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It is a politician’s dream: Handing out cold, hard cash to people on the street as they plead for help. Iraq’s prime minister has been doing just that in recent weeks, doling out Iraqi dinars as an aide trails behind, keeping a tally.

The handouts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and a handful of other top officials are authorized — as long as each goes no higher than about $8,000, and the same people don’t get them twice. Aides say they are meant merely to ease the pain a bit, and are motivated by a belief that better conditions will lead to more security.

So, how high was your rebate check?

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Former Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney is the official Green Party presidential nominee. She defeated Ralph Nader at the Green Party National Convention to secure the nomination. Cynthia McKinney then chose hip-hop activist Rosa Clememte as her running mate. Inspired by John Lennon, Cynthia McKinney’s campaign slogan is “power to the people.” Her platform includes immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, single-payer healthcare, reparations for African-Americans, and the creation of a Department of Peace.

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The endorsement could hardly have been stronger. On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”

There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.

In interviews with more than a dozen of the signatories, Politico found that, far from embracing McCain’s economic plan, many were unfamiliar with — or downright opposed to — key details. While most of those contacted by Politico had warm feelings about McCain, many did not want to associate themselves too closely with his campaign and its policy prescriptions.

[..]

The statement they signed is 403 words long — and there is no mention of the gas tax holiday or the deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will approach $400 billion this year.

But the Jobs for America plan is a 15-page document that touts a gas tax holiday proposal on the second page and prominently features the promise that “John McCain will balance the budget by the end of his first term” on the fourth page. The press release accompanying the economists’ statement claimed it was “in support of John McCain’s Jobs for America economic plan.”

When John McCain and reality square off, reality wins. Every time.

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The Rail Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) said today it was planning a 24-hour strike by rail workers on July 17, the busiest day of the Catholic event.

It is the day Pope Benedict XVI will make his way through the streets of Sydney during the afternoon peak.

The NSW Government will take the matter to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) tomorrow.

Mr Iemma said his Government would not cave in to the RTBU.

“The Government will not be blackmailed into giving them what they want as a result of these industrial terror tactics,” he said.

So now a strike is terrorism?

Obey, citizen! And don’t you dare Catholics!

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We the Sheeple of the Entitled States, in Order to form a more perfect Kakistocracy, establish Wealth, insure domestic Following, provide for the common defence against Terrorism, promote global Mistrust, and secure the Blessings of Taxes to our Leaders and our Owners, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Entitled States of Afraidia.

Or something like that…

More here.

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If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.

“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the federal appellate court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”

“It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity,” the court continued.

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The Sunday Times reports Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”

In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. (Not President Bush because “he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days,” Payne says. “I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone.”) All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is “a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that”:

PAYNE: The exact budget I will come up with. But it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library. […]

200, 250, something like that. That’s gonna be a show of “we’re interested, we’re your friends, we’re still friends.”

Watch the startling video here.

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The BBC has found the first evidence that China is currently helping Sudan’s government militarily in Darfur.

The Panorama TV programme tracked down Chinese army lorries in the Sudanese province that came from a batch exported from China to Sudan in 2005.

The BBC was also told that China was training fighter pilots who fly Chinese A5 Fantan fighter jets in Darfur.

China’s government has declined to comment on the BBC’s findings, which contravene a UN arms embargo on Darfur.

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China has chosen not to respond to the BBC’s findings. Its public position is that it abides by all UN arms embargoes.

China has said in the past that it told Sudan’s government not to use Chinese military equipment in Darfur.

Sudan’s government, however, has told the UN that it will send military equipment wherever it likes within its sovereign territory.