So oil goes up today…..

It is nice to think it is always darkest before the dawn, but in the case of Europe it may be dusk going to black night.

By Stephen Dinan

Arizona’s state legislature will open its own investigation into the Obama administration’s disgraced gun-running program, known as “Fast and Furious,” the speaker of the state House said Friday.

Speaker Andy Tobin created the committee, and charged it with looking at whether the program broke any state laws — raising the possibility of state penalties against those responsible for the operation.

Read the rest here.

South Carolina Exit Polls: How Different Groups Voted

What do the markets have to do with the election? Not much.
Barry Ritholtz
Washington Post, January 15 2012

~~~

Just about this time every campaign cycle, the pundits get all excited about what Mr. Market is saying about the election: What does this candidate or that mean for the stock market returns? Will an incumbent victory bode well or poorly? Are stock prices telling voters which candidate will be friendlier to future market returns?

Read the rest over at Ritholtz’s Blog.

“This film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the graveyard of social movements, the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the continuity and escalation of neocon policies under Obama, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself.

Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet.

Noble is brilliantly pioneering the new film-making – incisive analysis, compelling sound and footage, fearless and independent reporting, and the aggregation of the best information out there into powerful, educational and free online feature films – all on a shoestring budget.”

Enjoy your weekend

Seems that way since bankers were in the know. Why then have they not been prosecuted ?

“Most everyone agrees the global capitalist system has failed on two main counts–growth and fairness, writes PIMCO CEO Mohammad El-Erian in a column published today in the Financial Times.

He argues that continuing failure to address both (not just one) of these problems not only constitutes a “crisis,” but “raises legitimate questions about the model itself.”

If the system is going to continue, three things have to happen:

• Capitalism is prone to occasional market failures, and the world has to accept this.
• Global imbalances, created by the rise of countries like China, have become unsustainable and must be addressed.
• Global institutions must transform to fairly represent the global population in order to adequately recognize and deal with problems.

He concludes:

Each of these areas can be corrected. Theoretically at least, what has occurred is less a calamity of the system as a whole, and more an issue of how it was run. Yet, four years into the crisis, little has been done to repair the damage coherently and comprehensively and to safeguard the real victims, let alone counter the risk of further costly dislocations. Until this is done, it will be difficult to convince the world that capitalism itself is not the problem.

Read El-Erian’s full editorial here >“

What a convoluted pretzel of politics and people….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc4lnlDVW3o&feature=player_embedded

Read here:

Yesterday on Breakout we featured Yossi Beinart, the CEO of a company trying to get CFTC clearance to legalize the trading of futures contracts on the outcome of the 2012 elections. Beinart’s firm would allow traders to, in effect, wager on the winner of the Presidency as well as control of the House and Senate.

Suffice it to say Beinart’s is a controversial idea.

I sat down with my co-host, Matt Nesto to debate the merits of “wagering” on political events in general.

Taking the con side of the debate, Nesto’s arguments are as follows:

*The CFTC has a spotty, at best, record of regulating the markets that exist today. They have enough to do without adding a gimmick like election futures.

*Capping the nominal value of contracts purchased at $250,000 in itself invalidates the argument of the trading activity adding any economic value. Firms looking to “hedge” various outcomes need a much higher limit to impact their economic fate. Individuals have no way to justify bets of a quarter of a million on election results.

*There’s no economic need being met here; it’s simply wagering.

 An earlier Biden gaffe, asking a man in a wheelchair to stand up 

(via)

Vice President Joe Biden had his “oops” moment Wednesday speaking in a 49er-crazed San Francisco when he told a crowd at a city political fundraiser that “the Giants are on their way to the Super Bowl.”

Biden spoke at a closed event in the city’s financial District at the Bently Reserve when he made the gaffe, according to a White House pool report released today.
The comment by Biden drew immediate “good-natured” boos from the crowd, according to the report by Josh Richman of the Oakland Tribune, who was the only local print reporter allowed to cover the event.
After suggesting that the Giants were heading to the Super Bowl, Biden quickly recognized the gaffe and and explained he was accustomed to thinking in terms of the San Francisco Giants and their baseball wins. His next reference was to the “49ers on their way” to the Big Game.

Richman reported he was ushered out of the fundraiser after Biden started taking a few questions from the audience of about 110 campaign contributors. “The event raised somewhere between $275,000 and $1.1 million,” according to his report.

The event was one of several stops Biden and his wife made in the Bay Area today.

Biden plans to meet this evening with local tech leaders, including the heads of Apple, Google, Yahoo, Netflix and Zynga, but those meetings are not open to the media, the White House said.

He cites biblical passages regarding redemption and how Newt is a true conservative.

He officially quit the race to become GOP candidate for President and is heading back to Texas to shoot some pool.

I was surprised to read that a “guaranteed basic income” for every American would be considered “conservative.”

————————————————————————————————————————————

“Murray’s conclusion is that Americans need to steer clear of Europe and instead get back to their roots. We should scrap the institutions of the New Deal and Great Society and replace them with the system of guaranteed basic income he first proposed in In Our Hands (2006). And we should pin our faith on the four traditional pillars of the American way of life: family, vocation, community, and faith. These, Murray argues, were the true foundations of the American project, from Kennedy all the way back to Washington.”

Read the rest here.

(via DrudgeReport.com)

(Drudge gets the big scoop again)

NEWT EX-WIFE UNLOADS ON CAMERA; NETWORK DEBATES 'ETHICS' OF AIRING BEFORE SC PRIMARY**Exclusive**
Wed Jan 18 2012 18:47:14 ET

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours.

Her explosive revelations are set to rock the campaign.

But now a “civil war” has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.

Gingrich canceled a press conference on Wednesday to deal with the matter.

“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s wife of 18 years, explained to ESQUIRE last year. “When you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are.”

MORE

 

A new culture for business…

Not saying i’m on the left or that i want the president to be re-elected….just saying you on the right need to stand together or as they say it is your election to lose.

(via)

Bill Clinton, the original “comeback kid” doesn’t see much hope for a resurgence by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, dissing him in a new interview as a Romney clone because of issues the former speaker has flip-flopped on.

Clinton, who is on the cover of the upcoming issue of Esquire, puts down the speaker who has bragged on the campaign trail of how he worked with Clinton to reform welfare and balance the budget.[Check out the latest political cartoons.]

Clinton doesn’t giving any love back. In an excerpt provided to Whispers, the former president says, “As a private citizen he was for certain important health-care reforms and believed in climate change and believed there had to be a strong reaction to it. And now he’s just like Romney. Neither one of them can say what they believe to be true and get nominated. Romney’s still trying to figure out what he did as governor of Massachusetts and still appeal to this driving vituperative energy.”

Bubba also takes a shot at the GOP culture, charging that the Republican side of aisle has given up any pretence of moderation and bipartisanship. His key example is how Jon Huntsman was run out of the Republican primaries because voters saw him as a moderate and didn’t respond well to his work as PresidentObama’s ambassador to China.

“Huntsman’s economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners. But he also doesn’t make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America’s national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.”

“But all of a sudden that’s disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we’re, you know, we’re living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.”