November 29, 2006 by mugsy.

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Back on September 24th, I posed the question: “Gas prices fall by 1/3, but oil prices drop by less than 1/4. Is Big Oil out to help the GOP win in November?“. Both the oil companies and the Bush Administration denied manipulating the price of gasoline in order to effect the November mid-term elections. Vice President Cheney chuckled in an interview that they “have no such power” to affect gasoline prices. But that’s not true. Rhetoric regarding a possible war with Iran that helped spike oil prices earlier in the year was dramatically toned-down in recent months.

Almost on cue, just as everyone expected, once the election was over, gas prices began to rise again. Defenders of the Bush Administration and Big Business might try to argue that it is mere coincidence, that an extremely quiet hurricane season, coupled with reduced demand and an increased supply helped reduce gas prices.

But here is the kicker: the price of oil has FALLEN since the mid-term election! The per-barrel price of oil recently fell 23% from its all-time high of $78/barrel to a FOUR MONTH LOW of just $59.99 (though it has since climbed to $61).

This suggests that Big Oil cut into its own (obscene) profits temporarily in a vain attempt to help the Republican Party retain control of Congress. Such blatant manipulation should demonstrate loud & clear once and for all that Big Oil KNOWS that having a Republican Congress is more favorable to their corrupt and immoral price manipulation, and would have ensured continuation of their obscene profiteering for at least another two years.

Now that the election is over, it appears they have re-instated their previous profit margins, which would explain why the price of gasoline is back on the rise despite the falling price of oil.

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November 25, 2006 by mugsy.

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The death toll from a rash of car bombings in Baghdad Thursday continues to rise and now stands at 202. A reprisal attack killed 52 more in Northern Iraq on Friday; 25 men were murdered in an attack on a Mosque as worshipers exited the building, including six Sunni Arabs snatched by Shiite militiamen, doused with kerosene and burned alive while Iraqi soldiers stood by.

Back on October 27th, The Pentagon, and namely Donald Rumsfeld himself, publicly revealed that he believed the sudden record-breaking surge in violence in Iraq was actually the work of al-Qaeda seeking to influence the upcoming U.S. mid-term elections, a view echoed by Vice President Dick Cheney four days later.

October turned out to be the fourth deadliest month for U.S. soldiers since “Mission Accomplished” in mid 2003. And while November’s death toll is mercifully unlikely to exceed October’s record-setting rate, it will still reach the same level or higher as in the previous six months.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that fewer U.S. deaths translates into less violence in Iraq. In October, the civilian death toll hit a record 3,709. November is barely three weeks old, and already is on track to beat that record.

700 MORE Iraqi’s are now killed EACH MONTH than Americans killed on 9/11. Of course, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but just try to imagine Americans’ reaction to one “9/11″, “Oklahoma City” and “1906 San Fransisco Earthquake” EVERY MONTH. And if we adjust for population size (Iraq: 25 million vs USA: 300 million), that’s more than 44,000 dead Americans a month.

This “recent” surge in violence that Rummy, Cheney & Bush tried to suggest was merely an attempt to “influence the upcoming midterm elections” began back in April. Maybe someone needs to broadcast on Iraqi TV that the U.S. elections are over and the Democrats won. That’s SURE to quell the violence over there! Someone alert Rummy & Cheney!

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November 24, 2006 by mugsy.

“December 7, 1941… A date which will live in infamy.” - Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dec 8, 1941.

(Trivia: Roosevelt coined the new word “infamy” because he felt that no word his speech-writer had suggested in that place fully conveyed the magnitude of what had just happened.)

1,248 days later, Italy and Germany surrendered in what is now known as “V.E. (Victory in Europe) Day”.
99 days after that, the Japanese likewise finally surrendered on August 15, 1945 (”V.J. Day”).

Last August 18, 2006, Bush’s war in Iraq had surpassed the length of World War II in Europe. On Sunday (Nov 26), it will have lasted longer than ALL of WWII, past the end of the Japanese surrender 1,347 days later.

On January 7 of next year, it will be 1,347 days since “Mission Accomplished”. Let us pray that we get out of Iraq before it surpasses the length of the War in Vietnam (14 years - 1961 to 1975).

(Note: I apologize for the infrequent updates this past week. Things should get better after the holidays.)

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November 17, 2006 by mugsy.

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It was a full year ago today former war-hawk and U.S. Representative John Murtha (D-PA) publicly renounced his support for the war in Iraq, conceding that Iraq was now in the midst of a civil war, proposing an “immediate redeployment to the periphery” to start us on the path out of Iraq.

That was 783 dead soldiers ago.

For his reversal of support for the war, the Neo-Conservative Right declared Murtha typified the Democrats willingness to give up when things got tough (this from a bunch of Draft Dodgers and Deferment hounds during Vietnam), resulting in the Right’s new catch-phrase: “Cut & Run” Democrats. Freshman Neo-Con Rep Jean Schmidt, looking to score some cheap political points, in blatant violation of House rules, attacked fellow Congressman Murtha on the floor of the House, blasting the former Marine Drill Sergeant and Decorated Vietnam Vet as being a “coward”, repeating the “Cut & Run” meme… implying all Democrats are “gutless cowards”.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the Iraqi’s didn’t cooperate with their Grand Illusion that things there were improving and would continue to do so, so long as we “Stay the Course“. Reality slowly sank in, and by October of this year, even Rush Limbaugh was suggesting redeployment as a possible exit strategy out of Iraq (though he never actually used the word “redeployment”).

And now, thanks to an earthquake of an election that flipped control of BOTH the House and the Senate over to the Democrats (not one single incumbent Democrat lost their re-election bid), has the White House and fellow Republicans started to concede that Iraq is a mess that will not be tolerated much longer, and an exit strategy needs to be devised. It’s a shame it took the lives of 783 US service men & women to get them even that far.

But if “one year” makes you sick, what about two?

Two years ago during the Presidential debates between John Kerry and George Bush, the former prosecutor Kerry stated the obvious, that terrorism is a tactic that can never be defeated like a country. So trying to “defeat” terrorism guarantees a war without end. The goal therefor must be to reduce terrorism to the level of “a nuisance” that can be dealt with as a matter of “law enforcement”, not military force.

Despite the obvious logic of this, the Right seized upon Kerry’s statement to score some cheap political points, ridiculing the concept of terrorism as “a nuisance”, perpetuating the notion that Democrats are “a bunch of cowards” that “don’t have the stomach for war”.

Flash forward two years later to last Monday. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, in an interview on MSNBC, told the interviewer that “Winning… is simply having each of the nations that we’re trying to help have a secure environment”, and in using Washing D.C. police as an example, “keeps the level of crime below the level at which the government can function. That’s really what winning in the war on terrorism is”. Sound familiar?

That revelation only took 1720 dead U.S. soldiers.

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November 13, 2006 by mugsy.

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Now, I must preface this by saying that I’m NOT necessarilly recommending this as the course of action we should  take, but it’s worth considering if “saving face” in Iraq is your ultimate goal. We are about to be given our best and possibly VERY LAST opportunity to exit Iraq without looking like we are we were chased out, allowing the insurgency to declare victory over the United States. Here’s why:

Saddam Hussein was finally convicted and sentenced to death two days before the election (technically, four days early). If his appeals fail (as expected), he will be executed in January 2007. The next day, we could withdraw EVERY SINGLE TROOP from Iraq, declaring victory, and it would appear that we left after achieving what we set out to do rather than “chased out”.

On the day of Saddam’s public hanging, have a large ubiquitous troop presence on the streets, the same as we did for the Iraqi elections in January, banning all cars and enforcing a strict curfew in the days before. The very next day, have a full 100% redeployment into Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait (and Turkey if they’ll let us). The insurgency can’t claim we were “chased out”, it appears to everyone that we finished what we came for and then left.)

The problem here is that, thanks to the Republican’s refusal to impose time-tables on the new Iraq Government, the Iraqi Army is not prepared to take FULL control of the conflict should we 100% redeploy all at once. If coalition troops were the prime target of the insurgency, then redeployment would reduce violence to a level the Iraqi army could control. But the soldiers are NOT the prime target. It’s a civil war, thus Iraqi troops would end up “taking sides”, split among the factions, and the violence would likly grow.

The ultimate conclusion here is that it looks more and more unlikely that we’ll be able to leave Iraq in any manner in which World Opinion might view the U.S. as “victorious”. But the opportunity was there. It’s a damn shame.

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November 10, 2006 by mugsy.

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In last Tuesday’s election, Texas’ incumbent governor Rick Perry won an re-election despite 61% of the electorate voting against him.

So how does someone get elected governor with only 39% of the vote?

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Not one, but *two* Independent candidates in the race helped split the “anti-Perry” vote for a total of 30%. Bell trailed Perry by only 9%. Would ALL of those Indy votes have gone to Perry’s Democratic challenger had they of not run? We’ll never know, but one thing it does show is the need for something called “instant runoff” voting (link to animation explaining process):

Here is how IRV works: The above linked animation demonstrates this nicely, but simply stated, when voters go to the polls, they are asked to select their preferred candidates in order… favorite to least favored. When no one candidate achieves greater than 50% of the vote in a race with three or more candidates, the votes of the lesser candidates are analyzed. If 25% of the people that chose Candidate-A chose Candidate-B as their second choice, and 75% of those same voters Chose Candidate-C as their second choice, then Candidate-B gets 25% of “A”s vote, and “Candidate-C” gets 75%. This process is repeated with successive candidates until one candidate surpasses the 50% threshold.

Never should a candidate win an election with less than 50% of the vote. While the Founding Fathers designed our government to ensure that minority rights were still given value and heard, nowhere did they suggest that the minority should be allowed to rule over the majority.

That’s just not right.

Our election process is in serious need of reform. From printed receipts that allow for recounts, campaign finance reform, election intimidation & fraud, and candidates winning with less than 50% ruling over the majority, changes are desperately needed. Let’s hope that, simply because they won last Tuesday, Democrats don’t lose the urgency we all felt prior to the election for reform.

(Footnote: While the press is talking about “Democrats regain control of Congress for the first time in twelve years”, the last time Democrats controlled BOTH the House and the Senate at the same time was 1981… 25 years ago! )

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November 8, 2006 by mugsy.

And as of this writing, Democrats cling to slim leads in the Virginia and Missouri Senate races, both currently held by Republicans. Victory in these two states will give the SENATE to the Democrats as well! (I’ll update this figure as the returns come in.)

Nancy Pelosi will be the next Speaker of the House. First woman Speaker in history! (Anybody seen Dennis Hastert, lately?)

All night long, the talking heads on TV have been doing their best to “minimize” the meaning of this dramatic victory for Democrats with the observation: “Yes, the Democrats won, but only by running some VERY Conservative Democrats!” Expect this to be a common refrain in the days to come.

Oddities worth mentioning:

Incumbent Texas Governor Rick Perry wins re-election with a scant 39% of the vote. Thanks to not one, but TWO Independents splitting the anti-Perry vote, the Texas Governor was able to declare victory despite 61% of voters voted against him. That’s just wrong! I’ve been a vocal opponent of candidates winning multi-Party races with less than 50% of the vote. I think that when this happens, the top two vote getters should have a “run off” election. The simplest solution to this is something called “instant runoff”, where you also enter your “second choice” when voting in multi-candidate races. If your candidate doesn’t come in one of the top two spots, your “second choice” is counted instead. No need to go to the polls a second time.

I’ve never seen a better argument for “instant runoff” than the Perry “victory” today.

In a very SAD example of Republican denial, Tom DeLay’s former TX District-22 (R) candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs (see story below) was still refusing to concede the election to (D) Nick Lampson even after trailing by 14% with 92% of precincts reporting, and having trailed Lampson by approximately 10 points all night long.



In Connecticut, former DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Joe Lieberman defeated true Democrat Ned Lamont 48% to 40%, with the “official” Republican candidate finishing with a distant 10% of the vote. 2/3rds of Lieberman’s voters were Republican. He could not have won without that 1/3 of Democrats who voted in essence to support the Republican backed candidate Lieberman. Had those Democrats of just voted for the only true Democrat in the race, Lamont would have won in a landslide. I hope you Democrats in CT that voted for “Don’t criticize Bush. Criticize the Democrats” Lieberman are proud of yourselves.

But there may be a silver lining. If “petitioning Democrat” Joe switches his affiliation back from (I) to (D), The extra vote may give Democrats the seat they need to regain control of the Senate for the first time since 1982!

When Newt Gigrich led his “Republican Revolution” 1994 to win 50+ seats to regain control of the House of Representatives, they already had the Senate. If Democrats were to take back control of BOTH the House AND Senate at the same time, it means a MAJOR change in the catastrophic direction the Republicans have been leading us for the past 12 years! Besides holding President Bush accountable for his disastrous policies in Iraq, there are also liklely to be hearings on his unprecedented unconstitutional power grab, the NSA domestic spying scandal, stemcell research, raising the minimum wage, and funding for alternative energy research.

More details as they arrive.
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November 5, 2006 by mugsy.

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“Introduction of a flat tax.”

- Former Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer when asked of his greatest achievement while in charge of Iraq.

Friday, one of the architects of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, publicly criticized the war in Iraq and his former boss Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

“I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.“

So nice of the former PNAC founding member and lead chickenhawk to finally come around 2,800 dead US soldiers and one burgeoning theocratic terrorist state later.

Just days ago, a manic sounding President Bush declared that Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s jobs were safe throughout the end of his presidency. Probably the two greatest examples of incompetence and catastrophic pigheadedness in the entire administration, and President Bush is assuring us that their jobs are safe & secure, when in fact, theirs should be the first to go. (On Monday, November 6th, a slew of ACTIVE Top military brass will be publishing an Op/Ed in the “Army/Navy/Marines/Air Force Times” magazines calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation.)

Of course, we’ve seen this before. On December 14, 2004, President Bush awarded L. Paul “take your guns with you, Mr. Iraqi Soldier” Bremer, General Tommy “plenty of troops” Franks, and George “Slam Dunk!” Tenet, the Presidential Medal of Freedom… the highest award that can be bestowed upon any civilian, to three of the most conspicuous fuckups in the entire Iraq debacle. Reporter/Author Bob Woodward titled his latest book “State of Denial” after a long series of events such as these. The worse things get, the more shrill and manic they become, as if giving out medals to three colossal failures, and throwing all of your support behind two more still in your administration, will make everybody go, “Huh, maybe I was wrong about them. I mean, if they’re getting awards for what great jobs they did and the President is steadfast supporting them, maybe they really DID do a great job!” The scientific term for this condition is called “Irrational Exuberance”.

When I was a kid, I used to love playing “Video Blackjack” on my friends’ “Intellivision“. I found that I could usually bluff the computer into folding if I just kept raising the stakes, no matter how bad my hand was. Eventually, the game would decide: “maybe I really DID have that fourth ace”, and fold. The problem with my strategy though was that sometimes the computer KNOWS you’re bluffing because IT has the missing card it knows you need to win. So I’d keep increasing my bet and the computer would match me, until I ran out of chips and ended up loosing to a pair of Two’s. “Irrational Exuberance”.

One thing I noticed about the NeoCons long ago: When Reality doesn’t meet up with their expectations, either Reality is “wrong“ (ex: some outside influence if affecting the result - see: “foreign invaders“) or “more time” is simply needed till they are proven right (see: “Stay the Course”). So deep is their denial, not even hard facts can change their minds. This is what it means to be an Ideologue.

Iraq was to be their grand experiment. A blank slate upon which they could construct a “Conservative Utopia”, implementing every Right-Wing dream into reality… a country that was to blossom out of pure Conservative ideology: Privatize everything. Limited government. Minimal taxation to foster business growth… you name the Republican philosophy, they were going to impose it on Iraq. And Iraq would bloom into a thriving monument to Democracy and Capitalism in the heart of the Middle East!

But that’s not what happened. The Iraqi economy collapsed, joblessness skyrocketed, chaos ensued and Civil War broke out.

Problem is, you can’t have a Free Market without stability, and Iraq never got it. Soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussain and the collapse of every government institution, generations of bottled up repression exploded to the surface in rampant looting and chaos. But rather than impose order and show the people that chaos would not be tolerated, Coalition forces were told to stay out of the way and not interfere. When asked about the looting, SecDef Rumsfeld uttered his now famous “Stuff happens!” response. “Free people are allowed to commit crimes and do bad things!” he told reporters. It’s all been downhill ever since.

After the 1929 stock market crash here in the U.S., President Roosevelt instituted a range of Government Work Programs that would be regarded unbridled Socialism today. And in fact, that’s what it was. But it got Americans back on their feet, earning money and reconstituting the shattered tards of their lives. Once Americans were on their feet again, the market was allowed to take over and the American economy grew like a Victory Garden. But you’ve GOT to have stability first, and Iraq never had that as soon as the government was decapitated and there was nothing to take its place.

Iraq is where it is today because when 70% of the country is unemployed, electricity and water/sewage service is sporadic at best, and you have nothing to do all day except swelter in the 120′ heat with no air-conditioning as you watch foreigners in your country take what few jobs there are… which they obviously are not doing because you are still without water and electricity… you have nothing better to do than dust off the AK-47 you took with you after they disbanded the Iraqi army, and take to the streets killing every foreigner you see. And eventually, “foreigner” takes on a whole new meaning, as in “anybody that doesn’t believe the same as you”… including fellow Iraqi’s of a different religion, that seem to be getting preferential treatment or want to claim part of what is rightfully yours as theirs.

The American people have finally had enough. They are finally seeing the “State of Denial” for themselves, as violence spirals out of control in Iraq and President Bush continues to reassure voters that “things are going just great in Iraq”. Three years on in a war we were promised would take no more than days or weeks and be paid for in Iraqi oil revenues, and was a war of “last resort” only because of how certain we were that Saddam had “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that could be used against us if we didn’t act ASAP, the people are finally saying “enough is enough!”

If you bluff the dealer too many times, eventually you’re gonna loose.

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