Not So Stupid

The fact is that the markets started accelerating downward last summer when it became clear Obama was the likely winner.

-- elwin

As of late summer, the election was still up for grabs. The market began going down hill because Lehman failed, Bear failed, Citi Group was in the tank, AIG was failing, etc., etc. You could have elected Jesus' personal financial adviser president and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference with the financial or housing markets.

RC's are truly nuts about this issue. -- zizou#5

I can't think of a single thing that "the Church" isn't pretty much nuts about. Then again, that goes for all religion.

. . . every region of the world, is over population.

malaria, AIDS and agriculture are the biggest short and mid term problem for Africa -- The Jim

. . . gets a good part of its electricity from hydro electric generation. Solar and wind could easily make up the remainder, if anyone would bother to make a serious investment in them.

Solar is only good during the day . . .

Storage batteries?

. . . and there is the problem of course of cloud cover.

If we can make solar work seasonally in Seattle, it would sing in the places where it makes the most sense. Most of the SW of the country as well as a lot of Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon, Southern Idaho, nearly all of Nevada, nearly all of Florida, etc., etc. are places that get around 300 days of sunshine a year.

Also, to supply the US it would require a plant the size of Arizona.

No one that I've read is talking about centralizing solar generation in a single location. That's got waste and disaster written all over it.

Wind has the problem that it is unpredictable.

Not really. In the areas that wind works, the wind is more predictable than rainfall from year-to-year.

The best we have for the foreseeable future is Nukes . . . -- The Jim

Oh! The lobbyist from the nuke industry is here!

Then we see a post by a woman wanting to trade nerdy theories about "Lost." That's us! We recently started watching the show. We love trading nerdy theories.

Probably not as I thought it was lost cause about fifteen years ago. Pakistan is, unfortunately, next.

Trust me: Democrats don't go around debating socialism anymore . . .

I don't thing the Democratic Party even thinks of itself as being progressive let alone socialist.

No they don't. I don't think I've talked to anyone about autism for at least 30-years when an acquaintance who was initially diagnosed as autistic was found actually to be schizophrenic.

. . . on public education. All they do is siphon money from and drain schools of their better students. As has been said about more than a few issues facing the country, we need a Marshall Plan for public education. There probably aren't five school districts in the country that don't suffer from crowded classrooms and/or insufficient materials and staff.

Congress and presidents are more than happy to give the military all the money it wants. But money on education is "wasted" if it doesn't produce uniform performance nation-wide, a perfectly stupid idea given the huge socio-economic disparities between districts or even between schools within districts.

There is a financial imperative for the pundits to keep their core audience of investors coming back, . . .

I'm pretty sure that financial professionals, even the dumb ones, are just as annoyed by idiots like Cramer and Kudlow as you were. Saying that their main audience is investors (and I'm not talking about the general public investor who is at work and probably doesn't have time for their antics) is like saying that Rachel Ray's main audience is chefs at finer restaurants. These guys are like weather reporters on local news before they all went to college and got degrees in atmospheric science.

. . . left taxes were they were at the beginning at 2001.

"I voted for Obama. I'm a fan of Obama. But I think that his tax program has really affected the market, and so I'd like to see him back off from raising the capital gains tax to 20%, the dividend tax to 20% and send a different signal. Don't tax the real entrepreneurial, long-term investment part of the economy. The redistributionist part of his social agenda has bothered the market a lot, and so he ought to step back a little bit from that."

First of all, this guy can't even keep his terms straight. Taxing unearned income (capital gains) at a higher rate is not taxing "entrepreneurial, long-term investment." And if someone is able to live off investment income alone, he's not going to get nor does he deserve much sympathy from people who must work for a living. No one, big investors or small, is hurt financially if the tax rate on unearned income goes from 15% to 20%.

In 2006 51% ofLiberals in a Rasmussen poll wanted Bush to fail.

We didn't want Bush to fail. We didn't need to "wish" this because he was already failing spectacurly as he had been for the previous five years. By 2006 a lot of us wished he and Cheney would be impeached (unless a asteroid miraculously struck the White House killing them both and all their rotten henchmen/women).

Harry Reid said the war was lost before the surge. -- libertyaintfree

The war is lost. Iraq is still a clusterfuck with no positive future. Afghanistan, depending on how you view its history, may be worse.

Your point was?

There is no such thing as clean or even cleaner coal. The sooner people stop paying attention to this, the sooner we can get people to focus on truly clean and renewable energy sources - wind, solar, geothermal, even tidal power.