Last week, the major indexes took a well telegraphed, completely unnecessary, Washington induced pounding over the debt ceiling. The Dow plunged 4.2%, the S&P 500 and the NYSE composite both lopped off 3.9%, and the Nasdaq dropped 3.6%. Monday’s swoon pushed the IBD outlook to “uptrend under pressure” and Wednesday’s shellacking tipped the IBD outlook over to “market in correction”. It’s time to play defense again and wait for the next uptrend. Don’t let any profits turn into losses, paying taxes is always better than losing money.
With the market in correction, none of the watch list stocks can be considered as buy candidates.
/as usual, your mileage may vary, always do your own homework
Not everyone is happy about the compromise bill that will raise the debt ceiling. Democrat Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City had strong words about it over the weekend, calling it a “sugar coated Satan sandwich.”
Well, to me, the debt ceiling deal looks like a big [expletive deleted] sandwich and we’re all going to have to take a bite. But hey, if liberals are whining like crybabies about it, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.
The chief of the Turkish armed forces, Isik Kosaner, has resigned along with the army, navy and air force heads.
They were furious about the arrest of senior officers, accused of plotting, shortly before a round of military promotions.
A series of meetings between General Kosaner and PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to resolve their differences.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul moved quickly to appoint General Necdet Ozel as the new army chief.
Gen Ozel is widely expected to be swiftly elevated to chief of the general staff in place of Gen Kosaner. Tradition dictates that only the head of the army can take over the top job.
There has been a history of tension between the secularist military and the governing AK party, with the two sides engaged in a war of words for the past two years over allegations that parts of the military had been plotting a coup.
Traditionally, in Turkey, the military has served as check on Islamist forces and a key to maintaining a secular government.
/obviously, this development represents a substantial consolidation of power in the hands of Erdogan’s Islamist AK party and a big blow to the future of secularism in Turkey
Hey, check out our U.S. allies in Libya. It’s bad enough that they’re militarily inept and have dragged us, willingly, into an expensive quagmire, but now they’re killing each other!
That Abdel Fateh Younes, the longtime enforcer for Muammar Qaddafi whose stunning defection to the Libyan rebellion in February was an early indication of the depth of the challenge to Qaddafi’s regime, is dead, you can take to the bank. General Younes had been head of the embryonic rebel army from practically the moment he’d switched sides.
As far as the rest of the story – who killed him, when, precisely where, and why – all remains murk and conjecture, created by cross-cutting rivalries within the rebellion and the often misleading and contradictory way that Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC) communicates with the press and the Libyan public.
Let’s recap, we can drop thousands of tons of bombs on Libya, kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and yet Muammar Gaddafi is still alive and well, thumbing his nose at Obama. Meanwhile, our Libyan allies, the Transitional National Council (TNC) are busy killing each other and they have no hope of ever sacking Tripoli. So, The Beat Goes On, a stalemate and, adding insult to ridiculousness, the U.S. taxpayer is stuck picking up the tab for this “Three Stooges go to war” farce.
/where’s Samantha Power been these last few months, anyone seen her, she’s got a hell of a lot of explaining to do?
A possible terrorist plot against military personnel at Ft. Hood in Texas was disrupted with the arrest of an Army private who had purchased ammunition and bomb-making materials in preparation for such an attack, law enforcement officials said Thursday.
Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, a 21-year-old Texas native who had successfully argued that he was a conscientious objector whose Muslim faith would not allow him to deploy to Afghanistan, was arrested at a motel Wednesday by Killeen, Texas, police after his purchase of gunpowder at a local gun store aroused employees’ suspicion. Abdo, who had been charged this year with possession of child pornography, had been absent without leave since early July.
Authorities suspect that Abdo, who was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, was planning to construct bombs and detonate them at a restaurant popular with Ft. Hood personnel, according to a U.S. official who has been briefed on the case. Abdo intended to gun down survivors after the bombs went off, said the official, who asked not to be named because he is not in law enforcement.
How many more of these stealth jihadis is it going to take before the government realizes that devout Muslims, whose sole allegiance is to Islam, and the U.s. military don’t mix?
/these jihadis in the military have already killed dozens of their unsuspecting, defenseless, infidel fellow soldiers, only a tip from an alert citizen may have saved the death toll from rising even higher
The Palestinian Authority spends more than $5 million a month paying salaries to terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons, according to a Palestinian Media Watch report presented to congressmen in Washington on Tuesday.
According to the report, written by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, such payments contravene US law, which prohibits funding of any person who “engages in, or has engaged in terrorist activity.
Why are we still giving any money to the Palestinian Authority, especially now that they’ve teamed up with Hamas and seeing as how they’re both sworn to Israel’s destruction? Why are we supporting the enemy of our closest alliy in the region?
Western security agencies were most likely behind the killing of an Iranian scientist in an operation that underlines the myriad complications in the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, analysts say.
Darioush Rezaie, 35, a university lecturer, was shot dead by gunmen in eastern Tehran Saturday, the third murder of a scientist since 2009. One was killed in a car bomb, the second by a device detonated remotely.
Granted, killing Iran’s nuclear scientists isn’t the most effective or efficient way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons but, then again, it may be one of the only viable options left to the West at this point. That is, if Western intelligence agencies were responsible for the assassinations, which they deny.
/in any case, at least someone is doing something to try and hamstring Iran’s nefarious nuclear ambitions
