When Politics Contaminates Everything
“Romney and Obama are both extraordinarily talented and smart,” writes Jeffrey Tucker, reacting to two Harvard Law grads “debating” this week. “That’s what it takes to pull off the world’s biggest hoax.
“They must shamelessly play along with the expectation that they are masterminds of history’s largest and most expansive government with thousands of departments, millions and millions of regulations, astonishingly complex networks of graft and corruption and legacy content dating back more than a century, and, further, claim — with a straight face — that their personal ‘vision’ can encompass and control the whole apparatus, and, by extension, the nation and the world.
“Anyone who can do this has to be pathological, if he believes what he is saying, or duplicitous to an extent that vastly exceeds the human norm.”
Meanwhile, for those Americans who threaten to leave the country if their guy loses, JetBlue Airways is accommodating.
The carrier’s “Election Protection” campaign is giving away seats on 2,012 flights to customers who go to its website, choose their candidate and sign in through Facebook. Those who choose the loser on Nov. 6 become eligible to win a flight to one of JetBlue’s 21 international destinations.
We object: The campaign blatantly discriminates against third-party and write-in voters, to say nothing of nonvoters. Maybe we’ll sue.
Nor does the campaign give contest winners the chance to live up to their word and follow through on their threat: The airline is giving away only 1,006 flights, round-trip. Wusses…
God help us, even beer is getting politicized these days.
Scarborough Research recently interviewed 200,000 beer-drinking Americans about not only their political leanings, but how motivated they usually are to vote. National Journal then crunched the data to create this headache-inducing scatterplot chart.
[Click image to enlarge]
Thus Heineken appears to be “the most Democratic beer of all,” says the political rag. “On the other hand, Republicans love their Coors Light and favor Sam Adams, which is brewed just a few miles away from Romney campaign headquarters and whose namesake was an original tea partier.”
Unlike JetBlue, at least this survey appears to accommodate folks who don’t fit neatly into a left-right spectrum, and folks who vote seldom or not at all.
Not that we’ve ever touched a can of Natural Light. Well, not that we’d ever want to remember…
“Don’t waste your time with mindless election coverage and how it could sway stocks,” advises Jonas Elmerraji, mercifully bringing our Friday musings around to something actionable.
Obviously, this guidance applies if you’re a buy-and-hold investor… but Jonas is a trader and a technician. “As traders, price is our most important indicator,” he says. “It tells us when to buy and sell — and it points toward important inflection points within the markets.”
The story it’s telling now is the same one Jonas has passed along to us the last four months…
Pullbacks? No worries for now, Jonas says, invoking a “pressure valve” analogy: “The market needs time to correct following its strong moves higher. It has to blow off steam through either sideways or downward movement. Since the June bottom, the market has moved higher and corrected in a very orderly fashion.”
Cheers,
Addison Wiggin
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