“Mugsy’s Rap Sheet”

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As you well know by now, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Tim Russert, died quite suddenly of a heart attack on Friday the 13th. two days before Father’s Day. To say the news came as a total shock would be quite the understatement. No noticeable outward signs of any chronic health problem to prepare us, and his own father still alive at age 89, for the MtP host to suddenly drop dead of a heart attack while at work at age 58 caught everyone by surprise, and I’m not ashamed to admit getting a little choked up listening to the numerous broadcasts memorializing him. Amazing since I really wasn’t that big a fan. Oh sure, I watched him ritualistically every Sunday morning for over a decade, but I deplored the way he rarely asked follow-up questions or often let obvious lies go unchallenged. I attend The Church of Sunday Morning News Talkshows, every week, praying at the altar of NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, squeezing in some of CBS’s Face the Nation… opposite MtP… when the subject turned dull, and even woke early to watch Fox News Sunday (seeing how the Right spins things and ignores subjects they’d rather not deal with is a sight to behold). Politics is to me what sports are to athletes. The Primaries are my playoffs and Election Night my Super Bowl. The sudden death (no pun intended) of Russert in the middle of “the playoffs” would be like Jim McKay dying in the middle of The Triple Crown (what? he did? yikes!) A bad month for newscasters.

But this weeks column isn’t about Russert. My father is a Conservative. Listens to Rush Limbaugh every day, collects guns, has a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and voted for George Bush twice (and though he hates the man now, will probably still vote for McCain). When I asked him if he heard about Tim Russert, he simply shrugged and didn’t understand what the big deal was. My sister, with little care for politics or political matters, is recently divorced from an alcoholic redneck Republican (that still defends George Bush), and being seeped in that culture for a decade, my sister is a “passive-Republican”. She repeats the GOP Party line, forwards attack emails smearing Barack Obama with innuendo… racial and otherwise… about how he is a secret Muslim, and the huge crowds he draws are reminiscent of Hitler… you know the drill… but doesn’t vote (not that I’m aware). She had to take in a border last April to cover her rising expenses, with a new house, rising energy bills, and rising food costs, but doesn’t connect any of it to the people she supports running Washington. She’s an Evangelical, and supports the warmonger because the Democrat wants to kill babies.

During the 1980 Presidential election, two-time loser making his third run at the Presidency, California Governor and former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan posed the quintessential question that every election now boils down to:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

  While I’ve always thought that was a great line, I never truly understood its significance until now. Republicans don’t like detail. Keep it simple. Just boil it down to the most basic principle possible: “We’re good, they’re evil.” “We’ll cut your taxes, they’ll raise your taxes” and “We believe in God, they want to let gays perform abortions on Flag Day.” Republicans don’t want to hear about “policy” or “why we need to do X because of Y”, they want something as simple as they are that can fit in a Greeting Card. Like a caveman, “Taxes bad! He cut taxes while HE raise taxes! Me vote for guy #1.” If caveman had his way, the tax rate would be zero. Then when his streets fall apart, his bridges collapse, and the police or fire department don’t come when he calls, he blames the Democrats because they’ll go into “detail” on why you need to give “them” more money, allowing Republicans to swoop in and tell them exactly what they want to hear… “You can have low taxes AND 5-star quality government services. We’ll just add it to The Debt.” “Deficits don’t really matter, right?” Don’t bother trying to explain to a Conservative just why deficits matter. You might as well be Charlie Brown’s school teacher, for all they hear is: “whut whaa, wha whaa-whaa, whaaa”.

Over the weekend, I saw the first half of a mediocre 2007 movie entitled “Idiocracy“. The premise of the movie was something we’ve all been noticing in recent years: society seems to be getting dumber and dumber. The opening three minutes of Idiocracy sums up the plot nicely: basically, intelligent responsible adults plan their pregnancies and have only as many children as they can support, while unintelligent, irresponsible morans have eight and nine kids without regard for the circumstances. As per the movie’s premise, quickly, the number of children born into poor dumb families outpaces the number of children born to intelligent responsible parents, resulting in the dumbing down of the global population. A dead-average military slacker (played by Luke Wilson) is made part of an experiment in cryogenics (freezing) and finds himself 500 years in a the future, now the most intelligent man on the planet, in a country populated by morons.

The path of least resistence is to be spoon-fed what to think. Learning about the issues takes work. Understanding them requires still more. Republicans know this, so they live & die by the “sound bite”. Everything is boiled down to three monosyllabic grunts: “Guns, God & Gays”. Think about all the times you’ve heard Conservatives rant about “elitist” “Latte sipping” Democrats. They complain about “Liberal colleges” that “convert” students into dreaded “Liberals“. And this works because Conservatives that “don’t like detail” probably didn’t go to college either and resent those who do. Growing up in a Conservative family, I considered myself a Republican, though if you had asked me, I probably disagreed with them on most every issue (the power of branding). College didn’t “convert me” into a Liberal, becoming educated and paying attention did.

Barack Obama will win the November election, but it will have less to do with people understanding his policies or agreeing with him on the issues than it has to do with people that ask themselves Reagan’s famous question:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

That’s a concept even Republicans can understand.

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- Mugsy

Now that the Primaries are over and each Party has its candidate, the popular parlor game of guessing who each will pick to be their V.P. is moving into high gear. It’s fun, and I’m not afraid to admit I’m playing the game too.

Who the candidates pick tells us a lot about the kind of Presidency they intend to have. And with the Democratic Party having run both several “minorities” as serious legitimate candidates for the U.S. Presidency, and now with the first African-American candidate ever to win their Party’s nomination, just who these candidates pick as their running mate will be open to more scrutiny than ever before.

Senator McCain has a serious problem here because no matter who he chooses, it’s going to spin badly. If he chooses another “old white guy” like himself, it will only reinforce the idea that the Republican Party has become “the old white guy Party”. So I think it is safe to say that none of McCain’s competitors for the nomination are likely to find their way onto the ticket. That eliminates Romney and Huckabee.

The Bush Administration is already political poison for McCain, doing his best to limit the amount time he is actually seen with President Bush. Choosing someone from the Bush Administration is highly unlikely because of it. Two of the top names being floated from Planet Bush as possible running mates are Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge.

Rice would seem an obvious choice if McCain were looking for someone to carry both the “black” vote and the “woman” vote, but everyone and his dog would know that is EXACTLY why she was put on the ticket. And I believe Ms. Rice knows this as well, as she has publicly stated that she is not interested in the V.P. nomination. But simply based upon qualifications, Rice has been an absolute disaster. First appointed as “National Security Adviser” in the first Bush term, how does one argue that she didn’t totally drop the ball on 9/11? The infamous “August 6th PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) compiled by the CIA for the Presidents eyes only, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.”, she dismissed as “historical” providing “no new information”, and 3,000 people died one month later. One has to question the judgment of someone that thinks the country’s top intelligence agencies would waste the President’s time with “a history lesson” and do no follow-up. I wonder how much sleep she lost… if any… over that decision?

Her track record as Secretary of State has been every bit as big a failure. She has towed the Bush line on “not negotiating with our enemies” (so who do we negotiate with, our friends?), gave the equivalent of Bush’s “Bring ‘em on” speech encouraging our enemies to attack our troops by publicly denouncing Iraq’s al Sadr as “a coward“, and has become such a “tow-the-line” mouthpiece for George Bush that the Big-3 networks don’t even bother to invite her on their shows anymore.

It’s no surprise Condi doesn’t want to be the “token black” or “token woman” on anyone’s ticket. The GOP is so short on both, a “black female Republican” is as rare as moments of candor in a speech by George Bush. Strike Condi from the list.

Tom Ridge was President Bush’s first head of “Homeland Security”. Earlier this year, he went on record as denouncing “waterboarding” as torture… something McCain voted to allow the CIA to continue doing. And who will ever forget Ridge’s 2005 revelation that the Bush Administration played games with the “terror threat level” during the 2004 Presidential campaign? Putting Ridge on the ticket means raising those issues again, making the two candidates answer a litany of uncomfortable questions. Ridge is also anther “old white guy”. Scratch him off the list.

So, no white guys. What about a black guy? Presently, there is not one single African-American Republican serving in Congress. So if McCain wants a black Republican running mate, he going to have to look elsewhere. Wikipedia has a list of high-profile African-American Republicans. Some of them, like baseball legend “Jackie Robinson” and singer “Pearl Bailey” have since passed away, making the list of “living” black Republicans even shorter. I don’t know what’s more embarrassing, having to include people that passed away over 30 years ago to pad your list, or the fact you can fit almost every known 20th century black Republican that ever lived on a single page.

If being “black” is important, but not specifically African-American, Louisiana’s young governor of East Indian heritage “Bobby Jindal” has been floated as a popular pick. He was elected governor just last October. Young but inexperienced. If McCain picks him, everyone will know why: he’s young… balancing out McCain’s advanced age… and he’s dark-skinned, making him a minority… something exceedingly rare in the GOP nowadays. Naming someone so inexperienced to be your running mate would create a big problem for McCain: How do you criticize your opponent (Obama) for being “too inexperienced to be President” when your own running mate has even less experience? So scratch Jindal.

No white guys. No black guys. What’s a Republican to do? Pick a woman, hoping to appeal to those disaffected Hillary voters. With Condi out, that leaves no black female Republicans above (and including) the rank of Governor in the entire country (someone please correct me if I’m wrong). That leaves just white women Republicans, of which there are many.

Some of the top names floated:

Carly Fiorina: McCain’s economic adviser. This is the same person that was drummed out of her job as CEO of “Hewlitt Packard” after pushing them to buy the floundering “Compaq Computer” in 2002, which became a financial albatross that nearly sank both companies. Fiorina fought hard to convince the board of HP to buy Compaq, promising huge returns. Before her ouster in early 2005, other members of the Board were criticizing her “leadership style” as being “hard to get along with”. A stubborn, dead-wrong ideologue that’s difficult to get along with? Perfect! Sign her up! Well, maybe not.

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson is another popular choice among McCain supporters. Bailey is best known for dismissing the investigation into “Scooter” Libby’s 2005 indictment for perjury as “a waste of taxpayers dollars” because of “no underlying crime” (nonsense) despite being a vociferous critic in support of Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1999. An uninspiring Senator with few significant legislative accomplishments to her name, has served as Senator of the very Red State of Texas since 1994. Though a partisan hack like her junior Senator John Cornyn, she ran for re-election in 2006 (despite a prior pledge to “term-limit” herself) promising to end the war in Iraq quickly through “partitioning” (similar to the solution offered by Democrat Joe Biden)… a position she reversed just 10 months later. During her re-election campaign, she hoped to win over war-weary Independents with this nugget:

“If I had known then what I know now about the weapons of mass destruction, which was a key reason that I voted to go in there, I would not vote to go into Iraq the way we did,”

Texas voters fell for it, and upon returning to office, went right back to being a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration, criticizing Sen Russ Feingold’s bill to start pulling troops out of Iraq “within the next 120 days” as “put[ting] a bullet right through the hearts of our troops.” Hutchinson also doesn’t bring with her a state McCain isn’t already likely to win in November. Like President Bush, Hutchinson was also a cheerleader in high school (college?).

Another popular female GOP fav, Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee… the latest blond Republican Stepford Wife hack to come out of the GOP’s secret underground cloning lab in Montana. Again, another partisan hack with few legislative accomplishments to her name, Blackburn initially endorsed Mitt Romney for President until “Hollywood” Fred Thompson entered the race and she switched her support to him… (anybody but McCain?) Blackburn differs with McCain on “stemcell research” (she opposes, he supports) and illegal immigration (no path to citizenship). Somehow, I just don’t see McCain giving her the nod.

Another GOP female VP possibility for McCain is “M. Jodi Rell”, reelected Governor of Connecticut in 2007. Rell has a comparatively “liberal” voting record (for a Republican), voting to legalize Gay Civil Unions and joined with Arnold Schwarzenegger to criticize the Bush Administrations fight to deny states the right to set stricter emissions standards than set by the federal government. So far, so good… unless you’re a Republican. Never graduated from college, Rell earned an “honorary” doctorate from the University of Hartford in 2001. Like McCain, Rell has also been diagnosed with cancer (McCain’s melanoma is in remission, Rell underwent surgery for for breast cancer in 2004), which could be problematic for someone that would be “second in line to the oldest man ever elected as President.” She could tip Connecticut red (highly unlikely), but cost McCain some bigger narrowly red states like Indiana or Colorado.

As I said, “No good choices”. But if I had to pick one of the above, the candidate with the least baggage is Hutchinson. A Bush partisan with lackluster public profile, a voting record on the environment that would win back Republicans upset with McCain’s embrace of “Global Warming”, and thinks that if we leave Iraq, “the terrorists will follow us home“. By no means does this mean McCain won’t pick one of the other problematic nominees mentioned above, just that if he does, if he isn’t aware now of the liabilities he’s bringing onboard, he will soon enough.

Who do you think McCain will pick? Let us know in the Comments.

Oh, BTW, as for loyal McCain attack dogs like Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, with their nose so far up his butt they can tell you what brand of toothpaste he uses, expect them to be rewarded with other choice positions, like “Attorney General” for former JAG lawyer Graham or Secretary of Defense for “We need to bomb Iran” Lieberman.

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- Mugsy

The week before the invasion of Iraq, crude oil peaked at $37.83 - (March 12, 2003).

Signs that war with Iraq might be avoided brought it back down to $31.67 on the eve of the invasion. The price of oil just five months ago on January 2nd of this year was $99.62. Friday, it jumped more than $10 a barrel… a one day record… to close at $138.54.

Two Conservative pundits in a March 2003 column noted:

“…a sharp decline in oil prices from their current $36 a barrel–close to a 12-year high–could help reignite the economy and spur war-wary consumers to start buying again. For example, if oil prices return to the low 20s after the war, that could inject $150 billion into the economy, far more than the rebates from President Bush’s 2001 tax cut.”

“$150 billion” is just slightly less than the latest $165 billion dollar supplemental to fund the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan for just the next eight months.

Cost of the War in Iraq (JavaScript Error) To see more details, click here.

Five years later, the line immediately preceding that quote is even more interesting:

“Each $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil is like a $100 billion tax hike, slowing U.S. economic growth by more than half a percent over the course of a year. The $12 or so increase per barrel since November–insiders call it the “war premium”–threatens to tip the U.S. into recession. Conversely,…”

Keep in mind that the price of oil just jumped $11 IN ONE DAY.

In 1973, oil was $3.59 a barrel. By September of 1999, crude oil was trading at just under $25/barrel. It took 26 years for the price of oil to rise just $21. Under George W. Bush, oil prices rose nearly double that just since January.

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly on “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet”, before the invasion of Iraq, the very idea of $75/barrel oil was almost unthinkable. The consequences would be disastrous. And talk of $100/barrel oil was easily dismissed as “hyperbole”, “science fiction”, “irrational exaggeration with no basis in reality”. No one would of taken you seriously if you predicted $100/barrel oil back in 2003. Even I, in my Predictions for 2008, didn’t expect oil to surpass $120 before the end of the year, though I did predict that once it broke the $100 mark, there would be little resistance to it rising quickly. Now they are predicting $150 oil by July 4th. You may have just done the math in your head: $75×2 = $150. Yes, by July fourth, the per barrel price of crude oil may be TWICE as high as that once unthinkable $75/barrel level.

Does Barack Obama EVEN NEED to campaign over the next five months? Simply paraphrase Ronald Reagan at every opportunity: “Are you better off today than you were eight years ago? $5/gallon gas and $150/barrel oil, a doubling of the National Debt to $10 Trillion in just eight years, unemployment over 5.5%, thousands dead and billions wasted in an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq launched on false pretenses, the man behind the attacks of 9/11 still free and recruiting more terrorists bent on attacking the U.S.. George Bush believes his record couldn’t be THAT bad if you’re willing to elect someone promising to continue his policies. Will you?”

The very thought that someone THIS incompetent is in our White House setting policy is frightening. The idea that this country could conceivably elect someone that would not only continue these policies but EXPAND upon them is too horrifying to even imagine.

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- Mugsy

It’s not uncommon for our government to invoke policies in advance of elections to make the ruling Party look good. Most commonly, it’s gas prices. The government will quietly cut military activity (both stabilizing the region & consuming less fuel, leaving more on the market for consumers), stop filling up the “strategic reserve” and cut backroom deals with oil companies to glut the market with gasoline and force prices down as November approaches. Then almost magically, the week after the election, prices mysteriously start to creep back up.

When the country has troops deployed in a warzone, they will take steps to depress the number of troop casualties in advance of the election as well. The period between April and November of ‘04 was bookended by two of the deadliest months on record with 135+ troop fatalities each. But the months in between, the number of troop fatalities never broke out of the mid 60’s, less than half of the number as those two deadly months around it. Fewer troop maneuvers as soldiers are ordered to remain on base means putting fewer troops in harms way. Then the politicians go on the evening news and crow about how we are “succeeding in our mission, and these recent statistics prove it!” Does it?

I’m still researching the matter, so look for a future update. But consider the possibility that the recent decline in troop casualties is due not because of “more soldiers” but less activity. We’ve had this many soldiers in Iraq before and the violence was far worse… so what changed?

Well, the Mahdi Army Truce for one. And as iCasulties.org notes, the decline in coalition troop casualties coincides with the Mahdi Army Truce of May 10th.

I considered several possible ways to evaluate if my theory were true or not:

First, if the number of troop casualties were low but the number of Iraqi casualties were going up, it would be a clear indicator that fewer troops were being put in harms way. How else would an increase in overall violence result in fewer troop casualties? However, this does not appear to be the case, as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is down as well due to the truce.

The opposite argument being made by the McCain crowd is that an increased troop presence is reducing violence. If this is the case, then the spike in violence before the May 10th truce should not of been so dramatic. And past periods when we had as many or more troops in Iraq would likewise have seen the same downward trend in violence. We didn’t. If more troops means more arrests, more weapons seizures, and an inability to plant bombs without being seen… all benefits of having more eyes on the ground, then even without the truce, there should of been fewer opportunities for violence.

There is the Petraeus “dispersal” theory that breaking platoons into smaller groups that are then sent out “among the people” is allowing Iraqi’s to “connect” with troops, endearing them to the civilian populace, and not viewing them so much as “occupiers” as being there to help. Two problems with this theory: one, they were doing this before the Feb-March spike in violence, so the argument that “connecting with Iraqis will make them less willing to see you harmed” would not of changed when the truce was lifted. And two, troops dispersed into smaller groups means you can’t kill two-dozen soldiers at once with a single bomb or highway ambush. Just because it takes insurgents longer to kill troops, doesn’t mean public opinion of their being there has changed. (”70 percent of Iraqis say they want the US to withdraw completely.”) (Updated link - 6/5/08: “Iraqi Parliamentarian: 70 Percent Of Iraqis Want Withdrawal, Huge U.S. Embassy Not A ‘Positive Signal’“)

The final theory is that keeping troops on base and off the streets is provoking less violence. With fewer targets to shoot at, violence goes down. And if this turns out to be the case, then the suggestion that pulling troops out of Iraq would result in an explosion of violence would then be demonstrably false. The exact opposite would be true, bolstering the case that we can pull our troops out without Iraq descending into chaos. The current improvement of conditions in Iraq may not be due to “The Surge” at all, but due to “fewer” troops being put in harms way. I believe current circumstances make this theory the strongest of the four, and definitely worth investigating.

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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 March of last year, I wrote about the fact that someone appears to have deliberately flipped the stars on the RNC’s elephant logo upside down:

The upside-down star is symbolic of the Satanic Pentagram:

Why this was done is anyone’s guess. But it wasn’t always this way:

George Bush Sr’s 1988 GOP Convention pin

Anyway, last Friday, during “Jim Lehrer’s News Hour” on PBS, a curious thing caught my eye:

(click to enlarge)

Someone obviously went through the trouble of DELIBERATELY inverting the stars on the DNC logo. How do I know it was “deliberate”? Note the logos in the background all show the stars upright. NOWHERE does the official DNC logo appear with the stars inverted, so someone not only had to create the graphic from scratch, but take the time to flip the stars on just the foreground logo. Notice the foreground donkey graphic has fewer legs and a different nose than the background graphic. This foreground logo was made from scratch.

A few minutes later in another graphic with less pronounced logo, the stars are once again upright:

(click to enlarge)

Same two-legged donkey graphic as above, only now with the stars right-side up. So the alteration is quite clearly deliberate.

Meanwhile, as George W. Bush leaves office, the GOP has changed its logo once again:

Only one star this time, but once again upright. Interesting. What do you make of all this? Is it a mountain out of a molehill or something more sinister?

---

(Follow-up: One reader on the Democratic Underground website noted that the new RNC logo seems to resemble roadkill, complete with tire tracks across the back and stars in the eyes. Funny!)