cream to scrap metal.

"We just can't take it anymore," he said. "We are prepared to strike until the rates are raised."

Just how long that will be remains uncertain. One trucker played a recording over his cell phone he said was from his company's dispatcher who said if he didn't show up for work, he would not be getting any jobs for the rest of the week.

"They're threatening us," said Julio Rodriguez, who showed a pay stub that said he was paid just less than $300 last week.

Unfortunately, the real issue still isn't quite clear to everyone:

In western Michigan, independent trucker William Gentry had been scheduled to pick up a load and take it to Boston, but his dispatcher told him there was a change of plans.

"She told me that her shipper was shutting down," fearing that someone would sabotage deliveries if their drivers worked during the protest, Gentry said at the Tulip City Truck Stop outside Holland, Mich.

"If something isn't done about fuel prices, the cost of consumer goods will shoot up, Gentry said. "People aren't seeing that the more we pay, the more they're going to pay," he said.

Gentry is mistaken. Lots of people see it, but the fact is, there's nothing for them to do about it.

As high as they are, American fuel prices are still very competitive with the rest of the Western world. Refineries in America, like in most of the world, are pushed to their limit, and existing regulations and taxes seem almost deliberately designed to deter fuel companies from investing in new ones. In turn, the existing refineries are increasingly ancient and unreliable, leaving us with frequent outages and, as a result, unpredictable supplies. Demand for diesel is skyrocketing worldwide, but supplies are not keeping up, and in America, when oil companies start turning higher profits because of that demand (precisely the kind of thing that might encourage them to expand their capacity and grow), the first instinct of government is to take that money away from them and flush it down the toilet of "alternative energy solutions" like corn ethanol. Appendix C of this 2003 Energy Information Administration study seems to make it pretty clear that this stupid game is quite a bit more profitable for government than it is for the oil industry.

One potentially viable alternative is coal liquefaction, something that has finally attracted military attention, but still frightens Congressional Democrats because of their apparent blood oath to the enviro-cultists.

"We're going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there's three times as much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves," said Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson. "Guess what? We're going to burn coal."

"We don't want new sources of energy that are going to make the greenhouse gas problem even worse," House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said in a recent interview.

Waxman's starry-eyed wishes aside, fossil fuels are, in fact, reality. The infrastructure is largely in place, and coal liquefaction will be an inevitable step, because as long as there is coal in the ground, there are going to be people looking for a way to burn it. However, it faces many of the same obstacles as improving our existing refining capacity, in that it requires a massive capital advancement and years of work to get underway. Of course, the development of the industry, one that has a high probability of proving viable where the "environmentally-friendly" technologies promise to wreck world markets for resources like iron and corn, would be a tremendous boon for large parts of the country and for the American economy.

So, which is more likely?

A) In a moment of lucidity, Congress and state legislatures will come together to ignore frantic leftist shrieking about "corporate interests" and pseudo-scientific enviro-cultism to pave the way for the construction of new oil refineries and coal liquefaction plants, thereby helping to secure the future.

B) Congress and the state legislatures will do exactly what they've been doing, and saddled with a finite supply of fuel, consumers will continue to drive prices up until it motivates them to change their behavior and thus reduce consumption, thereby stabilizing the price at some needlessly high level for the foreseeable future.

Everybody gets two guesses.

The sad part, of course, is that those behavior changes won't just mean that consumers will choose motorcycles, mass transit, and urban lifestyles over 40 mile commutes in an H3, it will also mean that people like Gentry may find themselves out of a job. Trucking is not a particularly efficient means of freight transportation, and both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have seen fit to buy into railroads. There's a reason for this, and as capital is expended to improve the railroad infrastructure to accommodate increasing demands, you can eventually expect high-speed passenger rail to follow, filled with passengers abandoning the already heavily-subsidized short-haul routes of ailing airlines, who will eventually break under the same pressures that are hurting the trucking industry.

As for the newspapers, well, they've been having a rough time of it already.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The cost of delivery skyrocketing and the profitability of doing so collapsing? Gee, I wonder what will happen.

Update: Reader Thrill notes that a refinery "outage" can be a bit euphemistic.


Behold, our infrastructure.

Nobody Expects the Feminist Inquisition

Do not mock feminists, because their delicate female emotions can't handle it.

In early 2008, Colorado College's "Feminist and Gender Studies Interns" distributed a flyer called "The Monthly Rag." The flyer included a reference to "male castration," an announcement about a lecture on "feminist porn" by a "world-famous prostitute and porn star," an explanation of "packing" (pretending to have a phallus), and a quotation from The Bitch Manifesto.

As a parody of "The Monthly Rag," Robinson and a second student, who wishes to remain nameless, distributed a flyer in February called "The Monthly Bag" under the pseudonym "The Coalition of Some Dudes." The flyer included references to "chainsaw etiquette," the shooting range of a sniper rifle, a quotation regarding a sexual position from the website menshealth.com, and a quotation about "female violence and abuse" of men from the website batteredmen.com.

Shortly thereafter, Colorado College President Richard F. Celeste sent out a campus-wide email about "The Monthly Bag," stating that "The flyers include threatening and demeaning content, which is categorically unacceptable in this community... Anonymous acts meant to demean and intimidate others are not [welcome]." The e-mail asked the authors of "The Monthly Bag" to come forward. When they did less than an hour later, they were charged with violating the college's values of respect and integrity.

They are now being asked to present themselves before some kind of campus forum to "discuss the issues raised". Celeste, presumably long since castrated himself, seems to have detected some sort of implicit threat in a discussion of "chainsaw etiquette" that could not be found in a reference to "the fear of male castration".

Of course, as we've learned from the University of Delaware's little brainwashing program, militant feminists can't be responsible for their own bizarre prejudices, because they "do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination". Except when they're dragging their opponents to a witch trial, of course.

Job For Sale

A terrible specter looms over Illinois:

The decision won't have to be made for almost a year, if at all. But speculation already is rampant in Springfield about who Gov. Rod Blagojevich would appoint to fill Sen. Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat if Obama leaves it for the presidency (or vice-presidency) in January 2009.

Possibilities include U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Chicago, Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, or state Sen. James Clayborne, D-Belleville, any of whom would maintain Illinois' position as home to the nation's only black senator.

Or he could turn to state Attorney General Lisa Madigan or state Comptroller Dan Hynes, on the premise that these are people Blagojevich wouldn't mind sending to another time zone.

Blagojevich could even appoint himself.

Most Illinoisans wouldn't mind seeing Blagojevich sent to another time zone, but only on a rail.

"I'm not sure my imagination is broad enough to encompass all the things that he might do," said Charles Wheeler, director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield. "...He's really not a very predictable fellow."

My prediction? The new Senator would be a close associate of a major Blagojevich campaign donor, and probably on the short list for a federal indictment.

When Rezko wanted something done, the Blagojevich administration leaped into action to make it happen, Levine marveled in a 2004 telephone conversation secretly recorded by federal agents.

"I have never been in a better position than I am right now," Levine bragged to a contractor he was shaking down for a $1 million kickback. "Part of the reason is because there's never been such tight control of the central apparatus. This guy is making decisions . . . and can get anything done that he wants done."

"Nobody could have done this but me," Levine boasted to a business partner on April 21, 2004, after fixing a vote of a state regulatory panel to approve a controversial Crystal Lake hospital project. The bribe from the contractor, which Levine said he planned to split with Rezko, was contingent on board approval of the planned Mercy Hospital.

The arbitrary exercise of absolute political power and a pull-based economy. It's as American as brie.

Things Ayn Rand Was Right About

Any Scottish bureaucrat who is surprised by this revelation lives in a fantasy world:

Our investigation has found that every day dozens of police officers are being tied up probing fraudulent robbery reports by people seeking crisis loans from the benefits agency.

The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), which handed out £98 million in crisis loans in 2006-7, last night said it was "concerned" about the volume of fake crime claims - and revealed a review of the crisis loans scheme has been launched to clamp down on the fraudsters.

One senior officer told The Scotsman that investigating a fake robbery claim can waste around 100 police hours, with officers having to seek witnesses, check CCTV and interview the "victim".

That means that in five forces, up to 80,000 police hours - which should be spent preventing and detecting real crime - were last year checking out bogus allegations ending in charges against the complainer.

That is the equivalent of about 45 police officers in the five forces dealing with nothing but false crime claims.

Crisis loans are interest-free loans given by the government to assist people claiming to be in distress, and the process for getting them was recently eased. Coincidentally, nearly 15% of recent robberies and violent crimes reported in Edinburgh are believed to be fraudulent.

The Chicago Way

IMAO's interpretation of the Obama Speech.

One of the crowd shouted, "We love you Obama!"

"I love you too, press," Obama said. "Now, it's time to talk about the important issue of race. As you see, I have my grandmother with me..." He pointed to his grandmother behind him who smiled and waved to the press. "...a horrible ignorant white racist."

"What! Why you little--"

Heh.

Update: Ouch.

A Long Tradition of Consistent Misrepresentation

The New York Times, pretending that climate change is a product of our time since 1890.

The Surge

Politico.com's David Paul Kuhn cites Pew Research:

According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans - a slim majority - now believe "the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals" in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.

The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going "very well" or "fairly well" is also up, from 30 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent today.

As I wrote after the 2006 election, the far left imagines that our presence in Iraq is a controversial issue. It isn't. What ordinary voters are concerned about is the success or failure of our presence there, and even that is, interpreted generously, a secondary issue.

The key point here is that backing a complete withdrawal is only sensible to a voter who believes that there is little or no chance for our mission to succeed. In turn, both Clinton and Obama face an intractable problem, in that both candidates have renounced the war effort entirely. They have endorsed failure as the only solution, and are now officially running against the trend on the one issue they really thought they had traction on.

On the issue that is actually at the forefront of the minds of Americans, the economy, the Democrats are leaning heavily on what Extreme Wisdom's Bruno Behrend quite adequately referred to as "the mindless idiot vote".

Update: More bad news for Democrats:

In a sign that the increasingly bitter Democratic primary campaign may provide some assistance to the Republican nominee, Rasmussen shows McCain ahead of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the normally blue state of Michigan. And in worse news, McCain has pulled even in Pennsylvania as well.

In fairness, the Democrats will probably get over the bitterness and unify around a single nominee. Right now, it's hard for some of them to imagine voting for the other Democrat, and their poll responses are likely reflecting that, but still.

Like A Leftwing Jimmy Swaggart

A 2006 piece by Sam Munson provides some insight into the sad story of Eliot Spitzer, referring to Brooke Masters' aptly-titled Spoiling for a Fight.

One of the book's most memorable scenes occurs early on: the Spitzer family gathered around a monopoly board, Bernard serving as a ruthless banker, the seven-year-old Eliot weeping with frustration as his father forces him to pony up brightly-colored rent dollars.

The $100 million his office wrung out of Merrill went entirely into the tax coffers of the State of New York....Market timing and late trading do dilute value for mutual fund investors, but the severity of the dilution is debatable. And Dick Grasso's pay package (most of which, it should be noted, he has so far ended up retaining), excessive or not, has very little to do with the financial health of America's poor and middle class....Spitzer has done almost nothing actually to benefit materially those purportedly hurt by these practices. His precipitous rush to settlement or court and his at-times unthinking aggression have undoubtedly contributed to this.

Contrary to his reputation as the "Sheriff of Wall Street", citing the same reference, the Atlas Society's Roger Donway classifies him as a lawless thug, an "American Robespierre".

Spitzer's medieval view became evident in his first major case, the attack on the securities industry in 2002 (pp. 73-102). His allegation was that Merrill Lynch and other firms tended to give higher recommendations to companies in which their investment-banking divisions had an interest. If they did (on page 84, Masters quietly admits it is debatable), the fact would not surprise anyone who admires the stock market as a boisterous Middle Eastern bazaar writ large. But that was not how Spitzer thought it should operate, and he decided to use the Martin Act to criminalize hype. A month after Spitzer announced his legal war on Merrill Lynch, the company's stock had dropped by nearly one-fourth, a loss of $11 billion in value. The management of America's most storied securities firm decided that the company was not rich enough to obtain justice and capitulated to the Spitzer creed.

The Martin Act, described by Legal Times and quoted in the piece, "empowers [New York's attorney general] to subpoena any document from anyone doing business in the state; to keep an investigation totally secret or to make it totally public; and to choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants. People called in for questioning during Martin Act investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination....To win a case, the AG doesn't have to prove that the defendant intended to defraud anyone, that a transaction took place, or that anyone actually was defrauded."

Masters does occasionally note that Spitzer's team is not above rank thuggery. David Brown IV, a Harvard Law School classmate of Spitzer's, quit Goldman Sachs to become an assistant attorney general because he felt he had "totally sold out" by pursuing wealth. His concept of idealism was well conveyed by a remark he made in New York magazine: "We will come to your house at night" (p. 258)....Said one lawyer involved in negotiating a settlement of the research-analyst case: "'[It] flushed down the toilet notice and comment; it also flushed down the toilet regulatory history'" (p. 127). And that is how Spitzer likes it.

Donway concluded with a recommendation:

Not everyone targeted by Spitzer has fallen victim to him, and Masters inadvertently reveals his weak point. She quotes what a gun-control lawyer said in a post-mortem on Spitzer's total failure to revamp the gun-manufacturing industry... Spitzer fails when his victims spurn his moral premises. He cannot control businessmen through "public shamings" when the businessmen are not ashamed.

And that is why people opposed to Spitzer need to attack the moral foundations of his career. Not his publicity-seeking. Not his vaulting ambition. Not even his procedural missteps. Spitzer's opponents must uphold the morality and legality of pursuing one's self-interest. To stop the rise of this American Robespierre will require a moral confidence equal to his own.

Instead, two years later, we find that Spitzer's own confidence was desperately misplaced. The question is whether New Yorkers will recognize the mistake they made with Spitzer, or if his scandalization will merely cover up the realities of his leadership. The good news is that it's certainly caused a lot of public reflection on the man, that has served to dredge up the unfortunate reality of exactly who it really is that was elected.

Traitor

Playwright David Mamet, author of Glengarry Glen Ross, sets down the Kool-Aid pitcher for the last time in a Village Voice piece entitled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'".

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms... Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I.

I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace....I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Read the whole thing. Mamet has come a long way to get here.

An Amazing New Invention

Barack Obama's "Baracycle" allows you to continue going forward, regardless of whether you're pedaling or backpedaling.

Don't Worry, It Won't Be Rigged

Worried about how to give Florida and Michigan Democrats the votes that the Democratic National Committee denied them, the Democratic National Committee proposes an untested and insecure solution.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean said a mail-in primary is "actually a very good process."

"Every voter gets a ballot in the mail," the former Vermont governor said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "It's comprehensive, you get to vote if you're in Iraq or in a nursing home. It's not a bad way to do this.''

As for who pays, Dean said, "That is a problem," reiterating that the party needs its money for the general election campaign against Republican John McCain.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., supports the mail-in solution, comparing it to an absentee ballot process. He also pinned his hopes on the state party to pay for it.

"Since Governor Dean has said he's not going to do it in the DNC, the Florida Democratic Party's going to have to go out and raise the money," he said. "We're looking at about $6 million."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., appeared to be amenable to a mail-in solution for his state, though with less enthusiasm.

Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Levin said doing the election again would be against state law. "That can't be changed, and that can't be paid for," he said. Levin also said caucuses would be difficult, with 500 potential sites.

"The one possibility would be some kind of a mail-in caucus," he said. "But there's some real problems with that, too. Not just cost, but the security issue. How do you make sure that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?"

You can't, and given the importance of these two states to the candidates' fanatical supporters, there's no doubt that mail-in ballots will be sent back from thousands of the dead, imprisoned, and senile. There lies the delicious irony of the "Every Vote Counted" party putting themselves in this position by trying to deny votes to their own supporters.

There remains only one intellectually honest path, and that's for the hypocrites to lie in the bed they made. No mulligans.

Update: Frank J. at IMAO:

No one wants to put up the money to completely redo the elections, so people are floating dumb ideas like a mail in vote or an internet vote or having robots fight it out in a pit -- all things people can easily call shenanigans on. And, after whatever poor compromise the Democrats come up with on the Florida and Michigan delegates, the election will still be essentially decided by unelected superdelegates. Basically, the Democrats have set up their primary so there is no way a large segment of their party won't go away feeling they were bamboozled. It's enough to make you want to put your fingertips together and say, "Excellent!"

Heh.

Hooray For The British Healthcare Model

...because under socialized medicine, everyone gets a decent standard of care.

A patient was told there was no reason why he couldn't have surgery in a hospital, despite the smell caused by a dead rodent trapped in the building's ceiling.

Cowper, 19, told the Sun newspaper he had waited 11 months for the operation, and the doctor told him he could go ahead despite the stench.

"He said the smell didn't represent a health risk, but I was appalled," Cowper said. "I asked him: 'If you were me, would you have the operation?' He looked at me and said 'no', so I decided there and then I wasn't going to go ahead."

At least it only took him 11 months to get penciled in.

You Can Trust These People

Following up on the blue-on-blue interfamilial political stabbing in Pennsylvania, the Ohio Democratic debate was apparently just too much for one North Carolina man, who took a baseball bat to his friend's head. Over at the Obama campaign, after the attack on a Clinton campaign conference call, Samantha Powers has stepped down after telling the Scotsman newspaper that Hillary Clinton is "a monster".

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything...You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'."

Over at Huffington Post, Rick Perlstein is getting alarming letters from Obama supporters.

Rick, if the Machine tries to give the Clintons the victory at the convention, I swear to God, Chicago's going to look like a Sadie Hawkins dance. People my age are going to be throwing stones. We all have transportation -- cell phones -- disposable income -- the Internet -- free time -- and Seattle as our example. Part of me is scared of a riot. Part of me isn't. The nomination belongs to Obama. Do you think we're going to let the Democratic Leadership Council take it? "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time."

Taken in isolation, it seems like meaningless drivel, so Perlstein asked others.

Not to mention that there's going to be a significant Iraq veteran contingent at the convention, ready to rock 'n' roll. We've already had planning meetings about it -- we're going about it the same way that we would plan any decent military operation.

I can't emphasize enough how potentially scary things could get -- we've got folks working on the inside of the convention, and it's all done on a cell basis, so that folks only know what they need to know.

Then there's this advertisement on the page:


It used to be that the Democrats would blame their petty, obsessive rhetoric on Bush's "divisiveness". Thank goodness that both Clinton and Obama are such "uniters", and that the Democrats have become agents of change, otherwise we'd see the same kind of crap from them that we've been seeing at every election for the last eight years, like trying to re-float their idiotic fearmongering about a nonexistent draft, since it clearly worked so well for the Kerry campaign.

"That isn't true, Howard."

Barack Obama's attorney, Bob Bauer, crashes a Hillary Clinton conference call. Hilarity ensues, as two Democratic Party titans engage in a girly slap-fight over who's ruining whose caucus. Click to listen.

Update: Overheard on Liberal talk radio:

When Obama called Clinton to congratulate her on her Ohio win, he should have waited until 3 a.m. to see if she'd pick up the phone.

Bruno Behrend asks if Obama has "jumped the shark", and identifies the source of his dislike for the man. "My biggest beef with Obama", says Bruno, "is that he actually courted and played the mindless idiot vote."

Economic Fallacy

According to MSNBC, about 70% of Democratic voters in Texas and Ohio think that NAFTA has taken away more jobs than it created, which says a lot more about the people voting in the Democratic primaries than it does about NAFTA. Somehow, even as we "lose jobs" to Mexico and Canada, Mexicans and Canadians continue immigrating, legally and illegally, to work here. Meanwhile, industry is complaining it can't find the skilled labor it needs. Did the employees go to Canada and Mexico, too?

As candidates go, Obama has been heading down this silly "protectionist" road for some time now, with Clinton close in tow. This is deeply alarming, given the timing, since it was a sudden fit of protectionism that so effectively turned a regular depression into the Great Depression.

Update: Eerily, John McCain is on the same page.

I will leave it to my opponent to argue that we should abrogate trade treaties, and pretend the global economy will go away and Americans can secure our future by trading and investing only among ourselves. We will campaign in favor of seizing the opportunities presented by the growth of free markets throughout the world, helping displaced workers acquire new and lasting employment and educating our children to prepare them for the new economic realities by giving parents choices about their children's education they do not have now.

I will leave it to my opponent to claim that they can keep companies and jobs from going overseas by making it harder for them to do business here at home.

The whole thing really is for the birds.

World? Meet Nadhmi Auchi.

If there's anything the Obama campaign has accomplished, it has drawn national media attention to the vile world of the Chicago Democrats. Now, even the Times of London wades into the murky seas of Illinois corruption, and, in doing so, splashes it all over the Obama campaign.

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain's wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama's bagman Antoin "Tony" Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city's South Side while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Auchi, a name beloved to Illinoisans in the know, is turning up elsewhere, as well, including RealClearPolitics.

You probably would have heard of Nadhmi Auchi by now if Sen. Barack Obama were a Republican.

A British citizen of Iraqi descent, Mr. Auchi, 70, is a billionaire, the 279th richest man in the world, according to a Forbes magazine survey last year.

A great deal of Mr. Auchi's money was made doing business with the regime of Saddam Hussein, much of it under the table. In 1987, Mr. Auchi helped French and Italian firms win a huge oil pipeline contract in Iraq, chiefly by paying off Iraqi officials, according to testimony given by an Italian banker to prosecutors in Milan. In 2003, he was convicted for his role in what was then the largest scandal in French history, involving payoffs from executives of the oil company now known as Total to political figures in Spain, Germany and Africa.

"The name Nadhmi Auchi was just another name for Saddam's intelligence service, or so we thought," said Nibras Kazimi, a former Iraqi dissident who is now a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.

You may remember the French TotalFinaElf scandal, since Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien's family was deeply tied in to the company, which led some to speculate that perhaps Chretien's motives for opposing the war in Iraq were identical to those of Jacques Chirac.

According to Nick Cohen and other sources, Auchi also sold arms to Saddam's Iraq even after Saddam had Auchi's brother killed, and had, in his younger days, been tried as a collaborator in one of the early Ba'athist coup attempts. He appears to have been something of a prime mover in the Oil-for-Food scandal and the related European embezzling operations. In 2006, this blog referenced his role in the maintenance of the euphemistically codenamed "Satan" Swiss bank account used to launder Saddam's money, and Auchi's similar deal with Gadhafi. A Pentagon report described him as "Hussein's principle international financial manipulator and bag man." He and his daughter are even suspected of involvement in swindling millions from the NHS.

Today, however, Nadhmi Auchi's reputation seems to foster strong working relationships with Chicago Democrats: Tony Rezko first partnered with Auchi to build a power plant in Iraq, then went on to sell him a tremendous real estate development project in downtown Chicago. Rezko even had to be jailed in January for violating his bail after Auchi wired him millions of dollars, leading the court to fear he was preparing to flee the country to avoid trial. If, as Rezko claimed in court, he's broke and, among his debts, owes Auchi tens of millions of dollars, Auchi must be a very good friend to front him more money, ne'st pas?

As I've said before, the "coincidental" associations between Rezko and Obama have a history of occurring at an incredibly convenient pace. If Barack Obama's campaign has been taking money from an avowed Ba'athist sympathizer, especially one who seems to have been heavily involved in buying off the French government, it casts his protestations that he is "the only candidate who opposed the war from the start" in an entirely different light.

Of course, it'd probably merely enhance his standing with the anti-war crowd, but personally, I've given Obama the benefit of the doubt for quite some time on his more suspect affiliations. These "accidental" brushes with radicalism and corruption always raise the question of whether the man is actually a closeted corrupt radical, or just unbelievably naive and clumsy at politics to have let it happen. He portrays himself as the latter and, amazingly, capitalizes on it, but consider that if that naivety and clumsiness includes "accidentally" affiliating himself with someone like Auchi, that's a whole new level of trouble, one he may not be able to talk himself out of should the American press get half as excited about it as the British are. I couldn't help but notice this prescient January 31th post at Democratic Underground:

If they so much as tie Obama to Rezko's "friend" and "moneyman" Nadhmi Auchi, Obama is fucked.

It should be known that Auchi is quick to threaten British papers that question his moral standing, and Auchi denies that he has ever done anything wrong in his entire life, criminal conviction to the contrary. In a scattergun-style denial, Auchi concludes:

The above is not an exhaustive list of the matters Mr. Auchi disputes and says are inaccurate in Observer and Guardian articles published in 2003. Mr. Auchi requests that the articles are not relied upon as an accurate source of information about him.

We've been through this stupidity so many times before with all of Rod Blagojevich's other friends and acquaintences, you'd think that Auchi, at the very least, would be the creative one. Next, like Dominic Longo, he'll be complaining that he's being persecuted by the media because he has a vowel at the end of his name.

Stupid Is Not Sexy

I was going to ignore the Marion Cotillard bit. I mean, why pay any mind to yet another random European's leftarded superstitions? That was my stance, at least, until I saw her transcendently idiotic "motive". That actually makes it kind of special:

"I think we're lied to about a number of things," Cotillard said, singling out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the US making up horror stories for political ends.

She said: "It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them."

Nevermind her apparent confusion over who pays for repairs at the World Trade Center, or her implication that shutting down air travel, the financial markets, and Manhattan itself was a great deal by comparison. The video, in which Cotillard also expresses her doubts about the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, was actually made about a year ago. Unfortunately for her, once you make a complete tool of yourself by publicly espousing the "fire couldn't melt the steel" nonsense, you're going to be identified as a tool for the rest of your life. Correctly.

In fact, the Spanish building she mentions, the Windsor Tower, had to be demolished after the 2005 fire, because it did cause a partial collapse and also buckled steel supports throughout the structure. Fortunately, in this case, the building's reinforced concrete core was able to hold up the excess weight of the much smaller building. It also helped that nobody had crashed an airliner into it. Video from that fire is here.

Despite her low-key image, Cotillard is an environmental activist who once worked as a spokesman for Greenpeace.

So, it follows that she may be a little slow.

Update: Agence France-Presse weighs in.

The actress, who picked up the award for playing Edith Piaf in the French film "La Vie En Rose," cited the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 as one example, adding: "I tend to believe in the conspiracy theory."

Cotillard could not be reached Sunday but her lawyer, Vincent Toledano, told AFP she had "never intended to contest nor question the attacks of September 11, 2001, and regrets the way old remarks have been taken out of context."

Toledano may not be accustomed to dealing with this type of public relations incident. She said she "tends to believe in the conspiracy theory" (not, mind you, that she merely "heard", but, according to a French news agency, that she "tends to believe") that the 9/11 attacks were staged, apparently as some sort of cost-cutting measure for real estate developers. If there's some other "context" for this, Toledano would be doing his client a service to reveal that context to the press immediately. Of course, there isn't. Still, in Cotillard's defense, this doesn't mean she's anti-American per say, it just means she's very gullible.

From Our Cold Dead Trunks

About a year ago, I was standing in line at a CVS when the woman paying at the counter began shrieking "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! I DIDN'T TELL YOU TO DOUBLE-BAG, YOU'RE KILLING TREES!"

The bags were actually plastic.

It's moments like that that have led me to conclude that rather than bringing a hobo stick to the grocery store, the only responsible thing to do when asked whether we prefer "paper or plastic" is to politely ask them to use whichever one they believe will do the most harm to the environment. Trust the professionals. This sticks the bagger and cashier with a spirited prisoner's dilemma, and frees the consumer from any obligation to keep up on the latest "scientific concensus" regarding how we might best grind Mother Nature beneath our carbon footprint.

Tim Blair reader "Apple77" suggests an additional precaution:

I always ask for things to be double-bagged. I come up with the excuse 'I need to carry these bags a long way and I don't want them to break.' This is a lie.

Frankly, I find plenty of uses for these bags, uses I can't get from paper bags or a tote. Of course, in the event we find ourselves forced by our local governments to pay for plastic bags, well, perhaps we can keep them out of landfills by leaving them all over the regulating agency's lawn.

Unintended Consequences: It's the Law

From the band of flailing nations that brought you standardized circuses, regulations governing the proper number of toys for pigs, and rules for the acceptable curvature of imported bananas, comes a moment of lucidity after a ban on exposure to electromagnetic fields inadvertantly threatens to restrict usage of MRI machines.

The European Parliament has now voted to delay implementation for four years.

The realisation that staff regularly operating the scanners in hospitals might be receiving an exposure higher than the proposed limit came only after the European Parliament had approved the measure.

Professor Alexander Eggermont, President of the European Cancer Organisation (ECCO) said he was delighted by the vote.

"The Directive would have posed particular problems to those healthcare staff that care for patients such as children, the elderly, or those who have been anaesthetised, and who need help and comfort during scans.

"It would also have stopped the use of MRI for interventional and surgical procedures."

[An EU spokesman] said: "There is still some question as to whether MRI would have broken the limits, but the European Parliament voted to take another look, and consider any amendments that might be needed."

Of course, there's also some question as to whether any hazard existed in the first place. Ian Young in the British Journal of Hospital Medicine:

However, there has never been any demonstration (or even suggestion) that there is any hazard to patients or machine operators from any of the fields involved in MRI. The known hazards with RF doses - which have the potential to exceed proposed limits - are catered for by manufacturers building systems that comply with the relevant international standard (International Electrotechnical Commission, 2001) and obtaining approval under the Medical Devices Directive.

The problems with the static and audio frequency fields arise from an over-zealous and scientifically unjustified application of the precautionary principle....[T]he case leans heavily on the possibility that some people may be 'hypersensitive' to one field or another (without demonstrating, or attempting to demonstrate, that such people exist). The same argument could be used to ban planes, trains, automobiles or any other domestic, agricultural or industrial mechanical device on the grounds that some people might be hypersensitive to the noise they emit. That would have a rather better scientific justification.

It seems perverse to diminish the efficacy of this vital clinical tool, in view of the complete lack of evidence of any hazard, and particularly when alternative imaging approaches would almost certainly involve staff and patient exposure to harmful ionizing radiation.

The fun thing about the precautionary principle is that if you applied it to itself, you usually wouldn't be able to apply it at all.