Clinton's travel, along with and consulting fees paid to her husband, the former president, have come to light recently in a lawsuit against Vinod Gupta, a Clinton contributor and chief executive of the data company, InfoUSA Inc.

The lawsuit by company shareholders accuses Gupta of excessively spending millions of dollars, including $900,000 worth of travel on the Clintons.

Sen. Clinton, who complained about corporate America's largesse and skyrocketing executive pay during campaign events Wednesday, said she did not believe her message was undermined by her acceptance of the private flights. In line with Senate rules then in effect, Clinton's campaign has said she reimbursed Gupta at the cost of a first-class flight, typically a significant discount off the expense of a private jet.

``Those were the rules. You'll have to ask somebody else whether that's good policy,'' she said.

This is just so perfect...note how quickly the writer grazes Hillary's support for card check legislation -- which obviates the current requirement for secret ballot by workers to approve union affiliation -- without pausing to explain it, or even citing the actual term.

Clinton struck several populist notes Wednesday in a speech at a union hall and at a town hall appearance at a North Las Vegas high school with large number of minority and low-income students.

The senator told members of the Culinary Workers Union, a group that represents casino and hotel workers, that it should be made easier for unions to organize [emphasis added]...

Hmm. Yeah, I know, no one pays attention to an issue until they think it's a threat. If we have a Democratic president in January 2009, we will have a Democratic congress and card check will move up on the agenda because the Democrats are afraid to say no to powerful unions.

The Clintons still can't pick friends from the quality side of the line.

...one of Mr. Dobbs’s correspondents said there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country over the previous three years, far more than in the past.

When Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down to interview Mr. Dobbs on camera, she mentioned the report and told him that there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”

...The next night, back on his own program, the same CNN correspondent who had done the earlier report, Christine Romans, repeated the 7,000 number, and Mr. Dobbs added that, if anything, it was probably an underestimate. A week later, the Southern Poverty Law Center — the civil rights group that has long been critical of Mr. Dobbs — took out advertisements in The New York Times and USA Today demanding that CNN run a correction...

“The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans,” Mr. Dobbs said on his April 14, 2005, program. From there, he introduced his original report that mentioned leprosy, the flesh-destroying disease — technically known as Hansen’s disease — that has inspired fear for centuries.

According to a woman CNN identified as a medical lawyer named Dr. Madeleine Cosman, leprosy was on the march. As Ms. Romans, the CNN correspondent, relayed: “There were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.”

“Incredible,” Mr. Dobbs replied.

Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Romans engaged in a nearly identical conversation a few weeks ago, when he was defending himself the night after the “60 Minutes” segment. “Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy,” she said, again attributing the number to Ms. Cosman.

To sort through all this, I called James L. Krahenbuhl, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, an arm of the federal government. Leprosy in the United States is indeed largely a disease of immigrants who have come from Asia and Latin America. And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.

The impact of mortgage equity withdrawal on consumer spending was calculated via the "Greenspan-Kennedy" method, a statistical system developed by Fed economist James Kennedy and former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Kennedy/Greenspan determined that 51 percent of MEW flowed through to personal consumption.

So where did Ritholtz get "51 percent"? Did he just make it up? Did he read it on some blog somewhere?

Lesson: you just have to question everything you hear.

Update... Reader Rich Sinda says,

I'm surprised you didn't know this but 73% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), was sentenced to death by a Beijing court Tuesday morning.

Zheng, 63, was convicted of taking bribes and dereliction of duty, according to the first instance hearing of the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.

He received the death penalty on the graft charge and 7 years in imprisonment for the charge of dereliction of duty. All Zheng's personal property was confiscated and he was deprived of his political rights for life.

Journalist: "So, President Yeltsin, how would you describe the state of the Russian economy in one word?"

Yeltsin: "Good".

Journalist: "Okay then Mr President, perhaps you would describe it in more than one word?"

Yeltsin: "Ah, in that case - not good."

The move toward lower levies on corporate profits in Spain, Germany, France and Britain is aimed at attracting companies and reinforcing the strongest economic expansion in six years. It comes after Ireland and new European Union members from Eastern Europe succeeded in attracting investment, and irking their larger rivals, with tax rates of less than 20 percent, among the world's lowest...

The EU's average corporate tax rate at the end of 2006 was a record low of 26 percent, and more cuts are in the works this year. Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister-in-waiting, in March lopped two percentage points off the top rate, which is now 28 percent. The lower house of the German Parliament last week backed Chancellor Angela Merkel's plan to pare its corporate rate to 30 percent from 39 percent.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who was elected French president this month, promised to reduce his country's 33 percent rate by at least five percentage points. The Spanish government under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is cutting its rate to 30 percent from 35 percent; and the prime minister of Italy, Romano Prodi, is considering a reduction in his country's 33 percent rate.

"Ghost shares" are highly risky, but "black horses" have beaten expectations. Buying cheap to sell high later is known as "fighting for the hat", while selling at a loss to avoid further losses is "meat slicing". Investors who think a piece of news will boost prices claim to be "lifting the sedan chair".

When a fund manager was sacked last week for allegedly manipulating share prices, websites hummed with talk of "rat investors", the term for insider traders.

There is even a Chinese phrase that could define the current boom. On top of bulls and bears there is the "deer market", when large groups of amateur, short-term speculators cause markets to move in erratic jolts.

Mr. Edwards...supports the union in its fight against Smithfield and he supports legislation under consideration in Congress that would make it easier to use the card check instead of an election. Mr. Edwards also recently sent a letter to Smithfield CEO Larry Pope demanding that he "protect the right of workers" to bargain collectively. He wants Mr. Pope to support the card check.

This -- his support for dispensing with secret ballot elections in the name of workers' rights -- makes Mr. Edwards one of the most pro-union presidential candidates in a long time....Over the past three years, Mr. Edwards has moved sharply to the left. Indeed, he has lashed himself to the mast of organized labor and steered hard to port. His bet is that service-worker unions will propel him to a surprise victory in the early Nevada presidential caucus, giving him a shot at beating the better-financed campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

He also feels that he has found an underserved constituency -- people displaced by the New Economy. And he is on to something. Outside of edge cities and burgeoning metro areas, the painful churning in the economy is easy to spot...

The union response has been to push for higher wages and to oppose moving or laying off workers. That has made it harder to keep manufacturing jobs....

It turns out that exercising political power through a union isn't a substitute for innovation, retraining and other steps necessary to make economies competitive. Look at the numbers. From 1997 to 2005 the 10 states with the highest rates of union membership -- which include California, New York and Michigan, among others -- had slower growth than the bottom 10 states...

As Mr. Edwards urges private-sector unionization as the best way to protect middle class jobs, he can only hope that unions are better at fulfilling electoral promises than economic ones.

Each of the Democratic candidates lust for the endorsements of the unions, mostly the new ones such as SEIU and AFSCME. No hardhats there; plenty of brooms and bureaucrats. Think of the bright, helpful folks at your DMV.

But isn't organized labor failing to organize labor? No, problem! "Card Check" to the rescue. That's the new proposal to do away with the requirements that unions win through a secret ballot -- just sign a card when the union reps corner you. Or else.

John Edwards wants to prove himself to his new masters -- so much so that he wants to turn prosperous North Carolina into dying Michigan. (Meanwhile, in Michigan, the locals now worry that their taxes support a world class university only to lose nearly all the graduates to other states.)

Note that Edward's ploy is aimed at SEIU workers in Nevada. The plant and its employees in NC is just part of the backdrop.