Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

D.R. Horton (ticker: DHI) appeared to stage an extremely bullish key-reversal yesterday just days after reporting a 39% decline in orders. The stock price is also very near the bottom of a 15-year trend channel. Possibly nearing the bottom in the homebuilding sector?

Also worth noting is that Exxon is very near the tippity-top of a 35-year trend channel (see chart below, visually sheared to normalize the long-term trend, and vertically exaggerated to extend the range). It's starting to look like the 'easy money' in the oil sector is now past -- possibly an additional 10-15% upside before it breaks but wouldn't count on it.

Every single day the halo around the comet is bigger. The leeward side continues to get increasingly diffuse while the opposite side is still pretty well defined as the shell expands. Are there any projections? I'm down to my 32mm 2" Koenig and it's still getting mighty big in the window. 8O

Looks like Musharaff doesn't like courts questioning his constitutionality, he's also taking the opportunity to round up the political competition. I hope the neocons don't get any 2008 strategy ideas from this guy's tactics.

Very weird -- I'm thinking he did it to try to rally the religious right and prevent them going for a 3rd party candidate as they've been threatening to do if Rudy got the nomination.

Interesting little blurb in the local paper about the polling place in a local precinct getting moved from a centrally-located area with lots of parking to a new spot, outside the precinct, at a conservative private college campus, with NO parking.

I expect to see a LOT more of this monkey business in 2008. In 2000 they had the butterfly ballot, the hanging chads, and the negative-votes uploaded for Gore. In 2004 they had the 'voter challenge' authorities, 8-hour lines and vote-eating punchcard machines in poorer precincts, Republican-built unauditable blackbox voting machines for other precincts, then the phony-felon lists, the caging lists, and the infamous 'provisional ballot' (a kind of voting placebo, often just thrown away). All these gave them an edge of a few percentage points in 2004. And in both years they had Republican campaign managers in charge of certifying the vote in the critical swing state which also doesn't hurt. But I think they're sensing they'll need a bigger edge in 2008.

The increasing stacking of the deck is another reason I'm not overly optimistic about the Dems' chances in 2008. I think they need a solid 55%+ in the polls in order to overcome the mischief margin and secure the election.

Jim Babcock said:
After Katrina, some on the left blamed the President for causing the natural disaster.

Maybe in your alternate universe, but here in reality they were just annoyed that he didn't find the disaster worthy to cut short his umpteenth vacation, our well-rested president later telling 'Brownie' what a heck of a job he's doing.

It's getting into Primary season: the dem candidates need to distinguish themselves from each other, and since they all agree Iraq was a bad idea, they need to discuss other issues in order to get anywhere in the primaries.

The simple fact is that even dems want the effort in Iraq to succeed, even while being skeptical. I think while the situation has improved, everyone's just holding their breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all, we've been told "mission accomplished" and "last throes" enough times to be wary of any good news, as it always seems to be temporary. I for one hope the surge works if only to get this thing over with and welcome any news of improvement. That said, unlike those on the right I have no happy illusions about the long-term results of the war, and the fact that the neocons have finally found a strategy to partially fix or mitigate the fiasco that has defined their whole disastrous ideology certainly doesn't give them any bragging rights and certainly doesn't give the electorate any reason to vote for them over the various dem candidates. Most of us would rather vote for someone less likely to get us into these situations to start with.

But as a practical matter, the candidates need to be able to talk about issues other than Iraq. As much economic and political damage as the Iraq war has done to our country, there is still more to America than Iraq. You can spin it as changing the subject all you want, but the truth is they've been talking about these other issues all along -- the press just doesn't acknowledge it much.

The particulars of here in 'flyover' country aside, the national polls as well give pretty much the same picture: Basically 2/3 of dems do NOT want Hillary. The problem we have is there are basically two "non-Hillary" alternatives, Edwards and Obama, effectively splitting the "non-Hillary" vote, which may throw the nomination to Hillary and the white house to Republican Candidate X.

It's part of the continued decline in republican popularity generally. Even the rich have gotten sick of the neocons, that should tell you something!!!

This is SO not news. Polls have been showing from the start that Hillary is the likely loser in any general election with significantly worse odds than either Obama or Edwards. This is why most dems don't want her. If she gets the nomination the dems can write the concession speech the next day to whoever the repub candidate will be and just skip the whole campaign shtick altogether. Too many people just hate her and the character-assassination homework is already done.