The Trading Digest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/iraq.afghanistan

Read it when you have some time.

Have a Great Night!

Dave Johnson

It was Joseph Pulitzer who once said

“Newspapers should have no friends”

In reading my Investors Business Daily this morning I happened to catch the photo on the front page showing the Republican hopefuls before the Iowa debate Wednesday night. Then on page 13 they ran a IBD/TIPP poll showing the appeal/unappealing rating of the various presidential hopefuls. Pretty neat stuff. Only thing is Ron Paul the guy on their front page is not even in the poll. Neither is Duncan Hunter who is also in the picture. Does IBD have friends?

(Click Photo for Full size)

Now the obvious response to this is the line has to be drawn somewhere. Good point. Yet how is Mike Bloomberg in the poll? Mike Bloomberg?!? Below are snapshots from presidentspolls2008.com showing the most recent ABC News national poll and the CNN New Hampshire Polls.

Do you see Mike Bloomberg anywhere? I mean Paul is even leading Fred Thompson in New Hampshire. Yet he is not in the poll.

Investors Business Daily has never hidden their strong Republican bias in their editorials or stories. Which is perfectly fine because it plays into their support of smaller government, lower taxes, pro business. But now they seem to want to guide their readers away from Republican candidates that would not meet their presidential qualities. Which is fine. As long as they are recognized for that bias.

As Ben Hecht once said:

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock”

Have a Great Day!

Dave Johnson

What would our founding fathers think of this?

While they’re at it, can they go ahead and reset the prices of some of the stocks I’ve bought in the past year?

- John

Jon Stewart: Many people are free-market capitalists, and they always talk about free-market capitalism, and that is our economic theory. So why do we have a Fed? Is the free market – wouldn’t the market take care of interest rates and all that? Why do we have someone adjusting the rates if we are a free-market society?

Alan Greenspan: You’re raising a very fundamental question. … You didn’t need central bank when we were on the gold standard, which was back in the nineteenth century. And all of the automatic things occurred because people would buy and sell gold, and the market would do what the Fed does now. But: most everybody in the world by the 1930s decided that the gold standard was strangling the economy. And universally this gold standard was abandoned. But: you need somebody to determine –or some mechanism – how much money is out there, because remember, the amount of money relates to the amount of inflation in the economy. … In any event the more money you have, relative to the amount of goods, the more inflation you have, and that’s not good. So:

Stewart: So we’re not a free market then.

Greenspan: No. No.

Stewart: There’s a visible – there’s a benevolent hand that touches us.

Greenspan: Absolutely. You’re quite correct. To the extent that there is a central bank governing the amount of money in the system, that is not a free market. Most people call it regulation.

Source: http://divisionoflabour.com/archives/004047.php

Have a Great Day!

Dave Johnson

In my post last week about the Hillary/1984 ad, I mentioned that the creator of the ad was unknown. Today it was revealed that the creator was actually an employee of a technology company to provide technology services for the Obama campaign. However, he still maintains that neither campaign knew that he was making the ad and that it took him all of a “Sunday afternoon on his Mac”. Here’s his actual post describing it. The whole situation is still amazing to me. One guy at home with a Mac and some software makes a political ad that has already been seen by over 1.5 Million people on Youtube and many more when it was picked up by the cable news stations. How much would it cost a campaign to run ads to get that type of exposure?

- John

And it wasn’t even created by a campaign? I just stumbled across this 1984 spinoff created as a Hillary Clinton attack ad from a Barack Obama supporter. The article from the SFGate says that the Obama campaign did not create the ad and has no idea who did. If we’re already seeing this type of youtube ad 9 months from the primary, I can’t imagine what we’ll be seeing leading up the final election. Who’d have ever thought that a site that got it’s start with short videos of teenagers doing stupid things might have such a large influence on the presidential election.

- John