This is the best Obama conspiracy theory post yet. William F. Buckley's ghost is making a futile attempt to bang his head into something solid.

• Item:  The Los Angeles Times is owned by the Tribune Co.
• Item:  The Tribune Co. is based in Chicago.
• Item:  "In 2008, Tribune is struggling under a $13 billion debt load, much of it incurred in taking the company private in 2007, and from plummeting advertising income at its newspapers." (Wikipedia. A business friend tells me the current figure is actually $14.7 billion.)
• Item:  Tribune Chairman and CEO Sam Zell is a major Republican donor. Why would he not want his paper to release the Khalidi tape?
• Item:  The federal government is sitting on a bailout fund of $700 billion.
• Item:  It's not likely the Treasury can disburse more than one or two hundred billion of that before the next administration comes in.
• Item:  The next administration will therefore have at least half a trillion greenies to hand out to anyone it deems worthy of being bailed out. Anyone — there are no hard and fast rules.
• Item:  14.7 billion is a very small proportion — less than three percent — of half a trillion.

It's obviously airtight, but John Derbyshire is missing so much more.

* Obama supports having the Olympics in Chicago. The Tribune would benefit greatly from the Olympics being in Chicago. See? Whereas if John McCain was president, he'd probably bomb someone and the Olympics would end up in Baku or whatnot.

* The Trib is getting a lot of (deserved) attention by dispatching reporters to blow up insane theories like the one about Obama not being a U.S. citizen. If Obama loses, they have to go cover committee meetings or something totally boring. Whereas if Obama wins, that's like up to eight years of crazy people like John Derbyshire coming up with crazy shit for the Tribune to debunk.

* I should mention here that I have a secret videotape of Barack Obama overtipping a waiter at Calypso who I think I saw reading a copy of Behold a Pale Horse on the Jackson Park Express. It's not much, but the Reader's parent company is only about $40 million in the hole, so we don't need nearly as much leverage.

Via Jesse Taylor at Pandagon, who also takes on the Obama-is-Malcom-X's-kid rumor.