I’ll admit, I follow US politics about as closely as a foreign amateur can sanely follow it. Okay, delete “sanely”. I deserve a free anorak. But this I don’t get.

Hillary Clinton has lent her campaign $5 million.

No, seriously. This is her campaign. But she wants her money back. Nevermind that a champion of the working class, campaigning against the filthy rich conservative capitalist scum with tax breaks, happens to have $5 million in spare change lying around idle. Why didn’t she send that to the IRS to fund universal healthcare?

But seriously, how do you lend money to a campaign? To your own campaign, of all things? Most people “donate” to a campaign. Isn’t she willing to donate? Doesn’t she have enough faith in the campaign? Does she expect to get the money back from suckers who have the conviction to donate in future?

And does this suggest that the GOP isn’t going to get the dream opponent, the one they’ve always wanted to beat just for the personal satisfaction of watching a Clinton go down, in the same way the Democrats would have loved to run against, say, Jeb Bush?

Does this suggest that Barack Obama, the rookie, has more money than the venerable matriarch of the Clinton dynasty? That she’s the underdog now?

John McCain took out a loan to finance his campaign. This makes sense. He’s going to have to pay it back, win or lose. But is Clinton’s campaign going to have to repay her if she wins? Even if she loses? This boggles the mind. It’s not like campaigns are for-profit companies. What sort of organisation is left to repay the debt if she loses? Did McCain even think to consider this eventuality when he sponsored McCain-Feingold?

I mean, how do you lend money to yourself to finance your own career?

I sure hope, if she wins, she’ll tell the rest of us this trick. It sure sounds wonderfully useful. “Look how much money I’m willing to lend myself! Surely, Mr Angel Ventura, if I trust myself this much, you can fund my idea for a non-lethal light-sabre design — named Taser-B-Gone — that I can sell by the gross to police forces around the world?”

Update: Al Giordano reasons that the money is already spent, that the Clinton campaign now faces a major budget deficit (making a mockery of her “fiscal responsibility” claims even before she can prove it to be empty rhetoric as president), and that she is running a “match the Clinton campaign” advert in which she describes the loan as a gift from Hillary and Bill. Whether that’s true depends on what the definition of “give” is, I guess.

Update: Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone, points out that Bill Clinton said this kind of self-financing “clearly violates the spirit of campaign finance reform”. Far be it from me to defend American campaign finance rules, of course, but if the Clintons want to use it as a club against political opponents, they should wield it more carefully, lest they accidentally bop themselves on the head.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is considering listing the polar bear as a threatened species, under that country’s Endangered Species Act.

Before blasting this idea as an underhanded ploy by evil environmentalists, it is worth considering the exact meaning of the terms in question. The US criteria are not quite consistent with those of the World Conservation Union (which the cognoscenti abbreviate as IUCN). The latter maintains the famous (or infamous, considering how few of its members have actually gone extinct) Red List of Threatened Species, in which “critically endangered”, “endangered” and “vulnerable”, describing an extremely high, very high or high risk of extinction respectively, are collectively known as “threatened”. By contrast, a “threatened” species under the US law means any species which is “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range”, and an “endangered” species is one “which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. Also, there is much more scope for discretion under the US rules, while the IUCN criteria for the different categories are very specific.

So, on what grounds should the polar bear be listed as threatened? Among the US agency’s own research, a population forecast says much depends on 45-, 75- or 100-year predictions of the extent of Arctic sea ice, and even then, there’s much uncertainty. Besides, that analysis (PDF) has come under attack (PDF) for serious flaws in its methods and analysis. Turns out that after a few years of slight decline in Arctic sea ice coverage, this winter’s Arctic ice is back to normal levels. (Via Anthony Watts, who links to the useful University of Illinois Cryosphere Today site. It also has a cute story about a stolen polar bear photo, reproduced above, which Al Gore and the media used to tell yet another lie: “They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.” Sob sob. Hat-tip: Hard Rain.)

What about polar bear population? Well, it’s pretty much stable, it appears. A National Center for Policy Analysis report entitled Polar Bears on Thin Ice? Not Really!, says that only two of the twenty or so population groups are in decline, which hardly gels with “throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. There’s a picture alongside. The chart illustrates the polar bear populations that are growing, declining, stable and unknown. Hardly looks like a threatened species, does it?

In fact, although the Red List includes the polar bear (and the hippo, which is responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other large animal), I can’t see which of the criteria it actually meets. The Inuit around Hudson Bay are saying more need to be hunted, because their population is increasing, and in an amusingly headlined article, “Advertisers urged to kill off polar bears,” James Murray reports on a study that finds advertisers should eschew cute pictures of polar bears to burnish their green image.

Listing a species that isn’t actually endangered is likely to do as much harm to noble conservation efforts as did Norman Myers’s 1979 statement, based on supposition alone, that 40 000 species would go extinct per year until 2000. Didn’t happen. Yet it was repeated in Al Gore’s 1993 book, Earth in the Balance, and is only one among many hyperbolic prophesies of mass extinction, which simply have not come true, and don’t look likely to happen in the foreseeable future either. They’re a bit like the cults who predict the end of the world. They’ve never been right, but of course, that only strengthens their faith that they have to be right sometime soon.

Despite the lack of evidence that the polar bear is, in fact, threatened, Brendon Frazier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, says it should be listed not as threatened, but as endangered. In this AFP article, he explains the reason why:

“An endangered listing can affect the sell-off of the oil drilling rights,” Brandon Frazier, a spokesman for global animal welfare group International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said. “The authorities would have to get approval through the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct drilling if there is an endangered species that inhabits the area.” […]

US lawmakers have proposed listing the polar bear as “threatened”, but IFAW said that did not go far enough. “A ‘threatened’ listing leaves open the possibility for exemptions and doesn’t shut loopholes, such as the one that allows Americans to trophy-hunt for polar bears in Canada and bring their heads and hides back to the US,” Frazier told AFP.

So there’s your reason. Anything to stop the big, bad oil companies from drilling. If the polar bear is under threat, the reason is climate change, which in turn is caused by evil humans, who dare pursue industrial development, scientific advance and economic progress.

That’s what they’re fighting for. If the polar bear gets listed as threatened, this can be used to stop almost any new industrial development, anywhere. Even if the impact is so tenuous nothing but global warming alarmism can rationalise it. If the polar bear gets listed as endangered, then so is the growth in prosperity that has fueled the rising quality of life among rich and poor alike. It’s not about the polar bear. It’s about us. It is, to quote William F. Buckley, about standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”.

Now who’s the conservative?

Two well-written items on economics caught my attention recently. They’re worth reading to get some perspective on issues that are sure to be mangled, spun, highlighted or covered up by the political candidates running for president in the US.

One is an essay written by South African tech entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth, a couple of weeks ago, in response to the first of the Fed’s two panicky rate cuts. With admirable simplicity, it explains the impact of using interest rates to modulate the economy, and why the US Federal Reserve, both under Alan “Maestro” Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, must shoulder much of the blame for causing the credit crunch, and for eroding economic performance with inflationary monetary policy. Shuttleworth says people who take over at the bottom and lead upwards do so even if “their voodoo had no mojo”. Which, applied to central banking, is as good an explanation as any of where the real “voodoo economics” lies.

Another is an angry editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that takes offence at the fact that the fiscal stimulus on which the Bush adminstration and Democratic leaders in congress agreed will prove to be nothing but an injection that merely postpones the pain, and increases the budget deficit for no discernable long-term benefit. Worse, the resultant deficit will be unjustly wielded as a blunt weapon in the election campaign, and could derail what should have been one of Bush’s most durable and important legacies: making his tax cuts permanent.