Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ and Historical Accuracy
by Humberto Fontova, BH:
Well, Soderbergh and Del Toro’s Che was just released on DVD-Blu-ray. As a bonus, the Criterion release contains a behind-the-scenes “Making Che” section, featuring interviews with Soderbergh, Del Toro, the screenwriters, along with audio narration by the film’s chief consultant (except Fidel Castro), author John Lee Anderson.
An obsession among all involved with this monstrosity (271 minutes), we learn, was “historical accuracy.” As a professional duty, last year I sat through this thing. For the sake of this review let’s forget the films’ “omissions,” namely the only success in Che’s life: the mass murder of defenseless men and boys. This being a shoot-em up war movie, we’ll instead focus on the battle scenes and the attendant dialogue.
[...]
The True Meaning Of Inflation
John Tamny, FORBES:
Getting back to inflation, rather than a measure of prices that change for various reasons that have nothing to do with currency policy, inflation is at its core the painful process by which capital flows to the hard assets of the earth and away from innovative, wage-creating industries. As individuals we don’t so much hate inflation for the rising prices as much as we balk at it because our chances to capture good jobs and good wages are compromised for capital essentially hiding.
As the rising price of gold has revealed throughout the decade we’ve been inflating, no matter what the more quiescent government measures of consumer prices have been telling us. A weak dollar explains our economic unhappiness because a weak dollar is what has made capital disappear.
At this point the only question is which political party will pick up on inflation’s true meaning. Money quantities, economic growth and consumer prices are decidedly poor measures of inflation, but the dollar’s price in terms of gold is. Right now inflation is delivering pain throughout the economy as it always has through reduced investment in our economic future.
[...]
Clamping down on Canadian Christians
Adrian MacNair, NP:
According to an article in Maclean’s Magazine’s “on campus” website, an organization called the Canadian Association of University Teachers [CAUT] is alleging that Trinity Western University, a Christian University, violated academic freedom. The reason? Because TWU describes itself as a “a faith-based institution, one inspired by Christ’s life and guided by his teachings.” More than that, it requires faculty to sign a “Statement of Faith” annually, in a document that outlines the “philosophical framework to which all faculty, staff and administration are committed without reservation.”
[...]
The Maclean’s article concludes that CAUT does seem to be targeting Christian schools. It’s just that TWU is the first. They are currently investigating whether other Christian Universities in Canada are “in violation” of academic freedom, including the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Crandall University in Moncton, and Redeemer University College in Ancaster. Religious persecution in the New World has arrived in the form of secularism seeking authority even in the halls of faith-based institutions.
The Intergovernmental Perjury over Climate Catastrophe (ctd)
Melanie Phillips:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is seeing its reputation disappear faster than a fish down a polar bear’s gullet.
Christopher Booker reports in the Sunday Telegraph that, following the IPCC’s grovelling admission that its 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis and that its inclusion in the report reflected a ‘poor application’ of IPCC procedures, more has come to light about the bogus ‘research’ on which the IPCC based this claim – which came from a report in New Scientist which was in turn merely drawn from a phone interview with a little-known Indian scientist, and that scientist’s links with the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri:
[...]
Launch of Explore Evolution “Further Debate” Website
ENV:
Since its publication in 2007, the innovative science textbook Explore Evolution: The Case For and Against Neo-Darwinism has helped trailblaze a new way of teaching about evolution, one based on Charles Darwin’s own acknowledgment that
“a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”
The original goal of Explore Evolution was to provoke discussion about Darwinian evolution, and provoke discussion it has!
[...]
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 1 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 2 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 3 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 4 of 7
Breaking the Obama astroturfing story
Phil Boehmke, AT:
Sabrina Eaton at The Cleveland Plain Dealer broke the Ellie Light story on Friday, revealing that more than a dozen different newspapers featured strikingly similar letters to the editor in support of President Obama.. Each of the pro-Obama letters was written by an area resident named Ellie Light. Having noticed this anomaly Ms. Eaton started digging and in the course of her investigation she tracked down the person known as Ellie Light. Ms… Eaton and Ellie exchanged a number of emails and eventually Ellie confessed.
So the reason why I expanded my submission was because I found that editors were eager to present a point of view on the topic that wasn’t so overheated and angry. Indeed, I think the viewpoint that my letter expressed was less important to the editors than the even and non-emotional tone.
No explanation was offered for the subterfuge in using multiple false addresses in shot-gunning her Obamaganda across the country.
In the days since the article first appeared, the news has spread at light speed across the Internet. Bloggers and tweeters have uncovered 64 letters to the editor (so far) from Ellie Light. From Philadelphia to San Francisco and all across the fruited plain Ellie’s letters have been uncovered.
[...]
None Dare Call it Genocide
By Cliff Kincaid:
Dennis Howard told EWTN television network on the day of the March for Life in Washington, D.C. that legalized abortion is the equivalent of 260 Haiti disasters on American soil. The death toll from abortion in the U.S. is over 52 million.
One of the differences is that Haiti is the result of a natural disaster. Abortion is man-made.
Another difference is that we search for the victims in Haiti and rush assistance to those injured from the earthquake. The victims of abortion are not worthy of sympathy or attention because they are the product of a “woman’s right to choose.”
This year’s March for Life featured a line of women carrying signs that said, “I regret my abortion.” They represented the “Silent No More” awareness campaign, where their testimonies about having abortions are available.
If you aren’t accustomed to hearing abortion described in the terms of genocide, then you have either (1) never been to a March for Life or (2) not bothered to visit the website of the abortion-related Genocide Awareness Project.
[...]
Public Media Bias and Climate Change
By Dr. Tim Ball:
Americans are lucky left wing radio station Air America crashed before Obama and founder now Senator Al Franken found a way to turn it into public radio.
Ironically, Saul Alinsky, father of US radical socialism wanted to break control of the media because it was used by power elites. Obama doesn’t need to break the control as the mainstream media act as a state media.
Bernie Goldberg wrote about this in his book “A Slobbering Love Affair.” Hypocrisy is the problem with mainstream media bias because they claim they’re unbiased. Public media practices similar hypocrisy. My worst experiences with bias and personal attacks in the media were with public media including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). They should be unbiased and apolitical but they are not. Funding by all taxpayers demands neutrality, but it doesn’t happen and it’s always left of centre.
[...]
United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror
by Jonathan Schanzer, FrontPage:
Dr. Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPageMag.com, exposes the hypocrisy of leftists and liberals who claim to champion the principles of freedom, democracy, liberalism, and feminism yet support both communist and Islamist dictatorships, which implement none of these principles.
David Horowitz, Glazov’s boss, also wrote a book in 2004, Unholy Alliance, on this subject, but Glazov digs deeper. The author, who fled the Soviet Union as a child and earned a PhD from York Univeristy in Toronto in Soviet studies, points in the first 100 pages of the book to a nucleus of American apologists in the 1930s who heaped praise on communist strongman Joseph Stalin, including Walter Duranty of The New York Times and author Upton Sinclair. In the generation that followed, intellectuals including novelist Normal Mailer and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir continued to apologize for communist regimes in Cuba, China, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.
With the decline of communism, the Left began to support Islamism. Whereas journalists, novelists and activists led the charge in the first wave, Glazov explains in the second half of the book, the most vociferous defenders of Islamism now come from the Ivory Tower.
[...]
Eyeless in Gaza
by Anav Silverman, FrontPage:
The past year brought a fresh wave of anti-Israel rhetoric and accusations, most of which cited Israel’s “siege” of Gaza during last winter’s Operation Cast Lead as evidence of Israel’s injustice toward the Palestinians. The international press frequently echoed calls by human rights groups and activists to “end Israel’s illegal blockade” and “liberate Gaza.” Such messages have been conceived to undermine Israel and present a very misleading picture of the actual Gaza conflict.
In a typical blockade, no supplies would be allowed to enter into enemy territory. Similarly, most English dictionaries define siege as an “act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies.” But in fact Israel has allowed substantial shipments of aid into Gaza. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website has reported that in 2009 alone, Israel allowed 703, 224 tons of humanitarian aid and 105,600,128 liters of fuel to be delivered into the Gaza Strip following Operation Cast Lead.
“The IDF invested major resources to enable the flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration, in November 2009. According to Levi, humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip increased by 900 percent compared to the previous year. Over 22, 893 humanitarian aid trucks entered into Gaza throughout 2009.
All of this has been pointedly ignored by Israel’s critics.
[...]
[Israeli] PM to world: Fight threats on Israel
THE JERUSALEM POST:
On the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu urged the international community to fight anti-Semitism by warning that those who hate Jews and want to destroy Israel will eventually move on to the rest of the world, too.
“There is an evil that can spread and threaten the security of Jews,” he said during a ceremony at Yad Vashem on Monday. “We know that this just begins with Jews, and then continues on to the rest of the world.”
[...]
Precisely correct.
Mort Zuckerman and the Obama Kool-Aid Drinkers: America’s Fourth Great Awakening
Posted by Frank Ross, BJ:
Some among the heaviest of Obama Kool-Aid drinkers are awakening to the performance gap between the campaign myth of Obama versus the reality of his inability to govern. America’s Fourth Great Awakening has begun.
Historians widely recognize three Great Awakenings. The First Great Awakening (1730’s-1740’s) spread across the United Kingdom and the Colonies with a religious fervor among what became the mainline Protestant denominations: Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc. The Second (1790-1840’s) witnessed Christian conversions, camp meetings, and evangelical excitement giving birth to the Holiness movement and, indirectly, the spread of a new sect – the Mormons. The Third (1840’s-1900’s), interrupted by the Civil War, was a period of religious enthusiasm that fostered social activism, as illustrated by the Social Gospel Movement.
Today, we’re entering the Fourth Great Awakening. It’s the revival of the Obama Kool-Aid drinkers from their stupor of infatuation with candidate Barack Obama. Mort Zuckerman is their new poster boy, and his newfound sobriety is clearly painful for him.
Zuckerman’s article entitled “The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama,” appearing on-line January 21, 2010 in his magazine U.S. News & World Report, is the confession of a reformed Obama Kool-Aid drinker. Mort knows what it’s like to be conned; he lost millions to Bernie Madoff. Now he’s appearing on news shows testifying to his awakening.
[...]
Obama spoils for a “fight” when self-reflection is in order
By JAMES TARANTO:
How did Barack Obama manage to kick off his presidency by making exactly the same disastrous mistake Bill Clinton made 16 years earlier? One answer is that Obama thought Clinton’s health-care errors were tactical rather than strategic, and that correcting these–by letting Congress write the bill, or by cutting deals with industry groups in exchange for their support–would be sufficient to ensure success.
But if Rep. Marion Berry is right, the answer may be as simple as sheer hubris. Berry, an Arkansas Democrat first elected in 1996, announced over the weekend that he won’t seek re-election. In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reprinted by Politico, Berry, who was an “aye” in the House’s 220-215 vote for ObamaCare Nov. 7, recounts his unsuccessful efforts to persuade the White House to pursue more moderate policies:
Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.
“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”
“You’ve got me.” In fairness, one can see why Obama might have been overly impressed with himself. Here’s a guy who became president of the United States just four years out of the Illinois Senate, and along the way developed a cultlike following. It sounds as though Obama became a follower as well as figurehead of his own cult of personality. He overestimated the degree to which he was special as opposed to lucky–a very human failing.
[...]
How Hugo Chavez’s revolution crumbled
By Jackson Diehl:
While the world has been preoccupied with the crisis in Haiti, Latin America has quietly passed through a tipping point in the ideological conflict that has polarized the region — and paralyzed U.S. diplomacy — for most of the past decade.
The result boils down to this: Hugo Chávez’s “socialism for the 21st century” has been defeated and is on its way to collapse.
[...]
Five Easy Questions for Obama
By Randall Hoven, AT:
President Obama, I know you’ve given lots of speeches, briefings, and statements. And you’ve schooled us well on subjects ranging from how to create or save jobs to how to change climate and achieve world peace. But there are just a few things I’m still fuzzy on, and no one else seems to be asking you about them.
So if you please, could you answer just a few simple and straightforward questions? I promise that there are no tricks. Here are five questions, four short-answer and one essay.
[...]
Call For An Audit of Obama’s Campaign Finances
by Pamela Geller
In light of the long-overdue ruling by the Supreme Court to throw out the free-speech-killing and unconstitutional McCain-Feingold finance law (was there ever a more destructive, corrupting influence on elections ever?), it is a good time to revisit the active complaint to the Federal Elections Commission over Barack Obama’s campaign finances.
[...]
Compare and contrast; Israel response to Haiti earthquake and the terrorists
Joseph Finlay, AT:
While the world – led by the United States and Israel – rushes to the aid of the devastated nation of Haiti, Osama Bin Laden has chosen to take credit for the failed Christmas Day attack in the US and has vowed future attacks on the US and Israel:
[...]
How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
Roger Kimball:
Just how stupid do Obama and his top advisors think we are? By “we” I mean not only the American people at large but also Obama’s colleagues in the House and Senate, the folks who at the end of the day will determine exactly how much of the administration’s campaign of “shock-and-awe statism” will pass into law.
The phrase “shock-and-awe statism,” by the way, comes to us courtesy of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. He coined it early on in the reign of Obama to describe the blitzkrieg-like way the administration was pushing its socialist agenda in that dim distant past, i.e., last year.
How breathtaking it seemed! The paint was hardly dry on the Obama romper room at the White House when the president unveiled his nearly $800 billion non-stimulating “stimulus bill” that assured the United States would be entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the most profligate nation in history. Then there was the “cash for dunderheads” program that was such a gift to foreign car makers and such a boondoggle for American ones. What about the cap-’n-tax fantasy that would finally have driven the nail in the coffin of American industry if only the business community had shared the administration’s taste for economic suicide? Or just last month the fiasco of Copenhagen and the bitter chilliness that is “global warming”? And of course “health care reform”: always and everywhere health care “reform” — a stupefyingly expensive mechanism for assuring that the federal government would expropriate a sixth of the U.S. economy while eviscerating the medical profession and sharply degrading the quality and timeliness of health care in this country. What bliss it was to be alive, and to be Left was very heaven!
[...]
Rethinking Social Justice
Posted by John Couretas, Power Blog:
Some years ago, I was engaged in a conversation at a religious communicators convention with a liberal/progressive activist who was having trouble understanding how the market could actually be a force for good. Finally, he defaulted to the question that — to him at least — would settle the matter. “So,” he asked, “does the Acton Institute work for social justice?” My response, of course, was, “You bet we do.”
The problem with this brief exchange was that we obviously didn’t understand social justice in the same terms. It was a failure to communicate at the communicators convention. And truth be told, there are probably fewer phrases that are thrown around so loosely, that are so heavily freighted with ideological baggage. Liberal/progressives use social justice as a shibboleth that offers affiliation with the tribe of those who advocate statist solutions, whatever else it might mean to them. Conservatives tend merely to shun its use.
A lot of that confusion promises to be cleared up with the release of an outstanding new resource called Seek Social Justice: Transforming Lives In Need from the Heritage Foundation. This resource includes a DVD and companion study guide (available free of charge) and can also be viewed on the Web site. You’ll recognize a lot of the names in this series from their association with Acton over the years as staff members, scholars, speakers at conferences, and policy experts. People like Anthony Bradley, an Acton Research Fellow, Marvin Olasky, Rudy Carrasco, Chuck Colson, Jay Richards, and Robert L. Woodson Jr.
The video for the first chapter — Rethinking Social Justice: Getting to the Root of the Problem — sets the framework for the entire series of lessons. The question: What are the “real roots of poverty and social breakdown.”
[...]
h/t: Linda at The Great Pumpkin
Turning Israel, Diaspora Jewry into a punching bag
BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, Jerusalem Post:
The result of the Jewish Agency’s report released on Sunday showing global anti-Semitism spiraling out of control recalls the memorable line in the film Casablanca, in which police Captain Renault announces that Rick’s Cafe must be closed because of illegal activity. “I’m shocked, shocked to discover that gambling is going on here!” says Renault while being handed the proceeds of his gambling wins.
While some observers of Jew-hatred in Western Europe are not shocked by the largest wave of anti-Semitism since the Hitler movement, many European governments, policy makers, and academics, however, tend to feign shock like Renault or simply cannot fathom that hatred of Israel is the most ubiquitous form of contemporary anti-Semitism.
As documented by the Jewish Agency report and the 2009 German University Bielefeld study, there is no shortage of hostile anti-Israeli acts and attitudes within such European countries as Sweden, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and Greece. The intense alliance between Hugo Chavez’s populist leftist Venezuelan government and the Islamic Republic of Iran has opened the flood gates of anti-Semitism in Latin America.
[...]
Obama plotting a domestic counterinsurgency strategy?
William R. Hawkins, AT:
In The New York Times Saturday, Jeff Zeleny and Peter Baker reported on how President Barack Obama is moving to centralize control over Democratic party strategy in the wake of Senator-elect Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. What was striking was the terminology coming from the White House. According to Zeleny and Baker, Obama will launch his new campaign in The State of the Union address where,
He will focus on how his ideas for health care, energy and financial regulation fit into the broader economic mission of creating what he calls a “new foundation” for the country, the key words being “rescue, restore and rebuild.”
The key words sound similar to the “clear, hold, build” formula for counterinsurgency operations and nation-building in Afghanistan. Is the Obama administration going on a war footing? Will it adopt the extreme view of partisan politics advocated by the far left which sees the populist Tea Party movement as akin to a domestic Taliban?
Such an approach will likely further discredit the Democrats while poisoning the political atmosphere at a time when the country is facing real problems that need common sense reforms rather than ideological offensives.
[...]
Pelosi and Reid Plot Secret Plan for Obamacare
By: Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, NEWSMAX:
Highly informed sources on Capitol Hill have revealed to me details of the Democratic plan to sneak through Congress Obamacare, despite collapsing public approval for healthcare “reform” and disintegrating Congressional support in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate leader Harry Reid have all agreed to the basic framework of the plan.
Their plan is clever but can be stopped if opponents of radical healthcare reform act quickly and focus on a core group of 23 Democratic Congressman. If just a few of these 23 Democrats are “flipped” and decide to oppose the bill, the whole Obama-Pelosi-Reid stratagem falls apart.
Here’s what I learned top Democrats are planning to implement.
[...]
Step Aside, Mr. Foxman: Your Remarks About Rush Are Out of Bounds
Posted by Pamela Geller, Big Journalism:
Abe Foxman has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh. That is bad enough, but it is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul. The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma.
One of the most odious of the bunch, Abe Foxman, uses the might and the soapbox of the Anti-Defamation League in an attempt to destroy friends and supporters of the Jewish people, in order to garner favor with our enemies.
[...]
RELATED:
Media Matters Attacks Beck – Ignores Progressive Roots Of The Klan And Holocaust
by Andrew Marcus, Big Government:
Media Matters is attempting to attack Glenn Beck over his exposé of Progressive violence and crimes against humanity in the previous century.
Media Matters can spend all year trying to deny the blood soaked roots of the progressive movement, but that’s a little like Democrat Robert Byrd arguing that there was no such thing as slavery, let alone the KKK.
[...]
‘Anti-Semitism highest since WWII’
THE JERUSALEM POST:
Anti-Semitism has reached a global peak since the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last winter, and levels of Jew-hatred have not been so high since the Second World War, according to the Jewish Agency’s annual report on anti-Semitism issued on Sunday.
The report was presented by Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein and Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky.
The tightening ties between extreme left-wing activists and Islamists were noted in the report, as well as more tolerance shown to Muslim acts of hate against Jews.
Iran and Venezuela stand at the top of the list as the world’s most anti-Semitic countries.
The list also includes countries which are not actively anti-Semitic but are indifferent to anti-Semitic incidents.
[...]
God and the Godless
by Terry Scambray, New Oxford Review:
Review of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski (Crown Forum, 2008. 225 pp).David Berlinski is a skeptical man. He doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution as well as certain other dogmas of so-called science. Equally skeptical of religion, he writes, “I am a secular Jew. My religious education did not take.” Even his spare, unadorned style reflects his reluctance to use his penetrating wit and his assorted literary gifts to go beyond the plain and the provable.
Yet Berlinski also realizes that skepticism is selective: deep down everyone is soft on something. Or as he puts it: “What a man rejects as distasteful must always be measured against what he is prepared eagerly to swallow.”
And “the new atheists,” his targets in this book, do swallow a lot of strange, “scientific” concoctions, in order to eliminate God.
[...]
Mom appeals to government: Don’t pull plug on my baby
WorldNetDaily:
Isaiah James May was born a little after 5 p.m. on Oct. 24, 2009, and was scheduled to die this past week – on Wednesday, Jan. 20 – just short of his three-month birthday.
That was the day chosen by Canada’s publicly funded, government health service as the deadline for Isaiah to recover from his traumatic birth or be taken off life-support.
[...]
Syria and Egypt – more dangerous for Israel than Iran?
By Jan Willem van der Hoeven:
Peace, real peace comes through victory, not through endless negotiations.
Had England or the Allied Forces taken seriously Adolf Hitler’s peace initiative when he sent his deputy, Rudolf Hess to Britain – no peace would have come to the European continent. To attain a true peace you have to win a war.
Britain, thank God, understood what few in today’s Israel understand.
This is the theme that which is repeated over and over again in the very Book the Jewish people were a channel for giving to the world; yet they themselves are so woefully ignorant of this lesson.
Here is one such passage:
[...]
United Church moderator’s comedy act rivals Little Mosque
Michael Coren:
I have to confess that I owe Mardi Tindal an apology. Who, you ask, is Mardi Tindal? The moderator of the United Church of Canada and a legend in her own lunchtime.
I had thought that she was a walking cliche and a fitting leader of a deeply silly organization. But no. I now realize that our Mardi is in fact the most gifted and original comic performer in the country. Last Sunday, her bitingly satirical views were read out in a couple of hundred United churches and this was Jonathan Swift in a suburb.
In a long piece describing her experience at the recent Copenhagen climate change conference, she wrote of her pain and anguish and how she now identified with Martin Luther King’s fight against racial hatred and William Wilberforce’s struggle against slavery. Both men risked death of course, but Mardi risks far more — feeling slightly sad next time she goes shopping.
[...]
The Federal Reserve Is Inflating Another Bubble
The View From 1776:
Stock market exuberance is symptomatic of a rapidly expanding money supply’s corrosive effect.
In the last two trading days of the week ending January 23rd, the Dow Industrial Index plummeted 430.170 points, the worst decline in a year. Major factors, according to Street gossip, were continuing weakness in corporate sales and growing fears that Helicopter Ben Bernanke might not be re-appointed Fed chairman.
As the Wall Street Journal reported:
Much of the selling Friday, which took the Dow down 2.1% to 10172.98, was pinned on news out of Washington, where more Democratic senators came out against the nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as Federal Reserve chairman.
“It felt as though every time a senator came out expressing doubt or uncertainty about their willingness to vote in favor of Bernanke, it took us down another five points,” said Craig Peckham, equity trading strategist at Jefferies & Co.
Why would the possible loss of Mr. Bernanke at the Fed cause a stock market panic?
The answer is that money managers and individual investors have come to rely upon the Fed’s readiness to pump up the stock market with increases in the money supply that lower interest rates.
[...]
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