After her recent win in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton is challenging Barack Obama to yet another debate before the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.
“I’m offering Senator Obama the chance to debate me one-on-one, no moderators,” Clinton said this afternoon at a rally at a baseball stadium in South Bend, Indiana. “Just the two of us going for 90 minutes, asking and answering questions. We’ll set whatever rules seem fair.”
Obama is unreceptive, as well he should be. In my experience, it’s the weakest candidate that is the one clamoring for more debates. More debates for Obama mean more opportunities for him to screw and a better opportunity for America to see who he truly is: condescending and one of the most liberal Senators there is.
Yet, despite some missteps, some rather revealing commentary coming from Obama, and despite Hillary’s win, he still has the upper hand and should not take up Hillary’s offer. On the other hand, I would love to see two politicians debate each other without rules and without moderators. This type of debate is sadly lacking from the political scene in America.
Obama puts forward the “the same incoherent litmus test he mentioned a few days ago.” This is a test that “conveniently allows him to talk to Iran — a sovereign state … but otherwise guilty of the same sins he lists vis-a-vis Hamas — while ignoring Hamas lest it put him on the wrong side of pro-Israel voters.”
My question is how does one not consider Iran to be a terrorist organization? Yes, it has borders, yes it has a hierarchical structure unlike the network-based structure of a terrorist organization. But Iran still wants to DESTROY Israel. Iran is still funding terrorist groups, giving money to the families of suicide bombers, and training forces that are killing U.S. and allied soldiers.
To me, Iran is a terrorist organization dressed up as a state. Obama, Clinton, Carter, or the State Department can talk all they want with Iran. This won’t change Iran’s goals of ruling the middle-east and pushing the Jewish people into the sea. It took millions of lives and a world war to realize that Hitler wasn’t playing around. Will it take that much to force us to realize Iran isn’t playing around?
What’s even scarier nowadays is the realistic possibility that a so-called state can conceivably pass off a nuke to a terrorist organization who would then detonate it wherever it pleases. There would be no smoking gun and it would be nearly impossible to connect officially such an action to a “state.” Just by virtue of having borders and some form of centralized government, Iran can allow “unaffiliated” terrorist organizations do its dirty work while it can bask in one of the benefits of statehood, namely unending diplomacy and talks which further legitimizes an undeserving and dangerous terrorist organization state.
I thought this last paragraph from Clive Crook’s blog post about Obama’s recent “bitter” comment was really funny.
Pandering is one thing. It is to be expected of politicians. But it is unwise, and it violates the etiquette of the profession, to say that you are pandering. Hillary panders to anti-trade sentiment, to the religious, and now (can this be correct?) to gun enthusiasts–all with apparently total conviction. Obama panders less well. I think it is a question of experience.
Read the whole thing for a good dissection of Obama’s comment and Hillary’s response to it.
I sold into the strength yesterday, perhaps a little recklessly considering how utterly unpredictable the market has become, but I saw two charts trading at or near the top of trend channels and the third trade was in response to the retail sector’s large bounce after Walmart’s report.
Here we have DVN, at the top of its trend channel.
Here is a chart of Medtronic, MDT. Not a terribly strong stock, nor at a very extreme level, but I still thought it was worth a shot.
This is RTH, the etf for the retail sector. I had a put previously, but sold for a profit at 92. I thought yesterday was a good chance to reload.
It seems that the Colbert bump, the phenomenon where guests on his show experience a surge in popularity, is real. No, really. There was a study done!
The sky is blue, the grass is green, and Hillary Clinton is a liar. Please tell me something I don’t know.
Based on Obama’s recently released tax returns, Ryan Ellis of the American Shareholder’s Association concludes that Barack Obama is a stranger to the investor class. This conclusion is based upon couple of factors. First, their reported qualified dividends are very low. Second:
Michelle Obama earned a quite lucrative annual self-employment contract from the University of Chicago Hospital System (in some years, over $1 million). Yet, Mrs. Obama didn’t appear to have a self-employed 401(k) plan or a SEP-IRA to make retirement contributions from. This implies that the Obamas are not exactly the best tax-deferred investors in the world.
And third, “In 2000, the Obamas cashed out $6260 from either a DB pension or a 401(k) plan.” Ellis says, “This is a sure sign of a household that does not build and accumulate a nest egg for their future.”
Throughout the years, many Democrats have complained of the so-called power and influence of “big oil,” the companies like Exxon who apparently have too much power and have gouged consumers by charging too much, especially after hurricanes and powerful weather events. I say this in sarcasm. But still, some politicians have called for taxing profits of these companies and now Obama has hinted that he would use the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to combat increased oil prices.
With all this in mind, the QandO blog does an excellent job of debunking the myth held by liberals and Democrats that “big oil” wields too much power. Some of the points made is that almost 80% of the oil market is controlled by foreign national oil companies. These are entities like the Saudi Arabian Co., National Iranian Oil Co., and the Iraq National Oil Co.
Another piece of evidence are the earnings of the oil industry. The oil and natural gas industry falls far behind many other industries in terms of earnings, so why is “big oil” constantly picked on by liberal politicians? Perhaps they’re just easy targets and scapegoats, but nevertheless, the so-called big oil companies wield a VERY insignificant amount of power and influence compared to the oil cartel OPEC and the foreign national oil companies.
The Financial Times on banks and regulatory backlash:
Wall Street crises have consequences. By 1932, John Maynard Keynes viewed financiers as “subhuman” and “of gangster mentality”. In 1933, at his inauguration, President Franklin Roosevelt told America that “the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation”. The next two years saw the Glass-Steagall Act, which split commercial and investment banking, and the birth of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The severity of the fallout from today’s crisis partly depends on the scale of loss borne by the public sector. So far central banks can, just about, present their activity as that of lenders of the last resort: lending to banks (and now dealers) in return for good collateral. Even the UK Treasury says nationalised Northern Rock’s assets exceed its liabilities.
But it is easy to imagine scenarios in which the public sector bears large and explicit costs. The collateral’s value could fall; central banks might feel obliged directly to prop up the prices of risky assets; bailouts of clearly insolvent banks might occur. High inflation might conceivably be tolerated to cut the real value of private debt – as Professor Niall Ferguson puts it, a re-creation of the 1970s to avoid the 1930s. Such public costs could render peripheral today’s regulatory debate. This is dominated by technical goals: making banks’ capital positions less pro-cyclical and boosting their liquidity. Faith in voluntary codes to reform bankers’ pay, such as that hinted at by Deutsche Bank’s Josef Ackermann, or credit ratings, might come to be seen as hopelessly naive.
Last week Barney Frank, chairman of the House committee on financial services, proposed a new US risk regulator. But the backlash could be more radical. Its objectives? Try these two. First, in an echo of Glass-Steagall, to prohibit some risky business lines at any institutions with implicit state guarantees. Second, to require central banks to take action to limit asset bubbles as well as conventional inflation. If the private losses “socialised” by the public sector do become drastic, so will the proposed remedies.
Obama exploits his still living white grandmother. James Taranto of the WSJ thinks simple decency dictates that a public figure treat embarrassing facts about loved ones with discretion, but come on, he’s a politician!
