“Mugsy’s Rap Sheet”

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- Mugsy

I was never a fan of Former Senator John Edwards. But as lower-tier candidates dropped out one by one, he was the only one of the three remaining candidates whose policy agenda and position on most issues I felt comfortable with. With his departure Today/Wednesday, I find there is no candidate whose policy decisions and stated agenda I feel is my “natural next choice”.

I have noted my problems with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on several occasions here on Mugsy’s Rap Sheet in the past year. My chief complaint with Edwards was only his lack of political experience. And I think it was that lack of political experience that handcuffed Edwards from challenging Senator Obama on his own inexperience.

There is no way on Earth I could vote for any Republican (yes, even anti-war Ron Paul, whose Libertarian solutions mean privatizing just about every government service we now enjoy. And if you think that might be a good idea, I have just two words for you: Iraq/Halliburton), leaving me with just two unpalatable choices: Hillary or Obama.

Since I can no longer choose a candidate based on their policy positions or stated agenda, that means picking a candidate based upon who I think has the best chance of BECOMING the kind of President we need to undo the catastrophic damage done by George Bush over the past eight years. The next President will have to deal with an Iraq that will be left in shambles, courting close ties with Iran (not necessarily a bad thing, but will be spun as “a catastrophe” that is “all the Democrats fault”. They will face a nearly $10 TRILLION dollar National Debt that looses $400 Billion tax dollars a year just to pay interest on that debt… so if the next President wants to fund the government without borrowing still more money and growing that debt, they are going to be faced with cutting “something” that one group or another will raise holy hell over. Bill Clinton found the money by cutting our bloated military budget, and the Republicans then used that defunding to unfairly blame him for the disaster in Iraq.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has always been the most hawkish among all the Democratic candidates on the subjects of Iraq and National Security. She voted to declare part of the Iranian Military, (their Quds Force) “a terrorist organization” (which Obama criticized, but then failed to sign the Webb Amendment criticizing that vote). Sen. Barack Obama, while he has claimed the mantle of Howard Dean as the candidate that “opposed the Iraq war from the beginning“, the reason for his opposition wasn’t because he thought invading Iraq was “unnecessary“, “wrong“, or that thousands of innocent Iraqi’s that had nothing to do with 9/11 might be killed, but because… as he stated in the Democrats second debate last year… “I anticipated that we would be creating the kind of sectarian violence that we’ve seen and that it would distract us from the war on terror”. On the subject of Iran developing nuclear weapons, he stated: “I don’t think that’s disputed by any expert.” Flash forward eight months later when the latest “National Intelligence Estimate” revealed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Neither candidate has demonstrated the kind of judgment I think we need in our next President.

Following the egregious abuses of power by President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the growing disaster that was Vietnam, the country reacted by electing the most honest, decent Democrat in the country: the Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter. I’d put Governor Carter’s morals and sense of right & wrong against George Bush’s any day. But because of a “perceived” failure to deal with “the Iran Hostage Crisis”, soaring gas prices, and inflation, Carter lost his bid for re-election just four year later and hastened in 27 years of extremist Republican rule in the White House, Congress or both, for the next 27 years.

The American voting public has an EXTREMELY short memory, and doesn’t understand how government works well enough to understand why you can’t always have both “guns & butter”. How else do you explain Americans voting Republicans back in charge of both the White House and the Senate just four & six years (respectively) after Nixon/Watergate?

My greatest fear at this point is if the next President, once again being ushered in to “fix” the crimes and failed war strategy of the previous Republican president, will be misperceived as a failure just four years from now and set the Democratic Party back another 30 years. And with the next President almost certain to be either “the first woman” or “the first African-American” President, a failed presidency could set back either movement every bit as long.

Right now, I can not endorse either remaining candidate for the Democratic nomination based upon anything they have said or their proposed agenda up to this point. Instead, I’ll be waiting to see who reconfigures their campaign that suggests they are mostly likely to BECOME the kind of President this country will desperately need in the years to come.

WRITERS WANTED - Keeping this blog current can be a bigger job than for just one person. “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet” is looking for VOLUNTEER guest writers to contribute to our blog to help make it worth visiting more than once a week. To contact us, please send an email to the address on our About Us page along with a sample and/or link to your writing skills.
- Mugsy

UPDATE: If you still aren’t convinced U.S. dependence on foreign investment isn’t a catastrophe waiting to happen, read this: Chavez Urges Withdrawals From U.S. Banks. ——————–

I received the following email from MoveOn.org Saturday night:

A Progressive Economy Democratic leaders will be meeting with President Bush this week to negotiate an emergency economic stimulus package, and they’re under pressure to accept the president’s priorities. Bush’s proposal gives little or no help to people who make less than $40,000 a year, but those are the very folks who need help most–and who would be most likely to spend a little extra cash in their pockets to get the economy moving again. This is a moment we could think big. We could spend on public infrastructure to create new jobs, or invest in new technology to make us more competitive and less dependent on oil in the long term. Or we could give even more Bush tax breaks to the people who need it the least. Can you sign this petition and tell your representative to demand a progressive economic package?

President Bush and Congress’ near-sighted solution of handing every man, woman & child in America a LOAN CHECK that they will have to REPAY WITH INTEREST has got to be one of the most horrendous “solutions” one could imagine. Here is the reply I sent MoveOn:

I am appalled that MoveOn has chosen to to sponsor a petition *promoting* the idea of a “stimulus package” that involves INCREASING THE NATIONAL DEBT, BORROWING YET MORE MONEY FROM FOREIGN COUNTRIES THAT WE WILL HAVE TO PAY BACK *WITH INTEREST*! That’s the short-sighted Republican answer to everything: write an IOU and let future generations worry about it. The best “stimulus package” would be to demand oil companies increase refinery output (which they have deliberately reduced to artificially inflate the cost of fuel) and CUT GASOLINE PRICES BY $0.50 A GALLON (gasoline fell below $2/gal the week of the 2006 election. That’s not a coincidence and it proves they can cut gas prices when they want to). The high price of gasoline is like a $1500 a year tax on every working class family in America. And higher fuel costs contribute to higher shipping and production costs as well, that directly affect the cost of the products we buy. Bringing down the price of fuel would have THE most immediate and direct impact on the economy without incurring more debt. It would mean a substantial savings to every American, helping those who need the help most, without giving everyone a “loan check” they must eventually repay with interest. MoveOn and the Democratic Congress should be ashamed of themselves for promoting such an irresponsible and DANGEROUS “solution”. Please reconsider your petition.

People don’t seem to understand Economics-101… when you’re running a deficit, that means you are spending more money than you take in in taxes. If you have no more money, where are they going to get all that lovely cash for their “stimulus package”? A: They must borrow it, or course! And that means you’re going to have to REPAY it… WITH INTEREST. Ever hear the phrase, “Don’t do me any favors”?

DO NOT SIGN MoveOn.org’s PETITION. Tell your friends not to sign MoveOn’s petition either. Instead, contact MoveOn.org and express your displeasure with them supporting a ridiculous “quick fix scheme” that could only of been concocted by a Republican that does nothing but improve George W. Bush’s short-term poll numbers at a cost of tens of millions of YOUR tax dollars! This country can ill-afford any more “tax breaks” that aren’t countered by either spending cuts, cuts in corporate welfare, or commensurate tax increase for the wealthy. And since no Democrat is going to advocate a tax “increase” in an election year… even on those who can most afford it… that third option isn’t going to happen. And no one has suggested any “spending cuts” to offset the cost of this “stimulus package”, so it will do one thing and one thing only: balloon the National Debt.

They might as well just cut a massive Billion dollar check to the oil companies because that’s where the money is going to go anyways.

Why is The National Debt such an important issue? Because every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar we aren’t spending here in the U.S.. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush together are responsible for nearly 8 of the 9 TRILLION dollars this country now owes its creditors (half owed to Americans that purchased bonds and half to foreign countries that loaned us the money).

Do the math: For simplicity sake, if we borrowed all that cash at an average of 5% interest, that’s $400 BILLION TAX DOLLARS PAID OUT IN INTEREST EVERY YEAR! Lost. Wasted. Down the drain. Used for nothing but to pay interest. Imagine what this country could do with an extra $400 BILLION dollars a year? Fully fund healthcare, invest in alternative energy research, hire an additional 8 million public school teachers, or SIX AND A HALF MILLION new police officers! By comparison, the Iraq war has cost the U.S. roughly $200 Billion dollars a year. So interest on the debt is equivalent to the cost of TWO IRAQ WARS EVERY YEAR… FOREVER! It’s fiscal irresponsibility at its highest, and it should NOT be encouraged!

And while MoveOn did inject SOME responsible suggestions of investing that money in “infrastructure”, that will neither produce the immediate economic stimulus this catastrophic Bush economy needs, nor would it help the plight of those who already have jobs and need some relief now… and still adds to a debt we can no longer afford to explode unchecked.

BORROWING STILL MORE MONEY IS NOT A SOLUTION! It is dangerous, reckless, irresponsible, and the only person it helps in the short term is George W. Bush and his cronies. Tell your friends NOT to sign the MoveOn.org petition if they receive it.

WRITERS WANTED - Keeping this blog current can be a bigger job than for just one person. “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet” is looking for VOLUNTEER guest writers to contribute to our blog to help make it worth visiting more than once a week. To contact us, please send an email to the address on our About Us page along with a sample and/or link to your writing skills.
- Mugsy

It’s been more than six years since September the 11th. Ever since, “9/11″ has been President Bush’s “Get out of jail free” card. Everything bad that has happened in our economy, every crime he has committed in the name of “protecting us from terrorism”, Bush defenders have pointed to “9/11!” as their ultimate defense. You say: “The economy is in the toilet.” They say: “We’re still recovering from 9/11.” Gas prices too high? Blame that too on a Middle East that declared war on us on 9/11.

Not once when the Administration was bragging about “Record home ownership” leading up to and immediately after his re-election in 2004, did I hear anyone claim “9/11 was still hurting our economy”. The “Record home ownership” they bragged of really only existed on paper. A rapid series of interest rate cuts by the Fed to rescue an already floundering economy rocked by 9/11, spawned a flurry of shady sub-prime mortgage lending.

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke the 14,000 mark for the first time last July, the Bush Administration was quick to take credit, claiming the new record was “evidence” that President Bush’s economic policies were working. So then, what does it say when the markets are on the verge of wiping out eight years of gains since the Bill Clinton high of 11,722.98 on January 14, 2000?

Tuesday, the DOW closed at 11,971.19… that’s just 248 points in EIGHT YEARS!

And if you adjust for the devaluing of our currency under President Bush… printing money like wallpaper… which it is quickly gaining parity with:  

(Click to enlarge)

…our economic collapse under President Bush has been even more devastating. Consider that when Bill Clinton left office, the new Euro was worth $0.98 to the strong American dollar. The Euro is now worth approximately $1.44. So, adjusted for inflation, the DOW closed today at “8,313″ in “year 2000 dollars”.

The thought of “$75 a barrel oil” five years ago would of been unthinkable, with $100 a barrel oil the stuff of science fiction… the price of oil in a post-apocalyptic America. This is our reality under George W. Bush.

After markets crashed the world over the same day U.S. markets were (mercifully) closed for MLK Day, the Federal Reserve met overnight for an emergency meeting and took the unprecedented step of cutting interest rates before the markets even opened Tuesday morning, cutting “a key interest rate” 3/4 of a percent… the largest one day cut in 23 years… to prevent the worst market crash since the markets reopened after 9/11.

My report last March about a “one day loss of 242 points, more than 650 points in a week” almost seems quaint by todays standards, and proof that the “Astounding growth” of the Bush economy is a Right Wing Fantasy that never was and never will be.

I think that after 6 years of BRAGGING about the anemic growth, and now near total implosion, of The Bush Economy, I think Bush’s defenders have lost their “9/11 trump card” when it comes to defending George Bush’s absolutely horrendous and disastrous stewardship of the U.S. economy for eight years.

Postscript: And just as they declared “economic” victory too soon only to have the consequences of their policies blow up in their face years later, so will the success of “the Surge” in Iraq… which was instituted as a way to give the Iraqi government the breathing room it needed to start making progress. Only half that equation has come to pass: a decrease in violence. Yet, they are already declaring “success”.

Want to know what the Iraq government did today with the added “breathing room” our soldiers are literally dying to provide for them? They agreed to adopt a new flag:

I figure by November, the bubble will have burst on Bush’s “Surge” as well, exposing it for the policy disaster we already know it will be.

WRITERS WANTED - Keeping this blog current can be a bigger job than for just one person. “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet” is looking for VOLUNTEER guest writers to contribute to our blog to help make it worth visiting more than once a week. To contact us, please send an email to the address on our About Us page along with a sample and/or link to your writing skills.
- Mugsy

UPDATE (01/17): The DOW fell just under 307 points today, closing at 12,159.21, making this the FIFTH 200+ point loss this year, which is not yet three weeks old.

I was given a subscription to “Vanity Fair” Magazine for my birthday during the 2004 Presidential Election. I was unaware at the time that VF is one of the best sources of political journalism there is, whose editor, Greydon Carter, is a notorious critic of the Bush Administration. I have happily renewed my subscription every year since.

While having an unabashed Democratic slant that spares no Republican from its in-depth investigative journalism, the magazine is popular among many Conservatives, who frequently write Letters to the Editor to complain about some “unfair bias” or “misinformation” in a previous article.

Two such letters appear in this month’s (February 2008) issue. The author of the article in question was given the opportunity to reply to his critics, which I felt was so lacking, I had no choice but to write the VF Mailbag and provide a proper response:

I know VF doesn’t typically allow readers to respond to others’ comments, but I found Mr. Stiglitz’s response to letters last month (February issue) fatally lacking. Two readers repeated ubiquitous Republican Talking Points dismissing the economic achievements of both FDR and Bill Clinton. The first reader pointed out the looming recession during President Clinton’s final year in office. Of the eight years of the Clinton presidency, only two were poor performers: 1996 & 2000. And what do those two years have in common? They were both ELECTION YEARS. While the DOW is a notoriously bad benchmark of economic health, it is an excellent measure of economic mood. The DOW hit its record high in January of 2000… the very beginning of the political campaign (a novel idea to begin a Presidential campaign in the same year as the election, I know). Governor George W. Bush went on the campaign trail telling everyone at every stop that “the economy wasn’t as good as they were saying”, and with that, the market slipped. And like a self-fulfilling prophecy, with every slip, Bush continued to point to the decline as “proof” that what he was saying was true. People forget that before 9/11, the popular consensus was that George W. Bush “talked the economy into a recession”. Another reader, loaded with selective facts, points out that the economy that grew under FDR following the Hoover Depression, was far weaker in 1938 than in 1937, and only the massive military buildup of WWII finally pulled us out of The Great Depression. What that reader conveniently disregarded (or is unaware of) is that in 1938, Europe was in chaos. Hostility between China and Japan grew, Spain was on the brink of civil war, and Italy, Germany and Japan formed the Anti-Comintern Pact which threw Europe into turmoil as the Axis began preparing for war. It is unfathomable that the second reader could credit military sales to Europe for bolstering the U.S. economy from ‘39 to ‘41, but conveniently disregard the decimation of sales to Europe in 1938 as that same war approached. “War” did not rescue the economic recovery under FDR. It delayed it.

In just the past 2-1/2 months, the DOW has seen SIXTEEN TRIPLE DIGIT LOSSES due mostly in part to the current mortgage lending crisis. The DJIA is currently 1,485 points off its 14,000.41 record high close of July, 2007. Once a rare sign of trouble, FOUR of those sixteen 200+ point drops occurred in just the past two weeks alone. This is the record they defend while criticizing the stunning successes of FDR and Bill Clinton.

Despite Vanity Fair’s normal practice of not printing responses to other readers, they have done so at least once in the past, and I’m hoping they will do so again. I’ll let you know.

WRITERS WANTED - Keeping this blog current can be a bigger job than for just one person. “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet” is looking for VOLUNTEER guest writers to contribute to our blog to help make it worth visiting more than once a week. To contact us, please send an email to the address on our About Us page along with a sample and/or link to your writing skills.
- Mugsy

Tuesday afternoon I received an alert from Black Box Voting, the election watchdog group founded by Bev Harris, reporting that the New Hampshire Republican Party already listed “8pm: McCain Victory Party” on it’s website before the polls even opened Tuesday:

(Click to enlarge. Clock on lower right.)

By the time I received the email and visited the website, a few hours had passed. But there it was, more than two hours before the polls had closed without a single precinct reporting: the NH/GOP website’s “Calendar” page reporting “8:00pm McCain Victory Party“ Confidence is one thing, but if I were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, I might be a little pissed. I suspect it was at least another hour before anyone at BBV even knew of the web oddity, assuring that the page had to of been posted sometime early that same morning, if not before.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, for days since the Ohio Caucus last Thursday, every  single  poll  that  I could find taken before Tuesday showed Obama leading Hillary… several by  double  digits. I did not find one poll suggesting a surprise Hillary Victory in New Hampshire.

On Monday, the same Black Box Voting revealed that “81% of NH voters will cast their ballots on Optical Scan voting machines from Diebold using an outdated and known hackable version of the ballot reading software”, and that a single company, LHS, has full chain of custody over each and every one of these machines, including the AccuVote Memory Cards.” BBV then performed a demonstration of a hacked vote using one of the same Optical Scanners, purchased by them from Diebold running the identical software:

The pre-vote test: 0 Yes, 0 No. The actual vote: 2 Yes, 6 No. Final result: 7 Yes, 1 No.

At least one study shows that Republicans have a better chance of winning in November if their opponent is Hillary Clinton rather than John Edwards or Barrack Obama, which has to make one wonder, was the fix in even before New Hampshirites went to the polls Tuesday morning?

UPDATE: From the Ron Paul website message board:

UPDATE2: From another Ron Paul supporters website, the vote totals in towns that “hand counted” ballots vs the vote totals in towns that used Diebold Optical Scanners is in: http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php.

This just gets more and more interesting. Updates as they happen. Stay tuned.

WRITERS WANTED - Keeping this blog current can be a bigger job than for just one person. “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet” is looking for VOLUNTEER guest writers to contribute to our blog to help make it worth visiting more than once a week. To contact us, please send an email to the address on our About Us page along with a sample and/or link to your writing skills.
- Mugsy

I follow politics like some people follow football. The Primaries are the year long “Playoffs” with Election Night being my Super Bowl. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that while others were watching “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Desperate Housewives“, I spent the evening watching the Returns come in from the Iowa Caucus. And you couldn’t script a more exciting night than Iowa Thursday:

Obama won with 38% of the vote, with Edwards coming in second at 30%. But the big news of the night arguably is that longtime front-runner Hillary Clinton came in third with just over 29%, a fraction of a point behind John Edwards.

The early returns showed a surprising (and sizable) 5-point lead for Edwards, which dwindled but held for the first 33% of the returns, at which point Obama took the lead and never looked back, finishing the night with an eight point lead over Edwards and 8.5 point lead over Hillary. But the fact Edwards held the early lead and finished better than the Third place that he’s been polling at for months, can definitely be seen as a victory for the Edwards campaign.

I have expressed my personal support on here for NM Governor Bill Richardson, whose fourth-place finish (with 3%), beating out every other lower-tier candidate by a huge margin, all but solidifies him as the inevitable Vice Presidential nominee (unless that nominee is Obama… the first Afro-American nominee, who I do not see choosing Richardson… the first Hispanic nominee… as his running mate).

I took a bit of flack a few weeks ago for suggesting to Kucinich supporters that they take a second look at Bill Richardson, but on Wednesday, Kucinich suggested to his supporters that if he failed to achieve the 15% minimum threshhold, that they throw their support to Obama… whose platform is FAR less compatible with Kucinich’s than Edwards (the man he redirected his supporters to in 2004) or Richardson (the only front-runner vowing to pull all troops out of Iraq his first year). This could only have been a political calculation rather than a sincere endorsement because hurting Hillary helps Kucinich, whereas helping Edwards only hurts him. “Politically calculating” is certainly not something Kucinich supporters would appreciate in a candidate, which I suspect left a bad taste in their mouths… not that Kucinich’s <1% was of much help to Obama. In one report, the Kucinch campaign was so disorganized, they didn’t even have a representative to speak for him at some (most?) caucuses, and without so much as banner hung under which Kucinch delegates could stand.

While I’m not a huge fan of John Edwards… my main complaint being a serious lack of political experience (serving just four of his first six years as Senator before running in ‘04)… I’ve had more serious differences with Hillary Clinton (read my #1 ‘08 Prediction below) and Barack Obama, so a victory over Hillary Clinton is far preferable to me than loosing to her.

The other big news of the night was a huge win for Republican Mike Huckabee, with a 6 point win (leading by as much as 16 points, but never trailed) over Mitt Romney. Huckabee’s lead was so commanding all night long that the GOP race was called after just 40% of precincts were in. I predicted in last weeks column that Huckabee will go on to win the Republican nomination thanks to Evangelicals that can’t bear any of the other GOP candidates, and tonight’s strong win for Huckabee… who was out-spent 10-to-1 by Romney… seems as good an indicator that I’m on the right track.

It bears repeating that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both came in second in New Hampshire… the first official primary which will be on January 8th this year… so finishing second/third in the early races does not mean the race is over for Edwards or Hillary. However, after John Kerry defeated longtime favorite Howard Dean in both Iowa and New Hampshire, he coasted on to the nomination. Second place finisher John Edwards, despite wining several early primaries, was never able to overtake John Kerry’s lead in the polls… a lesson that shaped the Edwards campaign strategy this time around: take the lead early and ride the momentum on to victory.

Now where did I put the chips & dip?