2008 Elections: The Tide is Turning, Alright

Ever since Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primaries by a whole 9.2 points &mdash after being slated to win by over 26 points in that state &mdash La Casa de Los Gatos has been receiving, on average, two or more emails each day from her (her campaign, really) announcing that the tide has turned and would we please give them money.

Our regular readers know she's shit outa luck there, because we have no money. Having been painfully unemployed for close to six months now, with no job offers on the horizon, we don't have a shekel to spare. Not that we'd give her our hard-earned moolah if we had any.

Not because we hate her, or even dislike her, or have animosity of any kind towards her. No, we would not give her a penny because we're fiscal conservatives and we don't like how she's spending her money and how she's accounting for it.

See, we've been following the money information in this campaign fairly closely. The economy is in the crapper, and we want a leader who knows what the economy is about and how to rescue it. Make no mistake, without the money, we don't get no honey. What we mean by that is, the country is at a pivotal point here. The economy is pretty wrecked. We've been losing jobs for eight years. Inflation, rising food prices, peak oil, joblessness, tight credit, a contracting job and housing market, a broken health and welfare system, and a decaying infrastructure must all be dealt with and dealt with immediately.

Failure to deal with these, the nuts and bolts of the nation, will severely restrict our ability to defend ourself, to cope with the threats of an increasingly dangerous world, to negotiate favourable treaties political and economic, to secure our strategic global interests.

Even as we writhe through the throes of finding our next leader, the current gang of thieves, crooks, and liars is planning &mdash and enacting &mdash steps to keep us mired in endless war which drains our resources further while ensuring that whatever we have goes straight into the pockets of profiteers, bypassing broken sewers, bridges, hospitals, and people.

Opening up a new front in an already two-pronged war that we are losing by every imaginable count only guarantees that whoever takes the helm will have to spend more time and resources dealing with the extrication from all three fronts than they can possibly spend on issues domestic, however pressing.

We believe that the Republican Party and the current crooks in power saw the results of the 2006 elections and came to the conclusion that the populace was not going to let them take power again in 2008. In order to guarantee maximum profits for the corporate swine at the top, they worked hard to engineer a situation in which external issues would have a higher priority than domestic issues while simultaneously launching an all-out media blitz on the election process. They selected which candidates they wanted &mdash or tried to, anyway, although the voting public refused to go with Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani, their two preferred choices.

Now they're stuck with John McCain, whom they've never really liked, but they think they can control. And there's plenty of baggage there that is being covered up. His foul temper, his public assaults on colleagues, his treatment of his wife, his fondness for the high life, his cooperation with his captors as a PoW, his current psychiatric and medical records, his adulterous behaviour, his shameful treatment of his first wife. And no one's talking about the fact that 25 per cent of Pennsylvania's Republicans voted for two other Republican candidates rather than McCain, the party's nominee.

So, we believe the crooks in charge have made a pact with Hillary Clinton: if she will "bloody up" the candidate who appeared out of nowhere to destroy her shot at the current nomination, they will give her something in return. And they have. To see Richard Mellon Scaife, that hateful, crooked, rotten, nasty man, sit down with a Democratic candidate could only feed our suspicions. He's never, ever had one impartial word for the Democratic party and its candidates. We don't ask for a positive word. Merely an impartial word. His entire life, his fortune, his career have been spent to wreck any hope of social justice, fairness, in short, democracy. If ever a man was dedicated to the concepts of plutocracy and oligarchy, that man would be Richard Mellon Scaife.

For him to be sitting down with Hillary Clinton can only mean that he's buying and she's accepted his offer to buy. She won't win the 2008 elections if she manages to destroy Obama. What she will win, though, is the promise of competing in the 2012 elections, when McCain, already dangerously unstable, will probably have to step down. She might also win sufficient money to pay off her huge campaign debt.

And that's where the fiscal information comes in. Over the past four months, we've seen several reports that Barack Obama is outraising Hillary Clinton by substantial amounts. As recently as April 20th, the NYT carried a piece by Michael Luo outlining the plight of the Clinton campaign as its fabled fundraising juggernaut stumbled in the face of Obama's multitude of small donors. Caveat: Login required.

Now we hear that Hillary Clinton, in the wake of her poor showing in Pennsylvania &mdash winning by 9.x points when you've been predicted to win by 26 for months is a poor showing, and until the day the results were announced every worthless "pundit" who could draw breath was predicting that she would need a double-digit win to have a prayer of viability in the race &mdash has raised $10 million in 24 hours.

We don't care to do the math to verify that claim. We find it suspicious for several reasons, primarily that our visits to her site during that 24-hour period indicated much lower figures. Also, money pledged is not money in hand.

But the main reason we don't find her claims impressive is: according to our calculations, she owes at least $15.3 million in campaign debt. Most of this money is owed to the vendors, usually small businesses, who were kind enough to extend her credit for the staging of her campaign. According to Novakula, Clinton owes unionbuster Mark Penn between $2.5 and $3.1 million. Clinton's total debt includes a personal loan of $5 million that Clinton made to her campaign, that the Boston Globe reports has not been properly declared in her FEC filings.

Clinton claims that the $5 million she loaned to her campaign represents her share of the assets of herself and her husband. However, given that her annual income for the past X years that she has been a Senator is slightly under $170,000, and her book fetched some $9 million, and DC is an expensive place to live (as is New York), we wonder just how she is calculating her share of their combined assets.

What all this boils down to is, Hillary Clinton was the clear front-runner a year ago. How she got our email address was, we wrote to her campaign because we were proud of her and confident that she would emerge the nominee. A campaign that boasts of having ten million but owes $15 million is not, by our standards, a successful campaign.

Admittedly, Senator Clinton does not have to pay off her campaign debt until after the campaign is over. However, many small businesses have extended her credit. According to USA Toady, she plans to spend the funds she has raised not to pay down campaign debt but to continue to campaign. That's all well and good for her campaign. It's not so good for the little people who are struggling to stay afloat in an economy circling the toilet bowl.

The best thing she could do for herself, her party, her country, would be to step down now and pay off her campaign debts. After all, back when she pledged not to campaign in Florida and Michigan, she claimed those two states didn't count. Her top advisor, Harold Ickes, voted to strip Florida and Michigan of their delegates. A significant proportion of the Democratic voters of Michigan preferred "uncommitted" to Hillary Clinton.

What that says to us is that Clinton is a tough candidate, attractive to many in the Democratic party. But she is not trustworthy or competent on fiscal matters. In the final analysis, we need a leader who can get us out of this mess we're in. All the continuing campaign does is make the voting public really tired. And run up huge campaign debts. And prolong the moment when the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama &mdash because Clinton doesn't have a prayer of getting enough delegates to win the nomination &mdash can concentrate on ensuring that we don't have a doddering hawkish ill-tempered unstable and dangerous fool in the White House. That is, other than the current [string of adjectives] fool.

Even the Wall St. Journal has stated that Obama is the Democratic nominee. Senator Clinton, you fought a good fight. It's time to step down now.

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