For the price of the Iraq War, we could've covered the Midwest in muslin.
Florida resident Andy Lacasse posted the sign depicted above on his lawn to attack Barack Obama's racial background and putative religious views. Muslin is a finely woven cotton fabric, not a term for the followers of Islam, the religion that Obama is sometimes falsely accused of following. Onlinefabricstore.net sells 1 yard by 125 inches of muslin for $4.
The midwest can be broadly defined to include the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, which have a combined land area of 822,000 square miles. Covering this entire area with muslin from onlinefabricstore.net would cost $2.92 trillion, which is $80 billion less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the total cost of the Iraq War.
