The Stock Market is Not a Good Bet Now

The stock market has been a disaster this year. Something I predicted at the end of January. My prediction was based upon the theory that as January goes, so goes the entire year. It is an old theory that has been recited annually. This past January brought on another batch of magazines and newspapers that retold that theory. Even Eric Tyson, who writes all those Dummies books on finance, disagrees with the theory.

Perhaps the theory won’t be valid for 2010 but it certainly appears to be following the path that January predicted. The S&P 500 graph supports my prediction. Click the graph for an enlargement.

From Morningstar on August 20, 2010: “U.S. stocks declined Friday on light summer trading volumes, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its second consecutive week of losses as concerns about economic growth weighed on investor sentiment.”

From the New York Times on August 21, 2010: “Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.”

Quotation of the day from the New York Times on their emailed Today’s Headlines dated August 22, 2010: “For a lot of ordinary people, the economic recovery does not feel real.” LOREN FOX, an analyst at a New York research firm, describing investors who are pulling out of the stock market at a striking rate.

320 Pound Woman!

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The question is, What does a 320 pound woman look like?

Are you imagining this woman?

Got it?

Now, before you look at her pictures, get a mental image of what you think a woman who weighs 320 looks like….�
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Ready?

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Not what you were expecting, was it??!!

The tallest and biggest woman in the world lives in Holland .

She is 7’4″ and weighs 320

What a relief!

Now we ALL know we aren’t overweight, just too short!

A Season of Fear

Howard Fineman is a regular contributor to Newsweek. This is an interesting read. It is a bit sarcastic.

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The GOP’s shortsighted immigration play.

If we had any sense, the fall elections would be about just one thing: the economy. But we do not have any sense. We are facing what Wall Street would call the triple witching hour. Republicans have their finger on three social-demographic hot buttons. The first is illegal immigration (in proposing a review of the 14th Amendment), and the second is Islam in America (in objecting to the mosque at ground zero). They won’t be able to avoid pushing the third, race, even if they wanted to, given that the two leading congressional Democrats facing ethics charges are African-American. The Democrats, in response, label the GOP xenophobic and intolerant and those are the nice words. If Barack Obama’s inauguration could it have been only 19 months ago was a moment of proud, blessed calm, we are now looking at a nasty, community-shredding season of fear.

Given where Republicans and come November, maybe the country are headed, I wanted to interview a well-known Republican of color. Rep. John Boehner was out of town, so I called former representative J. C. Watts of Oklahoma. He’d risen from rural poverty to the starring role on the Sooners football team and served in Congress from 1995 to 2003. He supported Sen. John McCain, but he was a proud witness at Obama’s swearing in. Unlike me, he had no illusions about what it meant. I’d lived too much history, and had seen too much discrimination, to see that day as a new world, he says. Events have validated his skepticism. We have a political and media culture, based in Washington, in which no one wants to study things peel the onion before they speak. Instead, they just play to the base to get them worked up. That’s what’s happening on all these issues.

The foremost example is immigration. No longer content merely to advocate for the arrest and deportation of illeglas(see: Arizona), conservative cooks in the constitutional meth lab have concocted a much stronger intoxicant: rewriting the 14th Amendment to get rid of birthright citizenship (never mind that enacting the 14th Amendment during Reconstruction is something the GOP brags about on its Web site). The plan feeds straight into the cortex of Tea Party constituents: amending the amendment would end a supposed wave of anchor babies born to mothers who fly to the U.S. like malevolent storks to inject aliens into our bloodstream.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to have hearings. He regards himself as a cautious constitutionalist, but he can’t resist a red-hot hot button when he sees one, especially if it might help protect the Senate candidate in his home state of Kentucky, Tea Partier Rand Paul. Republicans focus on Chinese anchor-baby cases, but the larger message isn’t lost on tens of millions of Hispanic voters. So whatever gains this issue helps the GOP make today and they might not be insignificant could cost the party tomorrow, Watts says. I was just with some Republican Hispanic leaders in many ways, the future of our party and they told me they were heartbroken. They think we’re taking the legs right out from under them.

Fears of the other not to mention media concentration in New York City provide staying power to the GOP’s focus on the Islamic community center planned for a site near ground zero. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich continue to push the issue; most Democrats continue to avoid it. And while Republicans are careful to avoid any hint of racial language about the ethics cases, the GOP machinery churns out compendiums of coverage of Reps. Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters, whose congressional trials, inconveniently for the Democrats, are scheduled for this fall. Rush Limbaugh taunts Rangel by noting that the president has wished aloud that the congressman would retire. Limbaugh also said that Maxine Waters is just Charlie Rangel in a skirt, meaning well, who knows, but it wasn’t supposed to be nice.

Will all of this work for the Republicans? In spite of the sound and fury or, perhaps, because of it maybe not. With the economy sliding into a potential double-dip recession, the GOP would be better off focusing on the administration’s economic track record, or lack thereof. Republicans also risk backing themselves into a demographic corner. They can’t afford to be the party of white people who fear everyone else (nor can the Democrats be the party who calls everyone who disagrees with it racist). We’ve all got to take our time and think clearly before we speak on these matters, says Watts. Now that would make sense.

Howard Fineman is also the author of The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country.

Melvin Laird on Afghanistan

A transcript from “CBS NEWS’ FACE THE NATION” on Sunday August 16, 2010.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Finally today, I came to Washington in 1969 during the Nixon administration. My first beat was the Pentagon and the secretary of defense was former Republican Congressman Melvin Laird, who I came to believe, was, with the possible exception of Lyndon Johnson, the best politician I ever knew, certainly one of the wisest.

Mel and I became life-long friends. He’s well into his 80s now, but he’s sharp as ever and he’s worried. Worried about the all-volunteer Army that he helped to create. And worried about where we’re going in Afghanistan.

In a letter last week, he said the volunteer force has far exceeded his expectations, but that “we are asking much of it now and the multiple deployments and disregard for the personal and family life of our troops and their emotional well-being threaten to undermine our national security.”

Afghanistan worries him even more. He first went there in 1953 and he says: “Its culture is tribal, not nationalistic, yet we hope to build a nation there. We fought eight years and lost a thousand Americans, yet we are no closer today to stability, let alone victory.”

Laird remembers how bad intelligence and misunderstanding led us to Vietnam and he wonders now if we have made the same mistakes again. “I know something,” he says, “about misguided wars and how easy it is to get mired down in something that started with the best intentions.”

Mel Laird’s opinion is one view, and there are others. But Mel Laird has seen a lot and if he’s worried, I guess so am I. Back in a minute.

What do the Polls Say Today?

Americans want a leader of conviction. That would be a president who has a clear vision of where he wants to take the nation. George W. Bush was such a man. I disagreed with him on so many things but I did know what his views were. He was “the decider.”

Unfortunately Barack Obama is wishy-washy. The war in Afghanistan is a “war of necessity” except we will begin to withdraw in July 2011.

The question of building a Muslim mosque near the World Trade Center site was answered on Friday, August 13, 2010 by the president when he said, “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.” This quote was taken from President Obama’s remarks for Friday night’s iftar dinner at the White House.

However, on Saturday, August 14, 2010 White House spokesman Bill Burton released the following statement on behalf of Obama’s stance on constructing the mosque. “Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night. It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project. But it is his responsibility to stand up for the constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans. What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that If a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a mosque.”

The polls indicate that 64% of the nation oppose building a mosque near the WTC.

Los Angeles Times Framework

Notice the new link. Los Angeles Times photographers to offer some fabulous photos.

“It’s the economy, Stupid”

The words of James Carville, campaign advisor to when Bill Clinton in 1992. It has always been about the economy. President Obama decided to focus on health care rather than the most pressing issue in the past two years. I want to be an optimist but the numbers are not promising. There is nothing on the horizon to indicate that this recession will be ending soon.

Maybe this is a good thing because everyone in America has been coming to grips with their credit card and car payment debt. Listen to Dave Ramsey on any morning and you realize how utterly foolish Americans have been about managing their money. Visa, Master Card and the rest of them may be hurting but perhaps Americans are starting to grow up. I include myself.

This graph tells the story of the on going unemployment picture. New claims for unemployment finally dropped below 500,000 in the week ending November 21, 2009. The weekly new claims has swayed between 427,000 and 496,000 since then. Last week claims climbed for four weeks in row to 484,000. I doubt that the Republicans can do any better than the Democrats in ending this disaster.

Click on the graph to get a better view.

Women Living Under Sharia Law

The cover of the Aug. 9 issue of Time Magazine shows a photo of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off in 2009 under orders from a local Taliban commander as punishment for fleeing her husband’s home. (Jodi Bieber, Institute for Time Magaizne/AP)

There are no words that can explain this atrocity. I was happy to learn that this young woman will be treated at the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles. We can’t protect the entire world. We can’t even protect our own citizens from violence. It is obvious that the culture of Afghanistan is totally different from the West. What we consider evil they consider correct. Armies will not change their beliefs. I do not know how to change their views of the world.

Desperate stakes for women under Sharia

Washington Examiner Editorial

August 10, 2010

It is impossible to view Time magazine’s cover photograph of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears were severed by her husband and brother-in-law on the order of a Taliban commander, without shuddering in recoil. Her “crime” was nothing more than fleeing the hellish home of in-laws who had beaten and enslaved her. That Aisha’s only recourse in the face of such abuse was to run and hide is testimony to the reality that, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world that Sharia law prevails, women are at best second-class citizens. Sharia is the vehicle by which the most oppressive tenets of extreme Islamic religion become the civil law of any society on which it is imposed. In many such places, daily life for women and girls remains today much as it was a millennium ago — the unrelieved tedium, oppression and drudgery of chattel.

It would thus be a terrible mistake to dismiss Aisha as a nightmarish exception to the rule. As Examiner columnist Diana West noted Sunday, “similar scenarios play out beyond the wilds of the Taliban zone wherever Sharia culture flowers, an expanding zone that now includes urban centers of the Western world from Berlin to London to Atlanta to Calgary.” Mutilations like Aisha’s are far from the worst that can happen to women under Sharia law; the United Nations estimates that at least 5,000 women are murdered every year in “honor killings” by Muslim family members aggrieved by a wife or daughter thought to have disgraced her kin. As Fox News’ recent reporting has made clear, such crimes happen in America, too, and will likely become more frequent occurrences as Muslims here demand, as their co-adherents already are in Britain and on the continent, that they be allowed to live under Sharia separate from the established civil law.