25 GOP Senators may vote for Democratic Iraq withdrawal timetable in September: I found this off Americablog, which cites a small National Review Online article;
Iraq--the Coming GOP Collapse? By Rich Lowry
Was talking to an influential Republican strategist who thinks if Iraq looks the way it does now in September, Bush will lose about 25 Senate Republicans on a bill with some sort of timetable for withdrawal.
05/30 04:03 PM
If Lowry is correct here, then we could see a veto-proof Senate majority on Democratic legislation regarding U.S. troop withdrawal timetables for Iraq. The question to ask here is how bad will the Iraq war deteriorate before these GOP senators start to worry about their own political careers, over that of toeing the Bush administration's war in Iraq?
Right-wing noise machine--Plame not covert: Glenn Greenwald shows how the Right Wing Noise Machine consistently claimed that Valerie Plame was not a CIA covert agent, even as the evidence shows otherwise. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has even stated that Plame was a covert agent.
Al Gore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann: Former vice president Al Gore was a special guest on Keith Olbermann's Countdown program, where Gore promoted his book "The Assault on Reason." Here is the transcript of Olbermann's interview with Gore. You can also find Olbermann's interview on YouTube.
Here is Part One;
And here is Part Two
Stock market rallies: This MSNBC story about Wednesday's stock market rally. According to MSNBC:
Apparently defying gravity, the market broke new ground again Wednesday, with the Dow Jones industrial average jumping 111 points to close at 13,633.
The Dow's frequent records have grown almost routine in recent weeks, but even more significant Wednesday was that the broader S&P 500 — the benchmark index used by millions of individual investors and their retirement funds — finally surpassed the high-water mark broke through the index broke through its 7-year-old high-water mark to close at a record 1530.23.
Then there is this interesting explanation regarding this stock market surge:
The steady surge in stock prices is being propelled by a flood of money into the global financial markets, fueling a wave of acquisitions that shows no signs of letting up. The binge has been led largely by private pools of capital, so-called private equity funds, that have been buying up public companies and taking them private. As shares of those those companies are removed from the market, there are fewer shares available for institutional and individual investors who are restricted to publicly available stocks. That tends to push remaining stock prices even higher.
The buying binge is the biggest in decades. Some $2.3 trillion in deals worldwide — more than 15,000 of them — have been announced so far this year, according to Thomson Financial. At $857 billion and counting, U.S. private equity buying is more than triple last year's levels.
If this explanation is correct, then the stock market is being propped up not by companies making and selling products, but rather by mergers, acquisitions, stock buybacks, or public companies reverting to private companies. In a sense, we're seeing a form of speculation, where big banks and funds are playing shadow games of merging, or taking companies private for the sake of quick, paper profits. This can't go on forever--not when there are inflation fears within the Federal Reserve, not when gas prices have been going up, not when the housing market has crashed, and not when consumer spending has started to slow in the U.S. I have to wonder when a crash will take place in the U.S. stock market.
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