Dubya & Co. seemed to taking a page out of Da Mare‘s book when they awarded a $1.7 billion, no-bid, ongoing contract for Iraqi reconstruction work to Halliburton, which the veep used to run before re-entering “public life.”

But now they’ve really got the idea. Echoing Chicago-style practices of ensuring that political enemies (or simply apolitical types) don’t get their fingers on any government dough, the Pentagon announced it wouldn’t award any reconstruction contracts to companies whose countries that opposed the war in the first place.

It’s wonderful what a little war can do for the practice of good government.

It’s not every day someone proudly proclaims his love of busybody snitches. Leave that to a liberal like Chicago Tribune metro columnist Eric Zorn, who gives a merry “Ho, ho, ho!” to the nosy next-door neighbors in today’s column.

The city recently fined more than 1,000 drivers who did not have the required city sticker displayed on their cars. The ticket, the sticker and the late fee add up to $165 for these drivers who have traditionally avoided the fines by parking in private garages both at home and work.

Zorn cheers:

Heaven and nature might not be singing at the plight of those who’ve been skulking around from private garage to private garage trying to avoid paying the $75 annual sticker fee, but I sure am.

And knowing that calls from informants to 773-742-9217, the tip line at the clerk’s office, have lately increased from between five and 10 a day to approximately 40 fills me with great cheer.

Prompting the surge was a City Council ordinance passed last month authorizing law enforcement to search for sticker violators in nearly all privately owned parking garages. …

And all the surrounding publicity has inspired keen-eyed citizens to call 773-742-9217 — What? I already gave the number? Well, then I repeat myself–to offer suggestions to inspectors where to find mother lodes of violators.

It’s not that those without stickers are lawbreakers that’s making my days merry and bright. It’s that they’re freeloaders who for years have been taking a ride on the sleigh pulled by those of us who ante up and get our stickers and who have occasionally paid the “failure to display” fine when missing the deadline to install the new sticker.

Never mind the theoretical issue of fairness — ultimately, those who follow the law make up the shortfall caused by those who ignore it. If there were true justice in the system, authorities would cross-reference these new tickets with old vehicle registration, voter registration and tax records, then charge fees and fines dating back as far as the statute of limitations allows.

No tender and mild treatment for the wicked. Let ’em pay, let ’em pay, let ’em pay.

Never mind that the city sticker — or sucker sticker, as a friend of mine dubbed it — has no valid purpose and is simply a way to generate revenue. Gas is already taxed by Chicago and Cook County of 11 cents per gallon. If that is not enough to maintain the road infrastructure of the area (doubtful), then the gas tax should be increased.

The sucker sticker isn’t necessary for vehicle identification, of course. We have license plates for that, another $85, if I recall correctly. No, it’s not an easy pass to get you through the tolls faster. It doesn’t even verify that your car has passed the environmental inspection. It just sits there, with some kid’s ugly drawing on it (there’s a contest every year, see), and is impossible to scrape off the window, which you must do because it’s also against the law to put your new sticker above the old sticker, as that would make it too hard for the police to notice you’re scoffing the law.

And if you don’t buy the sticker, that’s a great opportunity for the city to make you pay yet again. All taxes deserve some “avoision,” as Kent Brockman put it, but this one’s a real stinker that ought to be reduced or scrapped altogether, not cheered on and enforced by busybodies like Zorn.

One last note. While the conceit is that mostly the well-to-do who park in private garages are being hit by this stepped up enforcement of the sucker sticker, this is yet another unnecessary tax that everyone has to face, and it obviously has a disproportionate impact on the poor folks liberals like Zorn claims to care so much about. He should be explaining how the city’s cronyism and wasteful bureaucracy make taxes like this necessary — that’s what a real journalist would do, anyway.

I guess it’s OK if a few families have to pass on toys for the kids this Christmas, so long as the busybodies can feel good about themselves.

American conservatives who fret that God has been taken out of the public square ought to take a look at what is happening in France right now, where leaders in parliament have called for a ban of any visible religious symbol in the schools there.

Meanwhile, supposed defender of Muslim sovereignty French President Jacques Chirac said in a speech that the head scarves and veils Muslim girls wear to school “ostentatious signs of religious proselytism” that are “aggressive” in nature.

The focus in the United States is, as it should be, on ensuring that the government does not endorse or establish any particular religion or religious expression. France wants to rid public life of any religious expression, period. Muslims here may be targets of counter-terrorist snoops, and they may be deproted just for registering with the government, but at least their daughters can wear their scarves to school.

Whatever actually happened in the ambush at Samarra, the U.S. military’s newfound love for enemy body counts should be disturbing to everyone, for or against the Iraq war.

“We’ve been killing and capturing bushels of these guys, but no one was talking about it,” one senior military officer told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “For a while there it was beginning to look like only Americans were being killed.”

An obsession with what things “look like” is beginning to opress all facets of the Iraq occupation. Touting enemy-kills in a war defined by the asymmetric nature of the opposing forces is beyond useless. And given the difficulty of differentiating between the warriors and the noncombatants, the numbers will be grossly overinflated and tragically overlook the real impact on Iraqi civilians of the occupation.

Here are some figures that do matter in evaluating the success of the occupation:

• Is the number of daily attacks going up or down?
• Is the unemployment rate going down?
• Is the number of well trained Iraqi police going up?
• Is the number of U.S. troops going down?

U.S. forces have been put in a very tough position. Do we really want “Kill as many as you can” to be publicly defined as part of their mission in Iraq? It’s bad for morale, it’s bad for the occupation, it’s bad for average, innocent Iraqis.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)

The Democrats may feel they’ve been steamrolled by the GOP on the ginormous Medicare prescription-drug bill, but the Republicans are the ones who are truly lost.

What a stunning role reversal — well, it would be stunning if weren’t so damned predictable. Senate Democrats overwhelmingly vote against the biggest expansion of the welfare state in nearly 40 years, while the GOP rams it through and Dubya twists every arm to make sure it goes his way.

Supposedly it will cost $400 billion over 10 years, but that’s a vast understatement of the actual costs, as Doug Bandow points out:

Any legislator who takes fiscal responsibility seriously should be particularly concerned about the latter. Pegged at a ten-year cost of $395 billion, the real increase in the government’s presently unfunded liability will be several trillion dollars: Estimates ranged from $6 trillion for the House bill to $12 trillion for the Senate measure, with the compromise likely falling somewhere in between. The latter number is 40 percent of Medicare’s current projected future red ink.

Nor does anyone take the $395 billion figure seriously; if a private company offered that estimate, its officers would be headed for jail. For one thing, that number stops before the baby-boomer wave starts retiring, after which costs will explode. Leonard Burman of the Urban Institute projects the second decade’s costs will run $1 trillion, and even that figure, given current cost trends, “is likely to be an underestimate,” he says. But why should today’s elected officials worry? Many will be out of office when Medicare’s fiscal house collapses.

It’s OK, though. The Republicans stand for “freedom,” so a victory for them must be a victory for liberty. I should get that through my thick head already.

I keep mistakenly thinking that in the end principles don’t amount to much compared to the lure of political power. Silly me.

The only bright spot that could be found in any of this is that, along with the good economic news, whoever the Democratic presidential nominee is will have to lean heavily on foreign affairs in attacking Bush. Right now, that’s where he seems to be most vulnerable, and that’s where the Democratic nominee is most likely to have something of value to say.

It’s a long shot, perhaps, but what else have we got?