Last week the major indexes turned lower again with the Nasdaq down 0.2%, the Dow and the NYSE composite each giving up 0.7%, and the S&P 500 slipping 0.4%. The IBD outlook remains at “market in correction”. It’s still not the right environment in which to be buying stocks.
This week, with the market in correction, there are no watch list stocks that can be considered to be in a proper buy range.
/as usual, your mileage may vary, always do your own homework
If any one person is the founder, it’s Rick Santelli. A year ago, the CNBC commentator blew a gasket on the air over a plan by the Obama Administration to tackle the foreclosure crisis. Multibillion-dollar proposals were flying like snowflakes in Washington, and Santelli’s rant struck a chord with people who wondered where all the money would come from. “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party,” Santelli declared, evoking the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. A movement was born. Egged on by conservative interest groups and leveraging Barack Obama’s digital-networking strategies, grass-roots opponents of the President’s agenda have made themselves a major factor in U.S. politics.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is thinking 100 hours, time enough, she says, to begin to “drain the swamp” after more than a decade of Republican rule.
It’s four years later, how’s that “most honest, ethical Congress” working out?
Draining swamps is not so popular today. It’s bad ecology.
We could understand Nancy Pelosi’s defense of Charlie Rangel this way. It’s an issue of conservation. I’ve heard those San Francisco liberals love the environment. Forget promises to “drain the swamp” during the 2006 campaign. She wants to conserve her ally’s job.
Don’t get Pelosi wrong. Surely, if a powerful House member “has proven himself to be ethically unfit” we know “the burden” indeed “falls upon” his party to oust him. In such a case, party leaders would obviously ask: “Do they want to remove the ethical cloud that hangs over the Capitol?”
So Pelosi explained in October 2004. The subject was Tom DeLay. The House ethics committee had admonished the Republican majority leader. DeLay used the Federal Aviation Administration to track Democratic state rivals. He hosted a fundraiser with energy lobbyists while energy legislation was under consideration.
Pelosi argued: “We must stop the influence of special interests so that the people know that we are here for the people’s interests.”
After all, this is why we have institutions like the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service. Except, that is, for the namesake and the center. An oil drilling company (special interest) made a $1 million donation to Rangel’s center. The quid pro quo, allegedly, included legislative favors. The matter, like so much of Rangel’s world, is under investigation.
Rangel has one of the powerful jobs in government. The New York Democrat is chairman of the House Ways and Means committee. The committee has jurisdiction over all taxation. And that’s the rub. Rangel has a problem paying all his taxes.
The chairman failed to report more than a half million dollars in income. He later amended his financial disclosure forms. Perhaps it was a senior moment. The public servant simply forgot about his New Jersey real estate and a quarter million dollar account.
But perhaps he’s just corrupt. There are other investigations. Possibly still more absent taxes, this time regarding rental income and a Dominican villa. There’s the four rent-stabilized Harlem apartments used by Rangel, reportedly, well below market value. House lawmakers cannot accept gifts worth more than $50.
Rangel’s cloud grew still larger on Thursday. The House ethics committee ruled that Rangel violated Congressional rules by accepting Caribbean junkets.
Thank goodness for Pelosi’s past stands. Back in October 2004, the ethics committee had not yet acted on DeLay’s links to a more serious money laundering investigation. But Pelosi saw that as no excuse. The cloud was big enough. Action had to be taken on behalf of the “people’s interests.”
Certainly, Pelosi is not foolish enough to not apply a Democratic double standard. Well, you know how this story goes. In Washington, the cynics are rarely proven wrong.
Some Democratic lawmakers are calling for Rangel to step down. But not the House leader. She says slow down. Don’t jump to those conclusions. She told reporters Friday, “There’s obviously more to come and we’ll see what happens with that.”
The Report further finds that Representative Charles B. Rangel violated the House gift rule by accepting payment or reimbursement for travel to the 2007 and 2008 conferences.
A crime suspect who invokes his “right to remain silent” under the famous Miranda decision can be questioned again after 14 days, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. And if he freely agrees to talk then, his incriminatory statements can be used against him.
In a 9-0 decision in a Maryland child-abuse case, the high court overturned a rule set in 1981 that barred the police from questioning a suspect once he had asked to remain silent and to speak with a lawyer.
Known as the “Edwards rule,” it was intended to prevent investigators from “badgering” a suspect who was held in jail after he had invoked his Miranda rights. In some cases, police had awakened a suspect in the middle of the night and asked him again to waive his rights and to admit to a crime.
In recent years, the rule has been understood to prevent police from ever requestioning a freed suspect, even for other crimes in other places. The justices said Wednesday that although the rule made sense for suspects who were held in jail, it did not make sense for suspects who had gone free.
“In a country that harbors a large number of repeat offenders, the consequence [of this no-further-questioning rule] is disastrous,” Justice Antonin Scalia said.
If there has been a “break in custody” and the suspect has gone free, Scalia said, the police should be allowed to speak with him after some period of time.
“It seems to us that period is 14 days,” he said. “That provides plenty of time for the suspect to get reacclimated to his normal life [and] to consult with friends and counsel.”
Then, if the suspect waives his rights and agrees to talk, any statement he makes can be used against him, the court said.
The ruling in Maryland vs. Shatzer reinstates a child-abuse conviction against a Maryland man who made incriminatory statements to a state investigator 2 1/2 years after he had first been questioned by police.
Hooray for the Supreme Court, and it was a unanimous decision no less! Good deal, Miranda could use a good pruning. Ever since the uber liberal Warren Court pulled the Miranda warning scheme out of thin air, criminals have had way too much of an advantage over law enforcement when it comes to questioning.
/seriously, if a criminal is too stupid to know that they don’t have to confess to the police, they deserve to go to prison anyway, just for being that dumb
The arrest of dozens of high-ranking military figures in Turkey over an alleged coup plan dating back seven years marks the latest episode of a power struggle between the Islamist-rooted government and the army, the bastion of the secular order, analysts said Tuesday.
In a massive swoop, anti-terror police Monday detained more than 40 people, including the former air force and navy chiefs, over a purported plan drawn up in 2003 to oust the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Until recently, such tough action was inconceivable against the military which has toppled four governments in 50 years and exercised significant clout in politics.
But recent reforms to align the country with the European Union, spearheaded by the AKP government, has reduced the influence of the once-mighty military.
Monday’s arrests constitute a “breaking point” in Turkish political history, said the liberal Taraf daily which exposed the alleged coup plan code-named “Operation Sledgehammer” last month.
“The republic is now changing. The era of ‘dictatorships’ is coming to an end. The coup plotters are being arrested and brought to justice,” wrote the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Ahmet Altan.
According to Taraf, “Operation Sledgehammer” called for the bombing of two mosques in Istanbul at prayer time and organizing attacks by soldiers disguised as Islamists against symbols of secularism.
The coup planners also allegedly plotted to escalate tensions with Greece to secure the downing of a Turkish plane in a dog-fight with Greek jets over the Aegean with the ultimate aim of showing the government as inept and justifying a military takeover.
The army has denied the exisence of “Operation Sledgehammer” and complained of a “smear campaign” amid a string of similar plots for a military takeover carried by the pro-government media.
Dozens of former officers, among them two retired generals, are already on trial over the so-called Ergenekon network, an alleged secularist-nationalist group accused of planning to foment unrest to pave the way for a military coup.
The probe was initially hailed as a success, but has since come under doubt with some suspects accusing police of fabricating evidence.
Government critics claim the coup allegations are a bid by the AKP to cripple the army and remove a major obstacle to a hidden agenda of transforming Turkey into an Islamic state.
Hugh Pope, a senior analyst specialising on Turkey at the International Crisis Group, expressed doubt there was a “witch hunt” against the army.
“Clearly, the judiciary is extremely serious and they would certainly not have taken so many high-profile people into custody unless they had an absolute certainty in their mind that this is a real case,” he said.
Pope acknowledged there was “uncomfortable evidence” of abuses in the judicial process against the alleged coup plotters, but underlined the investigation also represented “a process by which Turkey is establishing the supremacy of civilian authority” over military power.
Alexandre Toumarkine, a political scientist from the French Institute of Anatolia Studies, said the possibility of some limited form of military intervention in EU-candidate Turkey in the 21st-century was not pure fiction.
“The image of tanks in the streets carries such a heavy political cost that such a hypothesis is probably unthinkable,” he said.
Nevertheless, plans of more discreet military intervention aimed at “restructuring the political system in depth” have “germinated in the minds of quite a few people,” he added.
“We have the impression that they have reached such a level (of antagonism) that the army either accepts to withdraw from the political area or continues to prepare the destabilization of the current government to compel it to leave the scene.”
The president has unveiled a reform plan of his own ahead of Thursday’s bipartisan summit. But it’s no better than the lousy Democratic proposals that Americans have already dismissed.
The Obama plan appears to be based on the bills that were passed last year in the House and in the pre-Scott Brown Senate. While it leaves out the public option that was included in the House legislation, it adds a wrinkle that’s just as harmful: price controls on insurance premiums.
Americans aren’t going to want this rancid stew of legislative arrogance any more than they wanted the bills that were rammed through Congress. Our own polling shows that 34% strongly oppose Congress’ overhaul plans while only 24% strongly support.
When the “strongly oppose” and “somewhat oppose” responses are combined, the poll shows 45% are against the Democrats’ proposals. Independents oppose the plans 51% to 34%.
While the administration’s proposal might get some initial support because it regulates insurance costs, the public will recognize the rest of the plan as something it’s seen and rejected.
It seems the White House is cynically using the new wrinkle to take advantage of the anger toward insurance companies. The good news is that wrinkle should smooth out once opponents explain why restrictions on premium increases will leave the public with less coverage, as insurers will have no choice but to ration benefits.
The opponents — hopefully every Republican holding elected office — could start by repeatedly pointing out that Larry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, not a GOP operative, said: “Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time.”
The opposition should also ceaselessly tell the public that the ultimate consequence of premium caps on health insurance — if not the ultimate goal of the Democrats — is the collapse of the industry.
Private firms will leave the market when government restrictions make it unreasonably hard to make a profit. That will happen when the caps are combined with the inevitable federal mandates outlining the wide array of conditions that insurers must pay for and the rules that govern how coverage is sold.
New York has bitter experience with coverage rules. Since the early 1990s the state has forced insurers to provide insurance to people who are already sick and required them to set premiums at the same rate for all customers despite differences in age and health.
New York’s market hasn’t yet crumbled, but only because insurers have been able to increase premiums. New York now has, at roughly $9,000 a year on average, the highest rates in the country.
Soaring premiums can’t happen in a regime in which they are capped. When caps are added to mandates, insurers have nowhere to go but out of the health insurance business.
“We are sort of a case study of what not do,” says Mark Scherzer, identified in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times as “a consumer attorney who helped lead the fight for New York’s changes in the early 1990s.”
We see nothing in the Obama proposal that makes it more acceptable than what the Democrats have already put up.
• It won’t cut costs. Its $950 billion price tag for 10 years is even higher than the federal estimates, which were insanely optimistic, for the bills that have already been passed.
• It won’t insure all the uninsured. The White House says it will cover 31 million Americans who are without coverage. That still leaves as many as 15 million or 16 million without medical insurance.
• It won’t increase Americans’ control of their health care. It will require people to buy insurance and force businesses that don’t insure their employees to provide coverage. That’s more government.
• It’s not what the people want. By more than a 2-1 margin, our IBD/TIPP poll found, Americans want Congress to start fresh with a new blueprint, not rehash what they’ve clearly rejected.
No amount of we-know-what’s-best, force-it-on-an-unwilling-public arrogance can change these facts. Yet the Democrat machine, confident its ideas are so strong that they can repeal the laws of economics, refuses to end its offensive against the people.
We are far beyond the point at which we can admire their tenacity while disagreeing with their solutions.
What we need is a clean, quick kill of a plan — an Obama course that would drive our health care system into an abyss from which it would never escape.
What happened to Obama’s promise to focus on American’s top priority, jobs? Apparently, that lasted all of about a week and now it’s back to socialized health care reform, a plan already soundly rejected by the vast majority of the American public.
/Obama and the Democrats must have an insatiable political death wish, they’re going to get absolutely creamed in the 2010 midterm elections
Last week the major indexes ended higher again for the second week in a row. The S&P 500 added 3.1%, the Dow and NYSE composite both rose 3%, and the Nasdaq tacked on 2.8%. However, once again, there was still no follow through day on higher volume. The IBD outlook remains at “market in correction”. Be patient, with the market still undecided on a direction, it’s not advisable to be making any new purchases.
This week, with the market in correction, there are no watch list stocks that can be considered to be in a proper buy range.
/as usual, your mileage may vary, always do your own homework
A key Sunni political bloc declared Saturday that it would not take part in Iraq’s March 7 parliamentary election. Saleh al-Mutlak, who was banned from running by a parliamentary committee, is pulling his National Dialogue Front out of the election with just over a week to go before voting is set to begin.
The decision by veteran Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlak to pull his political bloc out of the approaching election poses a severe blow to the Iraqi electoral process, and gives ammunition to adversaries of any compromise.
An appeals court recently upheld a decision by a parliamentary committee barring al-Mutlak from running, because of alleged ties to the Baath Party of deposed leader Saddam Hussein.
Mutlak’s spokesman, Haidar al-Mullah, told reporters that his National Dialogue Front was “boycotting the upcoming election” and urged other parties to do the same. He supported the decision by citing complaints by U.S. commander in Iraq General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Christopher Hill over Iranian interference in the electoral process.
The parliament committee which banned dozens of prominent Sunni candidates from running in the election is led by pro-Iranian politicians Ahmad Chalabi and Ali Faisal al-Lami. Chalabi denied, Friday, on Al Hurra TV, that Iran had any responsibility in the decision.
. . .
Top U.S. officials, as well as many Iraqi Sunni leaders, have accused Iran of pushing for the decision to ban key Sunni politicians from running in the election. Marina Ottaway thinks that it may be a “bit much to see the long arm of [Iranian] President [Mahmoud] Ahmedinejad” behind the current crisis, because Iraq, she says, “has never had much of a democratic tradition.”
Abou Diab, however, believes that the current political imbroglio has clear Iranian origins, and that Iran wants “to turn Iraq into a friendly client-state after the planned U.S. withdrawal,” next August.
Remember Ahmed Chalabi? He was instrumental in providing us with the information (reports of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda) that got us to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Now, it appears that he’s trying to deliver control over Iraq to the Iranians after we leave. Have we been played as the world’s biggest suckers by Iran and her agents?
/wouldn’t it be a shame if Ahmed Chalabi were to suddenly go missing?
It all started out innocently enough last Saturday, that is, of course, if you think the United States actually needs a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
President Obama announced Saturday the appointment of Rashad Hussain, a White House lawyer, to be his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Obama made the announcement in a video conference to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. In his message, Obama called Hussain “an accomplished lawyer and a close and trusted member of my White House staff,” who would strengthen his policy of outreach to the world’s Muslims.
Then reporters, apparently unlike the White House vetters, started digging into Rashad Hussain’s background.
President Obama’s new envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, is at the center of a controversy over remarks attributed to him defending a man who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid a terrorist group.
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs quoted Hussain in 2004 as calling Sami al-Arian the victim of “politically motivated persecutions” after al-Arian, a university professor, was charged in 2003 with heading U.S. operations of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The United States has designated the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a foreign terrorist group as far back as 1997. At the time of al-Arian’s arrest, then Attorney General John Ashcroft called it “one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world.”
Al-Arian pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiracy to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was sentenced to more than four years in prison.
The White House says the controversial remarks defending al-Arian two years earlier were made by his daughter — not by Hussain. Both were part of a panel discussion at a Muslim Students Association conference, but the reporter covering the event told Fox News she stands by the quotes she attributed to Hussain, who was a Yale Law student and an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
The Web version of the 2004 article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs was later edited to delete all of Hussain’s comments. Editor Delinda Hanley told Fox News she believes the change was made in February 2009, though she does not recall who requested the edit.
Hanley remembered telling the group’s webmaster: “Let’s just take out the quotes since they have been attributed to the wrong speaker.”
Someone’s obviously lying. So, when the reporter refused to back down, out comes story number two.
Late Tuesday a White House official spoke with Hussain and confirmed to Fox News that Hussain did attend the 2004 event. The official says Hussain went with plans to discuss civil rights in the wake of 9/11, but remembers the conversation turning to Sami al-Arian’s case. According to the White House official, Hussain has “no recollection” as to whether or not he made the comments attributed to him.
We’ve now gone from flat out denial to a non-denial denial, he just can’t remember. But wait, there’s more, we’re not done yet, there are actual audio tapes and transcripts that exist! Cue up story number three.
Presented with a transcript of his remarks at a 2004 conference, Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s nominee to be special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, issued a statement Friday evening acknowledging having criticized the U.S. government’s case against Sami Al-Arian, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiracy to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Originally, the White House claimed that Hussain denied having made the comments, attributing them instead to Al-Arian’s daughter, Laila.
But Politico’s Josh Gerstein obtained an audiotape of the remarks, in which Hussain said that Al-Arian’s case was one of many “politically motivated persecutions.”
On Friday evening, Hussain admitted having made them and the White House backed off its insistence that Hussain hadn’t made the comments, though both noted that he did so in the context of disagreeing with the way the government pursued the case against Al-Arian, making clear not to address the specific criminal charges.
“As a law student six years ago, I spoke on the topic of civil liberties on a panel during which I responded to comments made about the al-Arian case by Laila al-Arian who was visibly saddened by charges against her father,” Hussain said in a statement. “I made clear at the time that I was not commenting on the allegations themselves. The judicial process has now concluded, and I have full faith in its outcome.”
Hussain, currently in the White House counsel’s office, said, “I made statements on that panel that I now recognize were ill-conceived or not well-formulated.”
Busted! Now, will Hussain be thrown under the bus where he belongs?
Is it just me or does it seem like pretty much everyone Obama appoints is some kind of anti-American radical or political miscreant?
/it’s really hard to believe that the Obama White House vetting process is this inept and ineffective, they have to know these peoples’ backgrounds and yet they appoint them anyway, because they’re fellow travelers
