ConservativeINC

DJIA down over 360 points! It’s Black Friday! My own portfolio is down 3.5% from last week and about 5.5% from two weeks ago! It’s time to take all my money out and put it under the mattress.

Here’s the chart from today.

And here’s the five year chart.

HA! It’s just investors being investors. They are paid to fret over everything and anything and that is what they’re doing now. Today the DJIA dropped 2.64%, big deal. Two decades ago from today, ironically, the Dow really dropped. In a single day it dropped 508 points, which was 22.6%! Heck, this isn’t even a 52-week low; that would be 11,881 points.

What caused this drop? A little bit of Pelosi destroying our alliance with Turkey, a helping of an assassination attempt on Bhutto, and a dash of Putin and Ahmadinejad all led to the rise in the price of a barrel of oil, which has led to the “sharp” drop in the Dow.

When the price of a barrel of oil rises investors worry about a softening of the economy because every industry needs oil (gas) to some extent. I think that the economy has evolved a significant amount in the last couple of decades so that increases in the price of oil don’t necessarily lead to an economic downturn. A big portion of our economy is based on the service industry, which uses relatively little oil, so we should be able to weather this storm in increased prices for some time now. But if you just have to go crazy over the market then you should worry about a possible nuclear war with Iran, or how about the weakening dollar, the specter of an adversarial China, increased taxes with a democrat president (ironically being backed by these skittish investors), a comet the size of Ron Paul’s delusion hitting the earth; yeah, worry about that stuff.

Or you could worry about al Qaeda getting its hands on a nuke made available from a crumbling Pakistan. And every day that Bhutto has been in Pakistan (what, two days now) something new happens that works to undermine the Pakistani government. First, she almost gets blown up. Now she comes out and says that she had told Musharraf that she thought the Taliban (they are the probable culprits) were going to try to kill her. It is not out of the realm of possibility that she is going to try to use this against Musharraf saying, oh, I don’t know, maybe he found out about the assassination plot and did nothing about it. She wants to recoup her lost power and skimming regime. I know that everyone in the intelligencia is having a party for democracy in Pakistan now (why no same party for the democracy in Iraq?) but they are, of course, wrong. Pakistan needs to remain strong so that it can repulse attacks from al Qaeda and the Taliban. Bhutto going in there to play democrat isn’t going to help anyone.

Because if Pakistan goes we won’t have enough time to worry about Iran. The same Iran who graciously greeted Russia’s ruler (that’s what he is, no need arguing about it). Putin going to Iran eliminated the diplomatic route to victory over Iran because he basically forbade any sanctions against that country now. This all spurred Bush’s WWIII talk and the real threat that our escalating tensions with Iran might culminate in something looking like a fungus sometime soon. Pakistan going sour, Iran going nuclear, Russia going redder, it all portends immense trouble ahead.

Con Caughlin (who?) writing in the (UK) Telegraph fears what is going to happen with regards to Iran not because he might end up eviscerated by a nuke but because we might get pushed into war with Iran by neoconservative hawks led by the Darth Vader-like Dick Cheney. In A Step Nearer to War in Iran he says this:

The apparent reluctance of the realists to embrace the military option in dealing with Iran is, not surprisingly, regarded with contempt by the Bush Administration’s hard-core hawks who, as with Iraq, are centred [British sic] on the redoubtable figure of Mr Cheney.

The hawks and their neoconservative backers dismiss talk of diplomatic dialogue and Security Council sanctions as defeatist and redolent of 1930s’ appeasement, and insist that the only sure way to remove any threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme is to bomb the country back to the Stone Age (a threat previously made in all seriousness to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, if he failed to support Washington’s campaign against al-Qa’eda).

As far as the hawks are concerned, diplomacy is for wimps.

In this guy’s world if we just asked nicely enough the Iranians would become our bff. Unfortunately that’s not how it works. Iran is a nation that is led by a guy who wants to spread Islam everywhere, wipe Israel off the map, and usher in the coming of the 12th Imam who will rule over the world. But even this guy has a rudimentary understanding of what is going on.

The Russian leader no doubt believes that it is in Moscow’s long-term strategic interests to have a good working relationship with Teheran, but by allying himself so closely with the mullahs he may have inadvertently made the diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis that the realists seek more difficult to achieve.

Washington’s desire for a third UN Security Council resolution that toughens economic sanctions against Teheran is now unlikely to attract Russian support, which would, in effect, end hopes of resolving the crisis by peaceful means.

That narrows the options available to Mr Bush, who reasserted his own hawkish credentials earlier this week by giving Iran a stark warning that Teheran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons could ultimately lead to the outbreak of the Third World War.

On the domestic side of the news we find that people do have money left over for politics even if they are poor. Let us look at the poor living in New York’s Chinatown. These people are dishwashers and garment workers and make very little money. You would think that they wouldn’t be able to afford the couple thousand dollars a year it costs to buy health care insurance. I tell you that this is complete bunk because some of these people are giving a couple grand to Hillary’s campaign fund.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

And this from the LA Times; wait a second, read the next paragraph.

At this point in the presidential campaign cycle, Clinton has raised more money than any candidate in history. Those dishwashers, waiters and street stall hawkers are part of the reason. And Clinton’s success in gathering money from Chinatown’s least-affluent residents stems from a two-pronged strategy: mutually beneficial alliances with powerful groups, and appeals to the hopes and dreams of people now consigned to the margins.

Yeah, it’s because she’s so charismatic and brings the best out of people. But they do redeem themselves a little later on with this:

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.

And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs — including dishwasher, server or chef — that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.

Of 74 residents of New York’s Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment.

Smells a little fishy. There’s no way even a small fraction of these people could afford to give what they did. Plus, it’s Hillary. Scandal is going to beget scandal if she gets elected president and that would be fun if it weren’t for the fact that it would also mean that she were president. Even though it is highly unlikely that these un-findable people could afford those donations it is not so with Rush Limbaugh’s crowd.

His “Dingy” Harry Reid Gestapo letter sold for $2.1 million. When you couple that with Rush’s own matching funds that means that the Marine Corp - Law Enforcement Foundation is going to get $4.2 million from this attack on an American citizen by a senator. The winning bidder is described thusly:

Our winning bidder, subject to the receipt of funds… is a wonderful woman named Betty Casey, as trustee of the Eugene B. Casey Foundation. She gives significant sums to hospitals, hospices, colleges, and private schools. These include the Eugene B. Casey Diabetes Education Center, The Eugene B. Casey Swim Center and the Eugene B. Casey Academic Center , and The Casey Home hospice. She has also donated tens of millions from the foundation and her personal funds to the Washington Opera.

Betty has been a listener to my program since it’s inception, and we can’t thank her enough for her support.

BigT’s Linkapalooza:
Immigrant (Muslim) Youths riot in Amsterdam.
Rendition is the movie the US government uses to torture terrorists.
New Padron cigar.
Torre thought offer was an insult.
Want to feel what it’s like to be hit in a videogame?
Want to make $100,000?
Is there another me somewhere in a parallel universe?
BigT

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