I was watching South Carlina primary result, and he made his speech, and he told the story of a woman giving him $3.01 to help to run his campaign for change, and I totally understand everybody around was brainwashed, because they couldn’t understand the gravity of what was said…
I thought about this :

And felt sorry for Obama…

CHICAGO – One word sums up how John McCain hopes to be regarded when Super Tuesday comes to a close: inevitable.

The senator from Arizona could fall short of capturing enough delegates on Tuesday to lock up the Republican nomination for president. But a powerful showing in the 21 states with GOP contests, including Arizona, California, New York and Illinois, could make him hard to stop.

McCain, who is leading other Republicans in national polls and in many large Super Tuesday states, is on a whirlwind, cross-country tour that took him from Chicago through the South on Saturday, with a plan to head northeast today.

With first-place finishes in the key early states of New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, McCain’s candidacy is approaching critical mass.

Up for grabs on Tuesday are 1,023 Republican delegates. A candidate needs 1,191 to clinch the nomination.

“We’ve got the momentum, we’re going to win this nomination and we’re going to win the presidency of the United States,” an invigorated McCain told about 500 supporters at a Friday evening rally at the Odeum Sports & Expo Center in suburban Villa Park, Ill. “And I’m going to compete right here in the heartland of America, the state of Illinois. I’m going to compete and win.”

Illinois swung for Democrat John Kerry over President Bush in the 2004 election.

Battle royale expected

McCain’s Republican opponents aren’t giving up in the final days before Tuesday’s vote. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the independently wealthy businessman who beat McCain in Michigan, is campaigning aggressively and targeting key states, knowing he needs a major comeback to turn the race in his favor. Like McCain’s home state of Arizona, Romney’s home state of Massachusetts also is voting on Tuesday. So is Utah, a state where Romney is well-known for his work in restoring fiscal equilibrium to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and his Mormon faith. Romney also is strong in Colorado.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister with strong appeal to Christian conservatives, won the Iowa caucuses but since has faltered. However, he remains in play in Southern states such as Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee and his home state of Arkansas.

Even maverick libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, continues to push hard.

“I don’t think anybody has to rush to call it game, set and match, but it’s clear that McCain has the advantage,” said Stuart Rothenberg, the national analyst who publishes the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. “And if Romney does not change the direction of this race in the next few days, it’ll be all over but for the official nomination.”

Recent polls show McCain with leads over second-running Romney in California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut. Forty percent of Tuesday’s GOP delegates are at stake in those states.

“I really, really hope that he wins all over,” said Bonnie Ryan, 23, a Republican student and social worker from Evanston, Ill., who attended McCain’s Friday rally. “He seems like a man of integrity and when he talks, I feel like he’s honest.”

Still, opposition among many conservatives remains fierce. Since his Florida win, McCain has drawn even more intense fire from some radio talk-show hosts, columnists and party activists for his past legislation on immigration and campaign-finance reform and his voting against Bush’s 2001 tax-cut package.

Ann Coulter, for example, the firebrand conservative author and columnist, last week appeared on the Fox News Channel to denounce McCain and vowed to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton if McCain is the GOP nominee.

“Hillary is absolutely more conservative,” Coulter said. Plus, “she’s smarter than McCain.”

Can McCain win it all?

McCain campaign insiders are optimistic but are hesitant to predict that McCain will knock out Romney and wrap up the nomination.

“I don’t know about wrapping it up, but he’ll have a huge delegate lead coming out of Tuesday,” said Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser and a veteran political strategist. “Governor Romney can continue on if he wishes. Usually, the reason people drop out of the race is they run out of money. And that won’t happen to him, obviously.”

Gail Gitcho, a Romney campaign spokeswoman, said Romney remains competitive in all 50 states and cited “a surge of support for Governor Romney with conservative voters across the country who understand that he can bring real, conservative change to Washington.

“Governor Romney is in this race to win it,” Gitcho said.

McCain’s strategy

Since triumphing in Florida on Tuesday, McCain has swept across the nation, presiding over rallies and fundraisers in California, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia.

McCain will campaign today and Monday in Boston, the heart of Romney country. Despite the defiant incursion and endorsements of McCain from the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, Romney maintains a healthy lead over McCain in recent Massachusetts polls. But because Massachusetts awards its delegates proportionally, McCain still could inflict some embarrassing damage.

McCain also has bought advertising time on national cable television networks and in select, competitive states.

“We’ll win California and we’re in good shape in the Northeast, with the exception of Massachusetts,” Black said. “Actually, I see two states that Romney wins: Massachusetts and Utah. There’s four or five that Huckabee can win.”

California poses an unusual battlefield. Republicans there have switched from a winner-take-all system to one that awards three delegates to whoever wins each of the state’s 53 congressional districts. The statewide victor will capture another 11 delegates.

“Whoever wins the raw vote in California is going to get some bragging rights, but you can win the raw vote and lose the delegate vote,” noted Ken Khachigian, a California veteran of multiple GOP presidential campaigns.

In California, McCain has won the endorsements of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News and other newspapers.

Arizona votes, too

McCain will continue to stump around the nation through Tuesday afternoon, when he returns to Phoenix to cast his own vote in Arizona’s primary and host an election-night celebration at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa.

McCain appears in little danger of losing his home state. Romney is the only candidate who has put much money and effort into organizing in Arizona. The two most recent Arizona polls reflect McCain leads of 17 and 23 percentage points.

Jaime Molera, one of McCain’s Arizona campaign co-chairmen, forecasts big wins for McCain in Arizona and around the country Tuesday despite the vehement criticism of him from state and national conservative critics.

“The strong conservatives in Arizona understand where McCain comes from,” Molera said. “I don’t think they buy a lot of the attacks on him.”

The music video includes excerpts from Obama’s speech and appearances from several celebrities: Scarlett Johansson, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, and Nick Cannon. “I’m blown away by how many people wanted to come and be a part of it in a short amount of time. It was all out of love and hope for change and really representing America and looking at the world,” will.i.am said.

ALL OF YOU, CALL THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN OFFICE at 1-(866)-675-2008 AND PRESS 6 TO TALK TO A CAMPAIGN VOLUNTEER.

By Crispian Balmer and Sudip Kar-Gupta

PARIS (Reuters) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy married supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni at the Elysee Palace on Saturday, just three months after they started dating.

“Ms Carla Bruni Tedeschi and Mr Nicolas Sarkozy would like to announce that they got married this morning in the presence of their families and in the utmost privacy,” a statement from Sarkozy’s Elysee office said.

The pair tied the knot at a low-key, civil ceremony conducted by the mayor of the Paris district that houses the president’s grandiose official residence.

“I married two voters … who live at 55 Rue du Faubourg St Honore,” Mayor Francois Lebel told Europe 1 radio, giving the official address of the Elysee.

“The bride was wearing white and was ravishing, as usual,” he said, adding: “The bridegroom wasn’t bad either.”

Another official told Reuters the wedding took place at 11.00 a.m. local time (5 a.m. EST).

Sarkozy and Bruni indicated last month that they planned to marry after a whirlwind romance and made clear that it would be a private affair, far from the eyes of the press.

Their relationship has been splashed across the media and Sarkozy’s popularity ratings have plunged in recent weeks, with voters complaining that the president was focusing too much on his private life and not enough on the country’s many problems, including rising prices and flagging consumer confidence.

Now they are wed, Sarkozy might find it easier to manage the relationship because Bruni will become the first lady of France and will start traveling with him on his many overseas trips.

HISTORICAL

Lebel said the wedding took place in a room on the first floor of the Elysee Palace and lasted about 20 minutes.

“There were around 20 people there, close family and a few friends,” he said. The mayor said the last French head of state to marry while in office was Napoleon III in 1853.

Sarkozy, 53, separated from his second wife Cecilia last October following an 11-year marriage and just five months after winning power. His colleagues said he was deeply upset by the divorce.

However, friends say he started seeing 40-year-old Bruni the following month and they were photographed visiting Paris Disneyland together in December. They then spent the Christmas holidays together in Egypt and Jordan.

Photos of the glamorous couple sparked a media backlash against Sarkozy, who was widely described as “president Bling Bling”, obsessed by the rich and famous. One opposition leader dubbed him a modern-age Louis XIV, France’s “Sun King”.

Their quickfire relationship also surprised many in his entourage.

Bruni, 40, has been portrayed as a man-eater in the press and has previously been linked with rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, as well as businessman Donald Trump and French former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius.

While she is a well-known leftist sympathizer, Sarkozy is a right-winger, viewed as a law and order hardliner.

Sarkozy’s own mother urged him not to re-marry after his divorce and Bruni herself has spoken out against marriage. “I’m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry,” she told the Figaro Madame magazine a year ago.

She has a son from a previous relationship, while Sarkozy has two grown-up sons from his first marriage, and a third son from his marriage to Cecilia.

Bruni threw a surprise birthday party for Sarkozy last week at her plush Paris home and friends say the pair are extremely happy together.

RTL radio said Sarkozy’s witness at the wedding was Nicolas Bazire, a senior figure in the LVMH luxury goods group, while Bruni’s witness was Mathilde Agostinelli, head of communications at Prada France.

The radio station also quoted Bernadette Chirac, wife of previous French President Jacques Chirac, as saying getting married at the Elysee, the president’s official residence, was “a wonderful thing”.

“I want to express all my best wishes to this new household. She is very, very beautiful,” she added.

(Editing by Caroline Drees)

Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissant

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: “He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn’t on strike.

“But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

“At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he’d been working for almost six hours.”

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.

At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, arrogant bastards.

Libel (a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression) by the Daily Mash…

“We have to put a stop to this financial system which is out of its mind and which has lost sight of its purpose,” Sarkozy said on the second of a two-day visit to India.

“The point of a financial system is to lend money for economic activities, which, in turn, generate profits,” Sarkozy told a gathering of French nationals at the French embassy.

“It is not to go and speculate on different activities which create enormous flows and profits in a few hours,” he added.

“If one can make profits in a few hours, one can also make gigantic losses in a few hours as well. And it is time to realize that (we need) to insert a bit of wisdom into all these systems,” the president said.

Societe Generale said this week a rogue trader hid “massive fraudulent” positions in 2007 and 2008 on European equity market indices, which left it nursing 4.9 billion euros ($7.18 billion) of losses after deciding to unwind them in wildly turbulent markets.

The French government was only informed about the massive losses on Wednesday, but a source at the Elysee presidential residence said Sarkozy himself was warned of the problem on Tuesday.

Ministers have expressed anger in private about the delay in informing the government.

Sarkozy is due to hold talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday to discuss ways of improving the transparency of financial markets following the subprime credit crisis.

“I believe in the market economy, I believe in free trade, but I want a type of capitalism … where more place is given to the entrepreneur rather than the speculator,” the president said on Saturday. “Speculation does not create wealth.”

“It is now time to put transparency and prudent new rules into the global financial system … and to promote lending money to businesses and to those who create wealth rather than to those who want to buy in order to tear things apart and speculate,” he added.

(Reporting by Emmanuel Jarry, writing by Crispian Balmer; editing by Tony Austin)

He rose to domestic fame upon the release of his third album, Le Phare, but remained relatively unknown outside France until the release of his score for Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain in 2001, which was a mixture of both new and previously released material.

Tiersen favors the piano, accordion, and violin, but is also known for his experimentation and use of obscure instruments like the ondes martenot and the typewriter.

Yann Tiersen’s list of collaborators continues to grow album after album (see discography below for details). While composing his fifth album, L’absente, Tiersen lent his musical talent to Françoiz Breut and Les Têtes Raides for their own albums. His 2005 album, Les Retrouvailles, featured vocals from Stuart Staples of Tindersticks, Jane Birkin, and Elizabeth Fraser, formerly of Cocteau Twins. Tiersen also played piano on Staples’ solo album, Lucky Dog Recordings 03-04.

His live performances vary greatly. Sometimes he is accompanied by an orchestra and many guest collaborators, like Dominique A. Others, he offers the more frequent minimalistic sessions, usually accompanied only by a drummer/bassist and a guitarist, with Tiersen switching seamlessly between piano, accordion, and violin for his lighter songs, and electric guitar for his harder pieces.

His girlfriend is a brazilian singer, Danni Carlos.

Amelie Poulain Yann Tiersen – Comptine d’un autre été

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) — French Prime Minister Francois Fillon chided Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer for failing to inform him sooner that Societe Generale SA had suffered a record trading loss.

“It’s an affair of such an importance for the French financial system, that maybe the government could have been informed earlier,” Fillon told reporters in Luxembourg today.

He said he learned of the 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) loss on Jan. 23, the day before it was made public and at least three days after Noyer was told by the bank’s chairman.

Fillon’s comments may signal the beginning of official finger-pointing. Fillon ordered Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to complete an investigation in eight days. Noyer was will testify in a Senate hearing Jan. 30 and will be called to appear in the lower house of parliament in the coming weeks, said the head of its Finance Committee, Didier Migaud.

“France is known for being an interventionist state, which it is, and at the same time a country where the prime minister is not informed or aware and is even seemingly the last to know,” Dominique Reynie, a senior researcher at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris said in a telephone interview. “It’s bad for the economy. Confidence will fall while skepticism toward the government will increase,” he said.

`Real Time’

Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank by market value, said yesterday that unauthorized bets on stock-index futures by a single trader caused the loss, the largest in banking history. Noyer said he was told during the weekend that began Jan. 19, and was kept informed in “real time.”

“Is it abnormal that the French government was informed four days after this affair was discovered?” Fillon said. “It’s a private bank. It isn’t obliged to do so.”

“All necessary contacts were made in due course,” Noyer said at a briefing yesterday. After informing Noyer, Societe Generale liquidated the positions starting on Jan. 21.

The day that Societe Generale began unwinding the trades linked to European stock-index futures, equity markets in France, Germany and the U.K. fell more than 5 percent. The next day the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a decision to cut interest rates as “financial market conditions continued to deteriorate.”

Fed policy makers didn’t know about the losses at Societe General prior to the rate reduction, a Fed official said yesterday. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet told LCI television in an interview today that the Bank of France said “what had to be said” within the European system.

Central Banks’ Role

“These things really have to be communicated among European supervisory authorities as soon as possible,” said Karel Lannoo, chief executive officer of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “Central banks are at the center.”

Societe Generale and Noyer guarded the information as closely as possible to prevent leaks that could have ruined the bank, said Elie Cohen, a Societe Generale director and economist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

“This was the highest crisis situation,” Cohen said in an interview. “So thinking about calling the Prime Minister? No. Sorry if he gets annoyed. They had to call the bank regulator.”

With positions that surpassed the bank’s market value of about 40 billion euros, “if a hedge fund found out about it, the bank was dead,” he said. “In an ideal world, the government could be informed of such a crisis, but because of today’s world and markets, you just take the best and most efficient measures.”

Societe Generale Chairman Daniel Bouton apologized to shareholders and clients in a letter posted on the company’s Web site today and published in major newspapers, saying the trading loss was “perfectly unacceptable.” The letter insisted the Paris-based company remains solid.

The bank took the right steps in responding to rogue trading, European Union Financial Services Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said today in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

To contact the reporter on this story: Stephanie Bodoni in Luxembourg at sbodoni@bloomberg.net ; Helene Fouquet in Paris hfouquet1@bloomberg.net

Lacoste Lacoste Big Wheel Duffle – GREEN

The dowle rod construction of this brief gives the bag strength and personality. The rich, full grain leather exterior makes you look good. The roomy, double gusseted interoir with rear organizer section, and plenty of pockets to faithfully hold your business essentials, cell phone and other items.

When the caller says he knows “that’s terrible,” the laughing inmate says, “No, it’s not.”

The judge disagreed, and despite Arrington’s claims in court that she plans to start an anti-DUI group, he sentenced her to a lengthy term in prison.