I found this analysis interesting particularly because it runs contrary of everything we’re told:

What fraction of U.S. consumer spending goes for goods labeled “Made in China” and what fraction is spent on goods “Made in the USA”?

• The vast majority of goods and services sold in the United States are produced here. In 2010, imports were about 16 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP); imports from China amounted to 2.5 percent of GDP.
• A total of 88.5 percent of U.S. consumer spending is on items made in the United States.
• Chinese goods account for 2.7 percent of U.S. personal consumption expenditure — about one-quarter of the 11.5 percent foreign share.

Vanity Fair recently had a pair of thorough exclusives regarding what are to date the most severe, costly and intrusive cyber-attacks in history. Some of these hacks were conducted by the anarchist groups Anonymous and LulzSec, but the really disturbing facet of the articles regard the Chinese government allegedly orchestrating highly sophisticated and successful security breaches against Western c0mpanies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

An investigation by the software company McAfee, called Operation Shady Rat, “has been stealing valuable intellectual property (including government secrets, e-mail archives, legal contracts, negotiation plans for business activities, and design schematics) from more than 70 public- and private-sector organizations in 14 countries. The list of victims, which ranges from national governments to global corporations to tiny nonprofits, demonstrates with unprecedented clarity the universal scope of cyber-espionage and the vulnerability of organizations in almost every category imaginable.”

The evolution of Shady rat ’s activity provides more circumstantial evidence of Chinese involvement in the hacks. The operation targeted a broad range of public- and private-sector organizations in almost every country in Southeast Asia—but none in China. And most of Shady rat ’s targets are known to be of interest to the People’s Republic. In 2006, or perhaps earlier, the intrusions began by targeting eight organizations, including South Korean steel and construction companies, a South Korean government agency, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, a U.S. real-estate company, international-trade organizations of Western and Asian nations, and the ASEAN Secretariat. (According to McAfee’s “Operation Shady rat ” white paper, “[t]hat last intrusion began in October [2006], a month prior to the organization’s annual summit in Singapore, and continued for another 10 months.”) In 2007, the activity ramped up to hit 29 organizations. In addition to those previously targeted, new victims included a technology company owned by the Vietnamese government, four U.S. defense contractors, a U.S. federal-government agency, U.S. state and county government organizations, a computer-network-security company—and the national Olympic committees of two countries in Asia and one in the West, as well as the I.O.C. The Olympic organizations, strikingly, were targeted in the months leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Shady rat ’s activity continued to build in 2008, when it infiltrated the networks of 36 organizations, including the United Nations—and reached a crest of 38 organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, in 2009. Since then, the victim numbers have been dropping, but the activity continues. Shady rat ’s command-and-control server is still operating, and some organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, were still under attack as of last month. (As of Tuesday, according to a WADA spokesman, the group was unaware of any breach, but “WADA is investigating” McAfee’s discovery.) The longest compromise duration—“on and off for 28 months,” according to McAfee’s report—was one Asian country’s Olympic committee. Many others were compromised for two full years. Nine organizations were compromised for one month or less. All others were compromised for a minimum of one month, potentially allowing for complete access to all data on their servers.

… Alperovitch’s diagnosis of the problem raised by Shady rat is troubling: “It’s clear from this and other attacks we’ve been witnessing that there is an unprecedented transfer of wealth in the form of trade secrets and I.P., primarily from Western organizations and companies, falling off the truck and disappearing into massive electronic archives. What is happening to this data? Is this being accumulated in a giant, Indiana Jones–type warehouse? Or is it being used to create new products? If it’s the latter, we won’t know for a number of years. But if so, it’s not just a problem for these companies, but also for the governments of the countries where these companies are located, because they’re losing their economic advantage to competitors in other parts of the world overnight. That is a national-security problem, insofar as it leads to loss of jobs and lost economic growth. That’s a serious threat.”

The National Security Agency went into the private sector to create another group, dubbed Operation Starlight, to study these and other cyber attacks against the West, particularly the embarrassing compromise of the software/VPN security firm RSA. RSA’s specialty is providing sophisticated VPN software and tokens. Earlier this year, RSA’s SecurID token algorithms were compromised. Like McAfee, Starlight’s draft conclusion (the final report is in progress and could change) found an “organized, concerted campaign on behalf of China.”

So how bad is the threat? There are indications that the threat is worse than what has been reported thus far, because many companies do not wish to disclose to the public that they have been the victim of a security breach. A recent breach of Google’s servers, since labeled as Operation Aurora, for example, gave away intellectual property and company secrets that its owners no doubt worry will be used against them in the years ahead.

Google’s initial announcement of Operation Aurora stated that “at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses—including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors”—had been affected, and early news reports named Yahoo and Symantec as among the other victims. As the year wore on, the body count grew: Adobe, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace admitted that they’d been attacked, then Intel. Before long a cache of e-mails written by analysts at the security firm HBGary and its sister company HBGary Federal were made public, after the companies were caught in the crosshairs of the hacktivist group Anonymous, a loose coalition of individuals who perform coordinated cyber-attacks, sometimes with the stated goal of advancing Internet freedom. The e-mails revealed that Aurora or similar attacks had also hit Baker Hughes, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Conoco Phillips, Marathon Oil, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Symantec, Juniper, Disney, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, General Dynamics, the law firm King & Spalding, and DuPont. DuPont was hit so intensely that, one HBGary analyst wrote, “their hair is on fire.”

Not only did the HBGary e-mails provide new details about Aurora, they also described similar attacks that had been going on for much longer than the public knew. “Many of the leading defense contractors … all had … aurora-type attacks as far back as 2005,” one analyst wrote. “So a search engine makes a big media stink about one intrusion, and that leads to a bunch of hype? I think the discussion needs to be on why it’s taken 5+ years for the rest of the industry to catch on.”

…

Another security researcher who was on the front lines during Operation Aurora says, “Those of us who are hands-on-keyboard want this story to be told, because we feel like the top corporate managers—following the advice of their lawyers—are reflexively keeping breach information secret from other companies that are trying to defend themselves. In the big picture, a little bit of short-term embarrassment is worth it, to get the American people to understand that there’s a low-level Cold War going on.” Despite—and also because of—the extreme secrecy surrounding industrial cyber-espionage, this phenomenon is gradually effecting a fundamental re-arrangement of the relationship between state and corporate power.

Michael Hayden was the director of the N.S.A. and then the C.I.A. during the period when the problem of Chinese cyber-espionage developed. In a conversation with him about Operation Aurora, I asked what he believed to be the most significant fact about those intrusions.

He answered, “You see Google acting in some ways as nation-states used to act, exercising to the best of their ability some attributes traditionally associated with sovereign states. ‘We’re going to break relationship’—cease doing business there, you know. It’s something I dwell on a lot. The cyberworld is so new that the old structures, you know—state, non-state, public, private—they all break down … The last time we had such a powerful discontinuity is probably the European discovery of the Western Hemisphere. At that point, we had some big, multi-national corporations—East India Company and Hudson’s Bay—that acted as states. And I see elements of that with the big Microsofts and Googles of the world. Because of their size, they actually are making decisions that have the impact of the kinds of decisions made in the halls of government. Google is not a state. But what constitutes Google’s inherent right of self-defense in this new environment against this kind of attack? I’m not accusing anyone of doing anything wrong. These situations are just so different. What do we believe would be legitimate for Google to do in response to this? Now, I don’t have answers. I really don’t know, but it’s a really good question.”

While understandable, the hesitancy not to publicize these security breaches only harms the companies in the long run. That’s because most of the hacks are successful because the adversary – hacker – exploits the companies own resources — it’s employees. Using a technique called “spear-phishing,” hackers browse through social media websites in order to collect information about people who work at a particular firm. They then custom script targeted e-mails and utilities which an unsuspecting employee clicks upon, and inadvertently gives network access to the hacker. The first step in employee training and education is acknowledging that the is an Advanced Persistent Threat.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the  population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Indeed, BP’s head, Lord Tony Hayward, wsa critical in formulating the Cap-and-Trade system. BP Chairman Lamar McKay supports it. As does Shell President Marvin Odum, and ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva (very Seinfeld, btw). As did former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, whose subordinates “buried a an Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming!” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

But why?

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama:  “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.

This begs the question: If it’s good enough for one billion Chinese…

In just the past 72 or so hours President Barack Obama has both become the first president to ever refuse to meet the Dalai Lama, and denied funding to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Both are policies based in appeasement, and the president’s track record on that is quite disturbing.

Beyond the historic snub, it’s naive to think that China will bend to Obama’s will just because he won’t take the moral high ground on Tibet. Denying funding to an Iranian human rights group on the basis that Iran might become more transparent and cooperate on nuclear proliferation isn’t just naive, but dangerously incompetent. (It’s insulting too, considering just days ago the U.S. government extended $400,000 to a human rights group run by Saif and Aisha Qaddafi, son and daughter of Mouamar Qaddafi, — despite bipartisan disapproval on Capital Hill — just after Libya gave a heroes welcome to the Lockerbie bomber.)

Also recently, the Obama administration threw its full support behind deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, despite the fact that a Law Library of Congress’s Directorate of Legal Research review found the removal legal under the Honduran constitution, and, reminds columnist Jonah Goldberg, “even though Zelaya was never supposed to be on the ballot in the first place and the only way he could be on it would be through unconstitutional election fraud.” (Note, Zelaya’s actual deportation was not).

I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise. Members of the hard Left have a long history of an attitude of liberty for me, but not for thee. Obama’s actions were best summarized by Charles Krauthammer: “When France chides you for appeasement, you know you’re scraping bottom.“

According to the State Department, terrorists in Guantanamo are “refugees,” and the Empire State Building will be lit up in red and yellow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist China. As Michael Goldfarb notes, “Hey, the Red Chinese only killed 50 or 60 million of their own people, why not celebrate that achievement with a special lighting scheme.”

Maybe in another 51 years we can light the Empire State Building to celebrate some of the Guantanamo “refugees” destruction of the WTC..?

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

Last week National Intelligence Council chairman nominee Charles Freeman withdrew his name, blaming “the Israel Lobby” for his lack of support to the post. Curiously, this would then define some leading Democrats — including Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, and Barack Obama himself — as persons beholden to “the Israel Lobby,” as they were either vocally opposed or noticably silent and unsupportive of the appointment (his appointment came not from Obama, but Adm. Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence.)

The Washington Post editors (who must also thus be members of “the Israel Lobby”) describes Freeman’s empty and ridiculous assertion. Indeed, why not blame “the China Lobby?” But that’s not so sexed up, is it?

FORMER ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. looked like a poor choice to chair the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council. A former envoy to Saudi Arabia and China, he suffered from an extreme case of clientitis on both accounts. In addition to chiding Beijing for not crushing the Tiananmen Square democracy protests sooner and offering sycophantic paeans to Saudi King “Abdullah the Great,” Mr. Freeman headed a Saudi-funded Middle East advocacy group in Washington and served on the advisory board of a state-owned Chinese oil company. It was only reasonable to ask — as numerous members of Congress had begun to do — whether such an actor was the right person to oversee the preparation of National Intelligence Estimates.

It wasn’t until Mr. Freeman withdrew from consideration for the job, however, that it became clear just how bad a selection Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair had made. Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister “Lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.” Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel — and his statement was a grotesque libel.

For the record, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee says that it took no formal position on Mr. Freeman’s appointment and undertook no lobbying against him. If there was a campaign, its leaders didn’t bother to contact the Post editorial board. According to a report by Newsweek, Mr. Freeman’s most formidable critic — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — was incensed by his position on dissent in China.

But let’s consider the ambassador’s broader charge: He describes “an inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.” That will certainly be news to Israel’s “ruling faction,” which in the past few years alone has seen the U.S. government promote a Palestinian election that it opposed; refuse it weapons it might have used for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and adopt a policy of direct negotiations with a regime that denies the Holocaust and that promises to wipe Israel off the map. Two Israeli governments have been forced from office since the early 1990s after open clashes with Washington over matters such as settlement construction in the occupied territories.

What’s striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that “it is not permitted for anyone in the United States” to describe Israel’s nefarious influence. But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges — and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them.

There’s a lot of talk of “energy independence” coming from the Obama administration. It’s a perennial red herring. Of it, Holman Jenkins stated earlier this week it was “a favorite of Tojo and Hitler, was debunked by Churchill, who reasoned that true energy security came from a diversity of suppliers, not the foolish pursuit of self-sufficiency.”

Even so, note the hypocrisy here, in Obama’s tax plan:

$5.3 billion – excise tax on Gulf of Mexico oil and gas
$3.4 billion – repeal expensing of tangible drilling costs
$49 million – repeal passive loss exception for working interests in oil and natural gas properties
$13 billion – repeal manufacturing tax deduction for oil and natural gas companies

In other words, in order to promote energy independence Mr. Obama is going to make it more difficult, more expensive, and thus less likely that American energy companies can drill here, drill now.

The key word above, of course, is “American” — Obama has no power whatsoever on the biggest and most powerful global oil companies, to whom we will turn to get our energy even more than before. (Those pie-in-the-sky notions of “clean” and “green” alternative energies won’t help you power your car to work — only oil and gas will). For all our demonization of the Exxons and Chevrons, et. al., they are puny players in the global market — ranked at #17 and higher in terms of global energy conglomerates, the top spots belonging to the state-owned companies in Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Nigeria, etc. 94% of the worlds oil is already controlled by non-US companies.

Meanwhile, Max Schultz noted that Obama’s alternative energies are simply too expensive, and no bang for the buck:

The subsidies involved are considerable. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in early 2008 that the government subsidizes solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh) and wind power at $23.37 per MWh. Yet even with decades of these massive handouts, as well as numerous state-level mandates for utilities to use green power, wind and solar energy contribute less than 1% of our nation’s electricity.

Compare the subsidies to renewables with those extended to natural gas (25 cents per MWh in subsidies), coal (44 cents), hydroelectricity (67 cents), and nuclear power ($1.59). These are the energy sources (along with oil, which undergirds transportation) that do the heavy lifting in our energy economy.

No matter. In the guise of “saving” our environment from warming that (1) isn’t a problem, and (2) is not even man-made, the Democrats are going to shove a massive $646 billion that will cost every American consumer, not just those hated “richest 2%.” They may as well tax you for every breath you exhale.

Here’s Andrew Roth:

I’m glad Greg Mankiw caught this. Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner told Congress last month that China should stop manipulating their currency (by buying dollars). Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Chinese to keep buying U.S. dollars.

So which is it??

This blunder, along with the “Buy American” fiasco, the empty cabinet seats at Commerce and the USTR, and the failure to pass the pending free trade agreements with Korea, Panama, and Colombia, prove that Obama is slow to grasp the importance of global commerce, especially as it relates to our current economic crisis.

Remember folks, Geithner was the financial “genius” who was supposedly so indispensable we needed to just overlook his failure to pay income tax. Indispensable? More like indefensible. All he’s done so far is make as many gaffes as Joe “Web Site Number” Biden.

By the way, is it Geithner or Geitner, because apparently Google News has both…

Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard takes on the usually economically coherent NYT’s columnist, David Brooks, whom one supposes is having an off day.

But then Brooks goes and writes this: “[T]he old free market policies worked fine in the 20th century, but no longer seem to be working today.”

Really? China just ended an almost two-week-long coming out party showcasing its incredible economic growth since Deng Xiaoping declared “to get rich is glorious” thirty years ago. (Semi) free-market policies seem to be working pretty well for China, and free-market economics seem to be working for Eastern Europe and Ireland too, among other places.

The “old free market policies” produced a two-decade long period of low inflation and economic growth in the United States. It may be true that lately this growth hasn’t been reaching everybody. That’s a problem. But history suggests that drastically raising taxes and expanding the government’s reach into yet more parts of our daily economic life isn’t the answer. Some lessons apply equally to both the twentieth century as well as the twenty-first.

Exactly. The problem isn’t that our economic policies don’t work anymore, rather the problem is that our government, even Republicans, don’t bother following them. Protectionism and high taxation runs rampant, especially as compared to other nations (ironically formerly communist nations) who give global investors more incentives to invest in their countries rather than the U.S.

Ireland, for example, is using our system just fine to kick butt.

[UK Times] A major offensive involving 300 Sudanese government battlewagons intended to clear space for Chinese oil exploration in Darfur’s far north has begun, according to rebel commanders who have come under attack.

Oil companies have been waiting for the Government to secure the region before starting work on seismic surveys.

The claims of fresh fighting come after Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese President, embarked on a two-day peace mission to Darfur last month, promising investment and inviting rebel leaders to talks.

His visit took place days after the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor accused him of genocide, murder and crimes against humanity.

Suleiman Marajan, a commander with one faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, said yesterday that the Government had lied to the world with its message of peace.

“The Government of Sudan has attacked our places with 300 vehicles. They have been here for three days protecting Chinese oil workers,” he told The Times by satellite telephone from North Darfur.

…Sudan is already one of Africa’s biggest producers of crude oil, pumping 500,000 barrels a day. About two thirds is destined for China. Chinese companies have begun exploration in South Darfur.

I’m holding my breathe for the countless condemnations from the Democratic Underground, Think Progress, MoveOn.org, et. al. That is, if they ever get around to it. They’re way too busy right now ignoring the Georgians.