Its always difficult when you are running for president. Your entire life is put under a microscope, a very very powerful microscope. Because of this it is always interesting when a politician is caught with his pants down, so to speak. In Rudi Giuliani's case he may literally been caught with his pants down. Records from his administration show that Giuliani improperly billed city agencies for police protection for himself and his mistress, now his wife, Judith Nathan. The story broke just before the debate last night and although moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN asked Giuliani about the allegations that was the end of it for the night. That is not likely to be the case for the general public. According to the story by Politico, Giuliani began his frequent travels to the Hamptons at the same time his affair with Nathan began. Prior to this Giuliani had no business or other reason to spend overnights in the Hamptons. The expenses first surfaced when Giuliani's term as mayor ended when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board. Why did Giuliani put the expenses with the Loft Board? Giuliani has no good answer for that. New York Mayors are afforded 24 hour protection provided by the NYPD and the expenses are borne them. According to City Comptroller William Thompson, auditors "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes." So the man who calls himself America's Mayor decided to spend the taxpayers money so he could go screw his mistress then he hid the evidence. So not only did Giuliani screw Nathan, his wife and the people of New York City now he is trying to screw the American people with claims of honesty. Giuliani has often stated his mistakes and has asked the voters to view all of his deeds not just the mistakes. Problem with that idea is his mistakes are overshadowing anything he may be able to take positive credit for. Let's see how he tries to weasel his way out of this one.

It has been said all along that George W. Bush and his entire administration have been living in a fantasy land. Apparently the fantasy continues even after you leave the administration. In a wide ranging interview with Charlie Rose, former White House political director Karl Rove said that the Bush Administration did not want Congress to vote on the Iraq War resolution in the fall of 2002, because they thought it should not be done within the context of an election. I know you’re laughing out loud but wait that’s not even the best part. Rove blames Congress for pushing Bush into a war with Iraq. Rove is clearly living in a complete fantasy land where everything that is real can be changed with a few words. In his interview with Charlie Rose, Rove stated that the "premature vote" led to many of the problems that cropped up in the Iraq War. Had Congress not pushed, he says, Bush could have spent more time assembling a coalition, and provided more time to the inspectors. What the fuck. The whole world watched as Bush did exactly the opposite of what Rove is suggesting. Congress gave the president the authority to use force if all other avenues had been explored. So to say Bush was rushed is complete bullshit. Bush ignored the bulk of what Congress passed and went right for the illegal war part. Rove must truly believe that the American public is completely stupid and are gullible enough to believe his revisionist history. Problem is we are not that stupid. Mr. Rove also fails to realize that anyone can get on their computer and find out the truth about how Bush ignored all the other opportunities in Iraq that did not require violence and rushed us into an unnecessary and exceedingly bloody war. My suggestion is to send Rove all the articles and Youtube clips you can find that show that facts about how he helped Bush lie us into war. Let him sift through them so he can remember what reality really is.

Phony Anti-Immigrant Distraction Will Come Back to Haunt GOP MSNBC interviewed Oklahoma State Representative Randy Terrill on Nov. 27th, the Republican behind that state's strict new anti-immigrant laws. The legislation denies jobs, unemployment compensation and other state services to undocumented workers, and has resulted in a marked downturn in local business profits as the immigrants move elsewhere -- one store alone reported losses of $75,000 a week due to Terrill's terrible bill that's driven immigrant workers out of Oklahoma. So what's Randy's answer to all the grief he's created for small businesses in OK? More and tougher anti-immigrant laws, including tossing people out who were born in this country! Following the CNN/You Tube Republican debate Nov. 28th, the good puppies working for Time Warner Inc. as 'analysts' -- blithely ignoring the extreme improbability that no questions were asked by the public about Iran or health care, and few about the faltering economy -- dutifully peddled the GOP's phony illegal immigrant issue as the 'hot' topic of the coming election. Prediction: Look for this Rovian distraction to explode in the face of the Republican Party like a trick cigar as more of these anti-immigrant laws are passed -- that's the blowback that the GOP never counted on when they unleashed this plague of thinly-disguised racism: all of the money illegal immigrants pump into local economies and, just wait, next the already-strapped border states will be complaining about the loss of tax revenues from the departing immigrants. As the saying goes: watch out what you wish for, you just might get it -- and before the next election. Oh, and more-fool Randy? He'll soon be seeking honest employment as angry voters turn him out of his soft government job. So far, he only seems qualified to be a ditch digger, if such jobs exist anymore -- he's certainly kept digging at this fetid issue long after a sane person would have stopped.

The winds have changed in the land down under. After 11 long years we Aussies have realised that such policies as screwing over education in favour of those with money, race-baiting and villifying refugees, giving employers the legal means to sodomise their employees, ignoring our indigenous population and our sordid history with them, using fear as leverage to gain popular support for right-wing ideological warmongering, dismissing climate change as a hippy fantasy, creating a massive transfer of wealth by handing out tax cuts to the wealthy and generally letting the right have free reign are not good policies for a modern, democratic state. With this realisation Australia has stood up and cast out the ideologues, not unlike the former blind man who, after his cataract operation, realised the puppy he had been loving and feeding for years, even though it would often viciously attack him, was actually a disease-ridden rat. John Howard and his malignant crew have been told to hit the road and we've given them nothing but a lunch-box packed with a legacy of shame (and salubrious pensions). In a little under a year you, my Yank brethren, will have the chance to do the same. Stay angry.

I don't resort to name-calling, usually. It's childish and less than most of you are capable of. Your long-term hatred, also, isn't good for the health of you personally or the country. So here is some real grist for your liberal mills. You can do this calmly, and most pointedly. GW deserves your ire, so help yourselves. Grimgold Catch a Falling Dollar! By Quin Hillyer Published 11/28/2007 12:08:44 AM By letting the dollar continue to weaken, the Bush administration is making another in its long series of huge, avoidable mistakes. It is an administration that has had many good intentions and some strong achievements (e.g., tax cuts, post 9/11 homeland protection), but that also has been utterly incompetent, not to mention bullheaded in ignoring important data and empirical evidence, on far too many fronts. Before discussing the dollar, it might help to understand how the administration's being "slow on the uptake" on this subject fits the longer pattern. It is a pattern of trying to make the facts fit a predetermined policy, rather than letting facts and philosophy mutually inform each other. It is in light of that pattern that a reader might consider that this column isn't merely a false "cry of wolf." For instance.... When the administration was confronted with blowback from various agencies suggesting that the weapons-of-mass-murder argument for war in Iraq wasn't quite as solid as all earlier logic had suggested, the administration still focused overwhelmingly on that one argument for overthrowing Saddam Hussein even when the combination of many other good arguments was available. Yes, we were right to go into Iraq. But we were set up for appearing to lose the moral high ground because we never found the weapons. When John McCain, several generals, and many learned observers, not to mention several millennia of military history, repeatedly suggested that securing the peace in Iraq would require more boots on the ground and less conventional tactics, the administration continued to insist that it had everything under control except for a few "dead enders." It therefore kept trying to cut the number of troops there, prematurely. The result was two years of catastrophic violence before Gen. David Patraeus's surge finally turned the tide back towards ordered liberty. When conservatives begged and begged and begged again for a stronger stand against wasteful spending (and, concurrently, for a crackdown against ethical lapses in Congress), the president continued to push for expensive programs and refused to veto a single spending bill. Fiscal conservative angst (along with widespread anger about ethics) drastically eroded enthusiasm for GOP candidates in 2006, and that lack of enthusiasm in turn made it harder to find people to make the conservative case to independents. Result: Republicans lost both houses of Congress. When the entire nation had been bombarded for four days with horrifying scenes of Hurricane Katrina's devastation and of the absolute crisis of humanity in parts of New Orleans, the president still went public with his bizarre assertion that FEMA chief "Brownie" was doing a "heckuva job." When, more than three months later, New Orleans and Louisiana had shown incredibly weak progress in recovering on their own, and when the absolutely obvious conundrum was how best to promote reinvestment in housing there even as bureaucratic snafus and an overwhelmed insurance industry were creating a plethora of confusion and uncertainty, conservative U.S. Rep. Richard Baker of Baton Rouge came up with an ingenious (and, in the long run, less expensive) plan to create a semi-private Louisiana Recovery Corporation. Congress seemed to be leaning in its favor, but the administration decided to smother the plan. Two full years later, the death of the Baker Plan remains the single biggest mistake in long-range Louisiana recovery efforts. When the GOP base showed time and again that judicial appointments were a crucial issue, the administration made not one but three big mistakes. First, as recounted by Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News (formerly of the Chicago Tribune), Alberto Gonzales deliberately chose not to have the administration weigh in strongly against the filibuster of Miguel Estrada (but instead to leave it up to Senate Republicans to handle). Later, the administration also was strangely mute when Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed the "constitutional option" to outlaw such abuses of the filibuster. Finally, despite many years of development of conservative lists of highly qualified, highly politically salable, potential Supreme Court nominees, the president chucked all those lists and tried to anoint the manifestly unqualified Harrier Miers. In addition to being a political disaster, the nomination was a disservice to the loyal Miers -- a perfectly respectable lawyer who just hadn't had the proper exposure to constitutional law, but who might have made a reasonable appointment to a lower appeals court for some serious seasoning. Finally, when all evidence -- overwhelming evidence -- was that the administration's preferred approach to immigration would shatter whatever unity remained on the right after the terrible 2006 elections, the administration not only pressed ahead with its plan but insulted conservative opponents and repeatedly misrepresented conservatives' proposals and their motives in so doing. ALL THIS IS RELEVANT because it shows an administration that, no matter how high its ideals, has been repeatedly asleep at the switch. And so it is again with regard to the free-falling dollar. Other experts (here, here, here, and here, among many others) have explained and will continue to explain the details of what is now a crisis in the dollar's value. Leaving aside the abstruse particulars, the subject actually isn't that difficult to grasp. When the dollar loses value when compared to commodities like gold and oil AND when compared to other currencies, the demand for dollars decreases worldwide in a sort of vicious cycle. When few people want dollars, few people want dollar-denominated assets. The dollar then weakens further. Then, when a misguided Fed eventually reacts by hiking interest rates in response (supposedly to re-strengthen the dollar it just weakened), it merely creates a yo-yo effect that causes uncertainty and instability. Indeed, the Fed might be moved to hike rates so much that a really serious recession ensues -- which in turn weighs further on the dollar's value. Amazingly, this supposedly conservative president and the supposedly conservative Federal Reserve chairman seem to have bought into the prototypically liberal, Keynesian economics from which a quarter century of Reaganomics should have cured them. Their idea is that economic growth and inflation work in lockstep, specifically that if the economy grows too much, inflation must be right around the corner. Their supposed cure for inflation is less growth, and their cure for too little growth is more inflation. This backs the Bush Administration and its hand-picked Fed chairman into the stance that in order to contain inflation, it must put people out of work. Despite the truth that real economic growth can occur without bad inflation, the Bernanke Fed keeps trying to raise interest rates to slow inflation by slowing the economy, or vice versa, as the current circumstances seem to dictate. And because Keynesians equate a strong dollar with a strong anti-inflationary bias, they likewise believe that a weak dollar is needed to ward off a recession. All of which is not just wrongheaded, but completely contradicts all the evidence of two decades of having a very strong dollar at the same time the economy was growing by leaps and bounds without inflation. Despite all that evidence, the administration has been sending signals from day one that it actually prefers a weaker dollar, beginning when then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill noted that a "strong dollar" meant little in policy terms. O'Neill's successor at Treasury, John Snow, continued with the message by asking at a G-8 meeting in France, "What's wrong with a weak dollar?" Now, though, even French President Nicolas Sarkozy is warning that a weak dollar is a threat to world economic stability -- and even supermodels are sounding the alarm. Unless the dollar's decline is stopped by strong words and concrete actions, and soon, the American economy is in serious danger of sliding into the sort of stagflation -- stagnation plus inflation -- that rocked the nation throughout most of the 1970s. Again, to repeat, it is absolutely possible to promote a stronger dollar and to let interest rates fall at almost the exact same time -- if dollar stability, rather than a specific target for inflation through manipulated interest rates, is the goal. Increase the value of the dollar, and investors will come running back to dollar-denominated assets...and interest rates can fall, thus expanding the economy. A strong, stable dollar is consistent with low, not high interest rates. With obvious evidence at hand that dollar weakness is roiling world markets, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve still may have time to ward off disaster. But that time is fading fast, and an economic Katrina could await if officials don't come to the dollar's rescue. Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com. He writes: "I am indebted to John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets, for a tutorial and some editing help with parts of the column. The opinions expressed, though, are my fault, not his."