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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73566)	11/20/2006 3:35:29 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Suddenly, Technology Stocks Look Good Again _____________________________________________________________ By Chet Currier Bloomberg News Sunday, November 19, 2006 Computer, Internet and telecommunications stocks are suddenly enjoying a resurgence, and some of the biggest beneficiaries of the rally have been value-oriented mutual funds, which until very recently would never have gone near a technology stock. As the U.S. stock market has embarked on a strong advance since mid-year, the long-depressed Nasdaq Composite Index has played a starring role. The index, 11 of whose 12 largest components are tech stocks such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and Dell Inc., climbed 21 percent from July 21 through the middle of last week, including dividends. That eclipsed a 13 percent total return for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and a 14 percent gain for the Dow Jones industrial average. Talk about a role reversal. While the Dow has been hitting record highs and the S&P 500 has climbed to a six-year peak this week, the Nasdaq index remains more than 50 percent below the lofty heights it reached in 2000. But if a particular group of stocks is down, that doesn't mean it's out. In keeping with their long tradition of bargain-hunting among neglected sectors of the market, several prominent managers of value funds began buying tech stocks a year or two ago. That put them in good position to reap the rewards of the Nasdaq revival. Growth-minded funds such as the Pin Oak Aggressive Stock Fund (largest holding: Cisco Systems Inc.) and the Fidelity OTC Portfolio (largest holding: Google Inc.) were near the head of the pack, with gains of 28 percent and 25 percent, respectively, since July 21. But look at some of the others keeping them company: the Longleaf Partners Fund, up 19 percent; the Oakmark Select Fund, up 16 percent; and the Legg Mason Value Trust, up 15 percent since July 21. Longleaf Partners' largest holding, at last report, was Dell, the personal-computer maker. Oakmark Select had good-sized stakes in both Dell and Intel. Legg Mason Value Trust, under manager Bill Miller, has long been an object of controversy among value purists with its taste for the likes of Google and Amazon.com Inc. Miller is also famous for "the streak" -- an unrivaled run of 15 consecutive years in which his fund has beaten the S&P 500. The streak is in great jeopardy in 2006, with the fund's year-to-date gain through Wednesday of 4.5 percent still trailing the index by more than 9 percentage points. Even so, as a holder of Value Trust shares in a retirement account, I'm glad I didn't jump out a few months ago just because Miller looked to be having a sub-par year. One obvious message is that experienced value investors aren't doctrinaire, insisting on sticking to old-line industries such as utilities or steel. If the numbers are right, they are ready to warm up to whatever is getting the cold shoulder. Beyond that, the tech rally raises all sorts of interesting questions. Is this darling group of the 1990s ready for some sort of extended run? If so, does the global economy as a whole stand to benefit? Richard Parower, manager of the Seligman Global Technology Fund, envisions a new cycle of business investment in high-tech equipment. "These cycles typically come around every seven or eight years," Parower said in an e-mail note last week. "Current systems have been fully depreciated and U.S. companies are eager to start taking advantage of productivity gains from new software and services." His specialized fund sports a 23 percent gain since July 21. Back in the late 1990s, a runaway rise in tech stocks got out of hand. It set the market up for a painful letdown when many of the wildest hopes for the so-called New Economy proved impossible to fulfill. But there was always a solid core of real economic value there, created by the Internet and other innovations. Tech stocks made trouble the last time they got hot. This time, maybe not.

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73566)	12/4/2006 3:46:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Pincus Tweaks 'Post' on War Resolution -- How Did Others Respond? ___________________________________________________________ By Greg Mitchell Published: December 04, 2006 NEW YORK - In the Washington Post today, longtime national security reporter Walter Pincus observes that several Democrats who voted in 2002 against giving President Bush authority to attack Iraq are now about to play key roles in the upcoming Congress. He pointedly observes that they were "given little public credit at the time, or since," even though they have "turned out to be correct in their warnings about the problems a war would create." Pincus was one of the few top people at the paper to push for more skeptical coverage of the run up to the war. Now he points out, "The day after the House vote, The Washington Post recorded that 126 House Democrats voted against the final resolution. None was quoted giving a reason for his or her vote except for Rep. Joe Baca (Calif.), who said a military briefing had disclosed that U.S. soldiers did not have adequate protection against biological weapons." Pincus noted that no other reason given to oppose the resolution by others "was reported in the two Post stories about passage of the resolution that day." A search of the Washington Post archives finds that the main story was co-authored by Jim VanDeHei, who is now leaving the paper. But how did the Post, and other papers, cover the critical resolution on their editorial pages? When Congress in October 2002 voted to give President Bush a free hand to wage war against Iraq, not many in the press saw it as a landmark, perhaps even a turning point, in U.S. history. But ever since the war went bad — more than three years ago now — the vote has gained increased significance, something to hail or lament (as a modern Gulf of Tonkin resolution) or an albatross to hang around a political candidate's neck. John Kerry never could explain his vote in favor of the resolution during the 2004 presidential race. Now he says he regrets his vote, but Hillary Clinton, who is in the same bind, refuses to renounce it. Those who favor the war, from President Bush on down, frequently invoke the bipartisan vote in both the House and Senate as proof that Democrats, too, believed that Saddam had WMDs and felt he should be removed from power. But how did newspapers, on their editorial pages, feel about the vote then? An E&P survey of editorials in more than a dozen major papers around that October 2002 vote finds that few sounded any alarms. The Washington Post was typical in backing Congress' decision to give Bush "broad authority ... to move against Iraq." The editorial suggested that it was not a "declaration of war" and "the course of U.S. policy is not yet set." Of course, Bush would later act as if it were equivalent to a declaration of war, and there is much evidence that U.S. plans for an invasion were indeed pretty well "set" at that time. The Post, like most others, reasoned that passing this measure would give the White House a diplomatic club to use against Saddam — and the United Nations — to possibly prevent a war. In the end, it paved the way for using far more lethal "clubs." At the other end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles Times forthrightly declared that the resolution "gives too much power to this and, potentially, future presidents to attack nations unilaterally based on mere suspicions. This could fundamentally change the nation's approach to foreign policy. ... Now that the resolution has passed, Congress and the American people should urge the president to interpret his mandate narrowly." The editorial even invoked the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, in which legislators, it recalled, were "misled" into giving President Lyndon Johnson powers in August 1964 to send many more troops to Vietnam. We all know how that turned out. But the great majority of papers skewed much closer to the hawkish Washington Post line. The Chicago Tribune went so far as to praise "the willingness of Congress to place its faith in Bush." It also approvingly quoted Sen. John Warner advising that a war resolution "is not an act of war. It is an act to deter war." The Wall Street Journal praised Senate Democrats for backing the measure "at crunch time." Denver's Rocky Mountain News found the administration's case "certainly persuasive." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette expressed approval but warned that Bush "must not imagine that the Iraq resolution can be used" like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution "to proceed to full-scale war." A New York Times editorial on Oct. 11, 2002, offered no judgment on the resolution, but, accepting the WMD reports by its reporter Judith Miller, among others, noted that for the time being "Saddam Hussein seems unlikely to strike out wildly with his chemical and biological weapons." But some papers did raise serious concerns about the resolution. The Boston Globe said, "The text is not as restrictive as it should have been," adding that it should have forced the president to come back to Congress and ask for explicit permission to go to war if Saddam ever opened his country to U.N. inspectors (which he did) or if the Security Council refused to back an invasion (it did refuse). The San Francisco Chronicle saluted those in Congress who "raised the right questions about the propriety of sanctioning a war before all diplomatic options were exhausted." The Chronicle warned that the resolution "emboldens the hawkish factions within the Bush administration who have been agitating for a military confrontation with Iraq since the day of our 43rd president's inauguration." That editorial closed with a sad reflection: "There were simply too few voices of reason and restraint on Capitol Hill this week." And on the editorial pages of the nation's newspapers. What will they do next time? ______________________________________ Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P. editorandpublisher.com

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73566)	12/5/2006 2:20:59 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Two More Years... ______________________________________________________________ By Paul Krugman Columnist The New York Times 04 December 2006 At a reception following the midterm election, President Bush approached Senator-elect James Webb. "How's your boy?" asked Mr. Bush. "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," replied Mr. Webb, whose son, a Marine lance corporal, is risking his life in Mr. Bush's war of choice. "That's not what I asked you," the president snapped. "How's your boy?" "That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," said Mr. Webb. Good for him. We need people in Washington who are willing to stand up to the bully in chief. Unfortunately, and somewhat mysteriously, they're still in short supply. You can understand, if not condone, the way the political and media establishment let itself be browbeaten by Mr. Bush in his post-9/11 political prime. What's amazing is the extent to which insiders still cringe before a lame duck with a 60 percent disapproval rating. Look at what seems to have happened to the Iraq Study Group, whose mission statement says that it would provide an "independent assessment." If press reports are correct, the group did nothing of the sort. Instead, it watered down its conclusions and recommendations, trying to come up with something Mr. Bush wouldn't reject out of hand. In particular, says Newsweek, the report "will set no timetables or call for any troop reductions." All it will do is "suggest that the president could, not should, begin to withdraw forces in the vaguely defined future." And all this self-abasement is for naught. Senior Bush aides, Newsweek tells us, are "dismissive, even condescending" toward James Baker, the Bush family consigliere who is the dominant force in the study group, and the report. Of course they are. That's how bullies always treat their hangers-on. Even now, it seems, the wise men of Washington can't bring themselves to face up to two glaringly obvious truths. The first is that Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq for no reason. It's true that terrible things will happen when U.S. forces withdraw. Mr. Bush was attacking a straw man when he mocked those who think we can make a "graceful exit" from Iraq. Everyone I know realizes that the civil war will get even worse after we're gone, and that there will probably be a bloody bout of ethnic cleansing that effectively partitions the country into hostile segments. But nobody - not even Donald Rumsfeld, it turns out - thinks we're making progress in Iraq. So the same terrible things that would happen if we withdrew soon will still happen if we delay that withdrawal for two, three or more years. The only difference is that we'll sacrifice many more American lives along the way. The second truth is that the war will go on all the same, unless something or someone forces Mr. Bush to change course. During his recent trip to Vietnam, Mr. Bush was asked whether there were any lessons from that conflict for Iraq. His response: "We'll succeed unless we quit." It was a bizarre answer given both the history of the Vietnam War and the facts on the ground in Iraq, but it makes perfect sense given what we know about Mr. Bush's character. He has never been willing to own up to mistakes, however trivial. If he were to accept the failure of his adventure in Iraq, he would be admitting, at least implicitly, to having made the mother of all mistakes. So Mr. Bush will keep sending other men's children off to fight his war. And he'll always insist that Iraq would have been a great victory if only his successors had shared his steely determination. Does this mean that we're doomed to at least two more years of bloody futility? Not necessarily. Last month the public delivered a huge vote of no confidence in Mr. Bush and his war. He's still the commander in chief, but the new majority in Congress can put a lot of pressure on him to at least begin a withdrawal. I'm worried, however, that Democrats may have counted on the Iraq Study Group to provide them with political cover. Now that the study group has apparently wimped out, will the Democrats do the same? Well, here's a question for those who might be tempted, yet again, to shy away from a confrontation with Mr. Bush over Iraq: How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully's ego? truthout.org

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73566)	12/9/2006 2:09:58 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

The Oval Intervention _______________________________________________________________ By MAUREEN DOWD Columnist The New York Times December 9, 2006 It is not a happy mood in the Oval Office. Poppy is sobbing, his face in his hands, slumped in one of the yellow-and-blue striped chairs. Laura is screaming the words “Oscar de la Renta” and “rendition” into her cellphone, still seeing red after showing up at a White House gala in the same $8,400 red gown as three other women who did not happen to be first lady. Bob Gates is grim-faced, but not as grim-faced as Barbara, whose look could freeze not only the Potomac but the Tigris and the Euphrates. Scowcroft is over on the couch, trying to nap while Kissinger drones softly in his ear. And, of course, there is the Deprogrammer for the Decider, James Baker, perfectly suited in bright green tie and suited perfectly for his spot behind the president’s desk. The Council of Elders had hoped this Apocalypto moment wouldn’t be necessary. They had assumed that the scorching Iraq Study Group report would have the same effect on Junior as the bucket of cold water that Mr. Baker’s strict father, a lawyer known as “the Warden,” used to throw on his face to wake him up as a boy. But Junior is trying to wriggle away completely, offering a decidedly cool response to the attempt to yank him into the reality-based community. He rallied his last two allies — his English poodle and his Scottish terrier, Blair and Barney. He is loath to give up his gunslinger pose to go all diplo. He cleaves to the neocon complaint that it is the realists who are now being unrealistic, thinking the administration can bargain with Syria and Iran, or that the Army can train Iraqi security forces (or, as they are known there, death squads) in a matter of months when they haven’t been able to do it in years. The Velvet Hammer is undeterred. He’s doing an all-out intervention, locking Junior and Barney in the little study next to the Oval. To stress the seriousness of the situation, they don’t give the president his feather pillow. The group gathers at the door of the study. “My boy,” his dad tells him between sobs. “We love you. We’re here for you. We’re worried about you. You’re not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting others. This is a safe place. No one’s judging you ...” “What are you talking about, Dad?” Junior snaps. “I just actually read 96 pages of your friends’ judging me in that cowpie report.” Barney woofs in support. Barbara can be heard muttering from across the room. “We were right about Jebbie.” Henry the K lumbers up to the door and in a low Teutonic rumble says: “It’s time we stopped taking care of you and started caring about you. Would you like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” Junior is getting even more furious. “You all think you’re so realist. But you’re unrealist. I’m realist. Are you sitting at my desk, Baker? Get out of there! Everyone says you’re so Mr. Ride to the Rescue, but none of your surrender monkey ideas would work. Talk about Pretend Land — Israel giving up the Golan Heights? Yeah, right. And they call me delusional.” Baker glides up to the door and says, in his most satiny drawl, “Son, I just threw a few D.O.A. ones in there for you to reject so you could preserve your manhood.” There are sounds of feet stomping. “You say I can’t stay the course but I can too stay the course!” Junior yells. “I can! I can! You say I have to put the two trillion dollar war cost in the budget, but I don’t! You say we have to cuddle up to evildoers in Iran and Syria. Why do you hate the troops? Where’s Condi? I want my Condi!” Realizing the president is getting hysterical, the group looks at Laura, hoping she can calm him down. She approaches the door and coos in a soft voice: “Bushie? Listen, now, this is important. How do you get someone audited? Can’t we send Oscar de la Loser to Gitmo?” Baker gently nudges Laura aside. “Now son, hear me out. We’ve disabled your enablers. Rummy has written his last self-serving memo. Dick’s got his hands full explaining his darlin’ new grandchild’s Two Mommies. Don’t bother calling for Condi. She’s at the bottom of Foggy Bottom. You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” It’s not sinking in. “We must achieve our objective,” Junior sputters. “Our objective is success. To succeed we must have success. If we don’t win, we lose. We are the winners. We can’t let the ... we’re in an ideological struggle and that’s why we have a strategy ... AL QAEDA! We must help democracy in Iraq succeed because ... ISLAMOFASCISTS! ... that is the objective of a successful ...” Barney scratches at the door, trying to cut and run.