“Mugsy’s Rap Sheet”

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- Mugsy

On the May 9th edition of PBS’s “News Hour”, Democratic Journalist Mark Shields said, “If the Democrats can’t win this year, they need to just pack it in and start selling aluminum siding.”

Truer words were never spoken.

On the Friday edition of a local political talkshow, guest, reformed Republican and anti-neocon “Kevin Phillips” (former Nixon adviser and author of “The Emerging Republican Majority”, a Conservative bible in 1968) was asked (tongue-in-cheek) if he felt “responsible” for the mess we currently find ourselves in. He said (I paraphrase):

“I would, if the Democrats hadn’t made the Republicans’ job so easy. In 1988, George HW Bush was beatable, but who did the Democrats run against him? Mike Dukakis, a liberal governor from Massachusetts. In 2000, Al Gore, following on the heels of a balanced budget and growing economy, should of won handily, but Bill Clinton sabotaged that with the Lewinski scandal. Then in 2004, beating George W. Bush should of been a piece of cake, but who did the Democrats choose to run against him? John Kerry… none other than Mike Dukakis’ former lieutenant governor.”

While the argument behind the argument is easy to challenge (the Party didn’t pick Kerry, the media did after pummeling Howard Dean to death with the “Dean Scream” video), there is a ring of truth to it… Democrats have a way of finding new ways to lose. So even running on Bush’s record, a McCain victory isn’t completely unfathomable. With the Democratic Party split between “Hillary” and “Obama” loyalists that say they’d “vote for McCain before they’d vote” for the other Democrat, not to mention another “Ohio/Florida” debacle should the race be close, and the recently approved “Voter ID” scam approved by this Conservative Supreme Court, and no one can rule out a McCain victory in ‘08.

Now, with that in mind, think to all the opportunities the new Democratically controlled Congress has passed up: “Impeachment is off the table” said Nancy Pelosi in 2006 to win re-election, and both houses of Congress have allowed themselves to be bullied by the Republican minority, continuing to approve hundred-billion dollar war supplementals for fear of being branded as “not supporting the troops” in an election year… all in the potentially futile belief that doing so will help ensure a Democratic victory in November.

So then, what if John McCain wins thanks to a bitterly divided Democratic Party? Will it be worth it, allowing George Bush to escape impeachment for the myriad of crimes he has committed since taking office? Refusing to cut off funding for the war in Iraq that has resulted in the loss of an additional 1,000 troop deaths since taking power in January of ‘07? All to end up with a Republican President anyway? Would it be worth it?

The Democratically controlled Congress needs to stop worrying about “harming their chances in November” and start doing the jobs they were elected to do. The Republican Party certainly wasn’t worried about 2000 when they impeached Bill Clinton in 1999. If anything, painting Democrats as “morally corrupt” helped them WIN the following year, not only seizing control of the White House, but increasing their margins in both the House & the Senate. There should be a lesson there for the current Democratic Congress: standing up for what’s right, exposing the crimes/misdeeds of the opposing Party, and working to bring about an end to George Bush’s ruinous war in Iraq… and now threatening Iran.., is what they were elected to do. NOT doing those things paints them as “weak”, “ineffective”, “cowardly”, and “no better than the other guys”.

And if Congress wasn’t doing enough to hurt democracy, what might be the result of idiotic Democratic voters that threaten to vote for McCain should their nominee not win? Three of the four members of the Conservative wing of the Supreme Court are all under 60 (Roberts, Alito and Thomas, with Scalia at 72). The youngest of the four Liberal justices is 68 (Souter, with Stevens being the oldest at 88). Swing vote Kennedy, who is 71, has been the deciding vote in many 5-4 split decisions… as well as the aforementioned horrendous “Voter ID” ruling. A 2007 study found that 24 of the 68 cases ruled on by the current Supreme Court were decided by a 5-4 margin. On May 6th, John McCain said that newly appointed Justices Roberts & Alito were his models for the kind of judges he’d nominate to the highest court in the land if he were elected President.

Hillary or Obama backers that threaten to “vote for McCain” need to grow the F— up. Throw a temper-tantrum if they must, but fall in line come November and support the Democratic nominee who ever they may be because this country won’t survive another Republican Presidency like the current one. And the current Democratically controlled Congress needs to start showing some backbone, or voters will lose faith in them come November.

(How John McCain wins)

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

A grime milestone was reached as the price for a barrel of oil closed above $129 a barrel for the first time, Tuesday.

The significance of that number may be lost on most, but it is significant and here’s why:

On September 12, 2001, crude oil closed at $29 a barrel… the day after the attacks of 9/11. While the U.S. Stock & Mercantile markets may have been closed in the U.S., the rest of the world went on without us. The price of oil rose only slightly, up just $1.55 from the day before. Oil has now risen an additional $100 a barrel since 9/11.

If you were a Republican, you might stop there and exonerate President Bush by blaming current oil prices on “9/11″. But exactly 18 months later on March 11, 2003, the price of oil had climbed a mere $9 to just $37 a barrel a little over a week before the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 had NOTHING to do with the meteoric rise in gas prices that we see today.

As I noted just last month, when Texas Governor George W. Bush was still running for President in 2000, the price of gasoline hit a high of $1.49/gallon. Truckers threatened to go on strike over the high price of diesel fuel, and a petulant candidate Bush was telling everyone that if he were President, he’d tell OPEC to “open up the spigot” and increase the supply of oil to bring down high gas prices.

Last week, Bushie tried just that, traveling to Saudi Arabia to beg his Arab masters that they take pity on him and pump more oil to bring down the price of fuel… a record price that’s making them filthy rich. Their response was just as you would have expected:

(click for full-sized image)

I’ve referenced this video of mine numerous times here on Mugsy’s Rap Sheet, where a Yale Professor of Economics just prior to the invasion of Iraq envisioned a “worst case scenario” of oil hitting $75 a barrel and gasoline topping a whopping $3 a gallon if the invasion of Iraq didn’t go well. Back then, $75 was such an unimaginably high price for oil. Consider that, even at the height of the 1991 Gulf War, the price of oil peaked at just $41 a barrel, then quickly settled back down to its “pre-invasion” price as the war ended quickly with the ouster of Saddam Hussein from neighboring Kuwait and U.S. troops were brought home.

(Click image for full story behind graph)

A Conservative, yet Bush-hating, friend of mine emailed me last week to say that, as much as he despised Bush, he didn’t blame him for the high gas prices, believing that the cause was mostly out of his control. I quickly knocked that down with a few points. “The current high price of fuel is ENTIRELY Bush’s fault, and here’s why:”

There are a number of things Bush can do to PERMANENTLY drop the price of oil/fuel. I say “PERMANENTLY”, because pathetic quick fixes like “halting the flow of oil into the U.S. strategic reserve“, like President Bush did this past week, not knowing what else to do after the Saudi’s turned him down flat, are not long-term solutions.

First off, stop devaluing the dollar by printing billions of worthless greenbacks to pay interest on the exploding National Debt being run up by his indefensible tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans while funding his war in Iraq. As the dollar grows worthless, it takes more of them to purchase a barrel of oil… which (for now) is traded in U.S. dollars. The skyrocketing price of oil, while hurting the rest of the world’s economy, isn’t causing anywhere near as much pain in Europe, where both the price of oil AND the value of the Euro have risen against the U.S. dollar. In 1999, the new “Euro” was worth $0.98 to the U.S. dollar. Today, it is worth $1.59.. So while it takes $129 to purchase one barrel of crude oil, it costs the EEC $82.50. For comparison sake, while the price of oil has risen $92 a barrel (from $37 to $129) since the invasion of Iraq, it has risen only $45 for most of Europe. Still high, but not even in the same ballpark as the U.S. (In case you’re wondering, the British Pound is currently worth $1.97, so in England, a barrel of oil is still affordable at the equivalent of $65.50/barrel).

Second, like just about everyone else, you probably noticed the price of gasoline fell dramatically just before the 2006 mid-term elections. Locally, the weekend before Election Day, the price of Regular Unleaded had fallen to just $1.99 a gallon (down from $2.25 earlier that Summer). Amazing how that happens, gas prices falling just in time for the big election, then going back up right after. While the oil companies (and the Bush Administration) like to blame “the lack of refineries” for much of the high cost of gasoline, it’s a total sham that I like to call “the Enron Effect“… closing refineries and cutting production to artificially raise prices. In 1999, the Texas-based energy company Enron was ordering electric plants in California to “close for maintenance”, causing artificial shortages of electricity that forced the state of California to impose “rolling blackouts”, and raised electricity prices through the roof. You may remember stories of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling joking in a live webcast to employees, “You know what the difference is between California and the Titanic? At least when the Titanic went down, the lights were on.“

And now oil companies use the same tactic to artificially push up gas prices, closing refineries or running refineries at less than peak capacity to create artificial shortages, then racking in the profits as the price soars higher. And we KNOW this is so because, as the 2006 “anomaly” proved, they clearly can glut the market, increase supply and bring down prices when they want to, to try and influence an election. If President Bush REALLY wanted to cut gasoline prices, he’d slap a hefty Billion dollar fine on any oil company caught unnecessarily closing a refinery or running at diminished capacity (no metaphor intended).

$75/barrel oil and $3 gas was almost unthinkable in 2003. That was $54/barrel ago.

($4 a gallon gas in Florida)

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

Way back in February of last year, I wrote about a “slideshow” released by the Bush Administration that purported to show hard evidence of Iranian weapons that had been snuck into Iraq to aid the insurgency. A brief review of those weapons/munitions quickly raised questions as to just where those weapons were actually coming from. The likelihood that those weapons were of “Iranian make” was nowhere close to being as certain as the Bushites would of had us believe. Almost as quickly as the claims arose, they were dropped from the GOP’s talking points.

Then last week, a few “small” interrelated stories hit the news:

1. Last Friday (5/9), the LA Times noted that “There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner’s introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word “Iran,” or any form of it.“

MG Bergner showed off a large cache of some “20,000″ weapons & munitions to reporters that were recovered in recent weeks by U.S. and Iraqi security forces. At no time did he point the finger at Iran as being the source of these weapons.

If you look even casually at the above photo, the weapons certainly appear not to have been recently constructed nor well preserved. If I were to guess, since no one is questioning the source of these weapons, they likely know where they are from: U.S.-made munitions dug out of old Iraqi weapons dumps.

2. Last week, Iraqi rebellion leader, Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr denounced revered Iraqi cleric Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani (living in the town of Najaf) for failing to condemn the recent outbreak of violence that has killed hundreds in Baghdad:

For 50 days Sadr City is being bombed … Children, women and old people are being killed by all kinds of US weapons, and Najaf remains silent.”

Consider for a moment what this suggests. Sistani’s followers certainly aren’t killing fellow Shi’ites living in “Sadr City”. And, why would you be upset that a fellow cleric wasn’t denouncing the violence if you thought they were behind it? They’re not bombing themselves, and if it were the Sunni-based al-Qaeda, Sadr would not of hesitated to blame them. No, the source of the violence are the actions of U.S. & Iraqi security forces attempting to wall-in Sadr City:

3. The Pentagon announced Tuesday that it was finally ready to put five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators on trial in a military court assembled at “Gitmo”, the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Among them, “9/11 Mastermind” Kalid Sheik Mohammad (”KSM” for short).

According to the report, “Prosecution of a sixth suspect, so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed Qahtani, was dropped.” You might remember “Zacarias Moussaoui” from a few years back. He was the man the Bush Administration repeatedly alleged was the missing “20th hijacker” over-and-over again from 2001 until his conviction in 2006 (view the court indictment here). I guess he was only the 19-1/2 hijacker. The Pentagon has not explained why they dropped the charges against Qahtani, but an ACLU lawyer has suggested that it was because any confession he might of made was the result of torture, and therefor not admissible in a court of law. He was released “without prejudice” so that he could be re-arrested and re-tried at a later date should they finally find the evidence they need to convict him of something he actually did.

Among the remaining five suspects going on trial, one (Hawsawi) is not even being charged with the actual hijackings.

So here we are: a huge seizure of weapons in Baghdad that come from who-knows-where, the military building a wall around an entire community in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress violence just long enough for Bush to leave office (and maybe get John McCain elected), and multiple 9/11 co-conspirators being accused of the same crime, NOT being charged, and then having to be released because they were tortured. What do all these failures have in common?

The King of Failure himself, George W. Bush.

Just a quicky. Consider this “The World’s Shortest Voter Guide.” I made it in about 15 minutes.

Pass it on.

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

Okay, before anything else, I just gotta say: It’s “Speed Racer”, not “Speedracer”. He doesn’t “race speed“, it’s the man’s name. Stop saying it wrong!

As you might have guessed, the cheesy Japanimation classic was my favorite cartoon as a kid, I lived and breathed Speed Racer from age 5 to 10. Even now as a grownup, I was excited when I first heard they were making a live-action movie version of my favorite cartoon. His car, The Mach-5, was the ultimate (James) “Bond” car and would of made an excellent action movie, but when I saw the previews with neon race tracks, loop-d-loops and an unfamiliar looking car with a tiny “6″ on the side, I was crushed, I felt like the kid that just learned Santa Claus didn’t exist. All my anticipation dashed like an egg on the sidewalk. Once again, another great childhood memory ruined by modern pop-culture.

Whew. Okay, glad to get that off my chest.

And speaking of “dashed fantasies”, the latest sign that things in Iraq aren’t going quite as swimmingly as they’d like us all to believe: The U.S. military, unable to bring the insurgency under control and unite the country, has chosen instead to simply erect a giant 3 mile long, 12′ high concrete wall around all of Sadr City, home to most of Baghdad’s Sunni minority.

And as you might expect, when someone tries to cut you off from the rest of the country and turn your entire city into a giant prison, the people inside are apt to get violent. Construction of the wall has been incredibly slow and deadly.

The Iraqi’s call the giant 12-foot concrete barriers “Bremer Walls” in honor of the former U.S. head of the now defunct CPA (Iraq “Coalition Provisional Authority”). Viceroy L. Paul Bremer was the first to order placement of giant concrete barriers all around Baghdad to hinder car bombs and suicide attacks from people wearing explosive vests.

So, the next time you hear President Bush, John “100 years in Iraq” McCain or his BFF’s Joe Lieberman, Lyndsey Graham, or ANYONE on the Fox Propaganda Network, declaring how “well” The Surge “has worked”/”is working”, remember this video. Out of ideas, the U.S. military has simply given up trying to unite the country and has instead decided that the best solution for the future of Iraq is to simply build a giant wall around an entire section of the city, trapping inside not only the “insurgents” they wish to restrain, but every man, woman and CHILD therein.

Another brilliant idea brought to you by the same people that warned us: “Imagine a terrorist network with Iraq as an arsenal and as a training ground…” - [President George W. Bush giving reason why we should invade Iraq 11/4/02]. To be fair, Bush didn’t say turning Iraq into a giant terrorist training ground would be a BAD thing. Silly us.