Wednesday Afternoon Stock Picks

With a market in turmoil, investors can make big gains with smart trading. What better place to get smart trading information then from a complete amateur.

Motorola- (MOT) Trading at 10.00

Why you want to buy: With Motorola’s largest investor Carl Ichan planning to spin off the cell phone division of Motorola, Wall Street speculation will result in a short term increase of Motorola stock. Sell it within a month though, the speculation won’t go on forever.

JPMorgan Chase and Co.- (JPM) Trading at 44.18

Why you want to buy: With the federally-funded take over of BearSterns, JPMorgan is experienced major stock turbulence right now. When the dust settles in a month or so, the price will be up. Don’t let minor downslides in the financial sector scare you away from purchases like this, the instability will only help the major players like JPMorgan. I wouldn’t be surprised to see even more acquisitions. Some investors are scared away from JPM because

Agnico-Eagle Mines- (AEM) Trading at 71.10

Why you want to buy: With a bullish market and the turbulence in the financial sectors investors will be looking for solid investment opportunities. For many investors that will mean a commodities market. When you combine that with the steady climb of gold prices, you really can’t go wrong buying a mine company. I personally like AEM over other mines because of it’s realistic production goals. Companies that set unrealistic goals often experience a massive drop-off when the gold isn’t realized. That isn’t a possibility with AEM.

Rubicon Minerals Corp- (RBY) Trading at 1.19
Why you want to buy: The same logic I applied to AEM, I’m applying here. Commodities and commodities manufactures a good bet in the bull market. RBY is a high risk pick though, low prices always are and RBY’s lack of diversification makes it even worse. I personally see big gains, but you could also see some big losses.

Costco Wholesale Corp- (COST) Trading at 66.62

Why you want to buy: With a recession (or at least fears of recession) coming, people will be looking to save money anyway they can, and this includes buying in bulk to save money. Costco and its competitors will all see a rise, what puts COST above similar companies is size. With 4000 SKU’s, COST can out-price its competition and attract customers.

Caveat: The moment this drops below 58, sell it like your life depends on it. Wholesale chains are vulnerable to a price drop when they face warehouse pull-out. Like a run on a bank if you don’t get your money out fast, you won’t get it out at all without COST reaching 52.


The above information should be taken as advise. You should consider seriously the risks and possible monetary damages before investing. If you are making investment decisions based a blog run by someone you don't know, you have Dennis Kucinich style mental issues and probably shouldn't be investing period.

Nobody was fainting during this speech

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack “Hope and Change Man” Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. This was a predictable, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks?

Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 — "chickens coming home to roost" — because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

(Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?)

What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"
But that is not the question. The question is, Why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave — why doesn't he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"?
Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.
His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt.
(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street.

Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did good old grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright.

Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?
(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.
This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance.

That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor.
Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.

Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness?

This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero.
It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well.

Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Give me a Break (And I don't mean of that Kit-Kat Bar)

Anyone who knows me will know I hate Hillary "I Can't be Photographed While Eating" Clinton, but it is ridiculous what has happened to her after she made supposedly racist remarks. These remarks were that it took Lyndon Johnson to enact the civil rights act. The point she was trying to make is that change takes a strong leader, this is true and her example was true. Truth however, does not matter in the world of far-left pinko-commies who think George Bush is like Hitler and the Iraq War is actually a massive conspiracy to enrich oil producers. These people think Hillary is to conservative (which shows how crazy they are) and know the race card is great for sabotage (look at O.J.) and are playing it from the bottom of the deck. Tim "Rah-Rah Obama" Russert managed to be as unfair and unbalanced as Pete Caroll would be if he was a referee for a Trojans game. He played clips of Hilary's speech out of context, berated her, and acted very ungentlemanly.

I'm not sticking up for the Hill, I couldn't do that but I am saying the media is going to manufacture phony controversies and that everything said about race will be twisted. Unfortunately, it is simply impossible to have a frank discussion about race in America.

We Are The Champions

The Rose Bowl ended in a blowout with the amazing and awesome U.S.C. Trojans crushing the pathetic and over ranked Illinois Fighting Illini (what the hell is an Illini?) by a score of 49 to 17. It was a wonderful game to watch and shows that college football needs a playoff system, because if they had one John David Booty and the Trojans would come out on top.

Iowa Caucus Predictions

The children of the corn in Iowa are soon going to be caucusing, which is to voting what Vanilla Ice's raps are to music. In a caucus you go to someone's house (or barn) or your town hall. You organize into groups based on your candidate, but if you are one of the idiots who supports a candidate less than 15% of caucus goers support, such Dennis "Spaceman" Cucinich, Alan Keyes, Chris Dodd, or Mike Gravel, you can transfer your support to another, normal candidate.

Here are my predictions for the Iowa Caucus Results.

For the Democrats

1st Place- Hillary "Preying-Mantis in a Pantsuit" Clinton.

2nd Place- John "Too Cool for a Tie" Edwards.

3rd Place- Barrack "Hope Man" Obama

4th Place- Bill "Not Important Enough for a Nickname" Richardson

5th Place- Joe "Only a Few Years Until the Nursing Home" Biden.

6th Place- Chris "Who?" Dodd.

7th Place- Dennis "Spaceman" Kucinich

Last Place- Mike "Nobody Cares What You Think" Gravel

For the Republicans

1st Place- Mitt "The Polygamist" Romney

2nd Place- Mike "Preach To Me" Huckabee

3rd Place- Ron "Dr. No Income Tax" Paul

4th Place- John "Integrity" McCain

5th Place- Rudy "Mr. 9/11" Guliani

6th Place- Fred "The Actor" Thompson

7th Place- Duncan "Great Wall of America" Hunter.

Annan's Ugly Exit

Outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan traveled to the Harry Truman Library yesterday to deliver his valedictory. It was yet another sanctimonious broadside against the Bush administration.

Ho hum.

As Truman himself once said, in a different context: "That's plain hokum. If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em: It's an old political trick."

What Truman would say today about Annan himself, and the organization he has headed for the past 10 years, can only be imagined.

But it would be, in a word, colorful.

Annan, who leaves office in 19 days, said he chose the Truman Library in order to pay tribute to his "far-sighted American leadership in a great global endeavor" - and to draw a distinction with the current president.

He noted that Truman "insisted, when faced with aggression by North Korea against the South in 1950, on bringing the issue to the United Nations" - in contrast to the Bush administration on Iraq.

This turns history on its head a bit: Truman could do so only because the Soviet Union was then boycotting the Security Council - and thus couldn't veto the authorization of military force against North Korea.

Nowadays, the United Nations can't, or won't, move swiftly no matter what the emergency - witness the continued genocide in Darfur.

Annan also appeared never to have heard of the Truman Doctrine, as defined by the then-president: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
Wise and courageous words - uttered in the same spirit that animated President Bush to act in Iraq, when Kofi Annan's United Nations refused to do so.

Just as Annan & Co. even now refuse to act on the nuclear ambitions of such rogue regimes as Iran and North Korea.

Frankly, it's no secret why Annan prefers to bash President Bush rather than focus on his own sorry tenure in office.

As secretary-general, Annan presided over Oil-for-Food, perhaps the biggest financial scandal in history - and in which his own son was involved.
He presided over yet another financial scandal, involving the U.N.'s procurement office. There was even a drug-smuggling ring operating out of his mailroom. His efforts at reforming the world body's basic infrastructure - particularly when it comes to human rights - were exposed as ludicrous, at best.

On an equally bizarre note, Annan yesterday proclaimed that all of the U.N.'s member nations "solemnly accepted" the "shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity." Guess Darfur didn't count because that was only a "ethnicity-driven conflict" (his words not mine.)
Clearly, Annan hopes to confuse his listeners by ignoring the real problems facing the United Nations - and to evade his proper share of the blame for its descent into a cesspool of corruption and incompetence.
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) yesterday said it best: Under Annan, the United Nations has become notorious for the "near-absence of standards of decency for the thuggish regimes that are too often empowered by its antiquated rules and procedures."
That Annan chose instead to bash the United States, added Hyde, was "completely predictable."
Harry Truman, certainly, understood the noble principles on which the United Nations was founded six decades ago.
Kofi Annan, during his tenure, betrayed them time and time again.

You can't find this in the New York Times

From the Cato Institute:

Opponents of trade liberalization have sought to indict free trade and trade agreements by painting a grim picture of the economic state of American workers and households. They claim that real wages have been stagnant or declining as millions of higher-paying middle-class jobs are lost to imports. But the reality for a broad swath of American workers and households is far different and more benign.
Contrary to public perceptions:
Trade has had no discernible, negative effect on the number of jobs in the U.S. economy. Our economy today is at full employment, with 16.5 million more people working than a decade ago.
Trade accounts for only about 3 percent of dislocated workers.Technology and other domestic factors displace far more workers than does trade.
Average real compensation per hour paid to American workers, which includes benefits as well as wages, has increased by 22 percent in the past decade.
Median household income in the United States is 6 percent higher in real dollars than it was a decade ago at a comparable point in the previous business cycle. Middle-class households have been moving up the income ladder, not down.
The net loss of 3.3 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade has been overwhelmed by a net gain of 11.6 million jobs in sectors where the average wage is higher than in manufacturing. Two-thirds of the net new jobs created since 1997 are in sectors where workers earn more than in manufacturing.
The median net worth of U.S. households jumped by almost one-third between 1995 and 2004, from $70,800 to $93,100.
The large majority of Americans, including the typical middle-class family, is measurably better off today after a decade of healthy trade expansion.

Sadly, you won't read this real news in the New York Times, they prefer to focus on impeaching Bush and delivering Democrat propaganda.