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Muhamad Morsi wins Egyptian Presidency

Breaking: Egyptian Election Commission Declares Morsi President

By: Scarecrow, Firedog Lake

Sunday June 24, 2012 7:39 am

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Elmer’s Pet Rabbit

Doing The Unthinkable

First a bonus track-

Green Shoots

Doing The Unthinkable

Terence Burnham is dead wrong.  Krugman actually does prefer Option B (“devalue through a new Spanish currency”)-

What are Spain’s alternatives here? Well, if they still had their currency, their own currency, the answer would be devalue, let the peseta drop, Spanish exports would become a lot more competitive, they’d be well on their way to recovery. They don’t have their own currency, so people are saying: Well, you have to do all this stuff to stay within the Euro. At some point you say: Well, you know if your answer to our problem is just ever more suffering, ever more you know… 25 percent, 50 percent youth unemployment. If that’s your notion of a solution, then maybe although it would be a very terrible thing to have the Euro breakup, maybe that’s better than what we’re doing. So that’s becoming a real possibility now.

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Hare Do

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these featured articles-

Formula One weekend @ The Stars Hollow Gazette.  Join us tomorrow at 8 am for Qualifying.

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

What A Great Idea!

An innovation in free speech.  I know I’d much rather watch advertisements than most ‘entertainment’ programming.

American Idol.  Case closed.

Whips and Scourges

Paul Solmon is an ignoramus who never studied Samuelson.

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5 x Five – Hot Button Issues – Gay Rights 2:49

Go Long!

GLOBAL MARKETS-Stocks, oil, gold fall on growth worries

By Caroline Valetkevitch, Reuters

June 21, 2012

NEW YORK, June 21 (Reuters) – Global stocks fell more than 1 percent and Brent crude hit its lowest since December 2010 on Thursday following data showing Chinese, European and U.S. manufacturing activity had slowed further.

The weak data came just a day after the Federal Reserve extended its monetary stimulus program aimed at boosting the U.S. economy.

U.S. stocks added to losses after Goldman Sachs recommended shorting the benchmark S&P 500 index. All three major U.S. indexes were on track for their worst day since June 1.

Gold fell and was on track for its biggest decline in more than three months, hurt by global economic worries, while the U.S. dollar rose against the euro and yen as the Fed’s move disappointed investors who had hoped for a more aggressive policy.

Business activity across the euro zone shrank for a fifth straight month in June and Chinese manufacturing contracted, while weaker overseas demand slowed U.S. factory growth, surveys showed.

Moody’s Said to Be Poised to Announce Bank Downgrades Today

By Howard Mustoe, Bloomberg News

Jun 21, 2012 2:04 PM ET

Moody’s Investors Service has told banks it may later today announce downgrades of the credit ratings of as many as 17 lenders and securities firms with global capital markets operations, according to two people with knowledge of the plans.



The company said in February it may lower the ratings of firms including UBS AG (UBSN), Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Barclays Plc (BARC) as part of a review of how Europe’s sovereign debt crisis was hurting more than 100 lenders. Any downgrades could raise borrowing costs and force banks to increase collateral.



UBS, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley (MS)’s credit ratings may be cut by as many as three levels, Moody’s said in February. Barclays, BNP Paribas SA (BNP), Credit Agricole SA (ACA), HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Citigroup Inc. (C), and Royal Bank of Canada (RY) may be lowered by two, Moody’s said.

Bank of America Corp., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) and Societe Generale SA (GLE) may be lowered by one grade, it said.

Oil falls below $90 for first time since Dec 2010

By Gene Ramos and David Sheppard, Reuters

Thu Jun 21, 2012 4:04pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Brent crude oil slid nearly 4 percent in heavy trading on Thursday, dropping below $90 a barrel for the first time in 18 months as weak economic data from China, the United States and Europe pointed to prospects for slower oil demand.



Other major commodities also tumbled as gloomy global data darkened the demand outlook for raw materials.



“Supply is outstripping demand and whatever other data you see out there won’t change that,” said Dominick Chrichella, senior partner at the Energy Management Institute in New York.



China’s factory sector shrank for an eighth straight month in June as export order sentiment hit its weakest since early 2009, according to a survey indicating the country’s economic trough may extend well into the third quarter.

U.S. jobs data added to the gloom with little change last week in the number of Americans filing new unemployment claims.

Data also showed U.S. manufacturing grew in June at its slowest pace in 11 months, with hiring in the sector hobbled as overseas demand for U.S. products weakened, compounding the dreary economic outlook in the world’s largest oil consumer.

Business activity across the euro zone shrank for a fifth straight month in June, according to the closely watched Markit Flash Composite Purchasing Managers Index.



“Really, what we’ve been calling ‘downward momentum’ would now be better described as ‘panic selling,'” said Tom Mooney at Southeast Energy in Houston, Texas.

“Even the most convinced bulls have had to face the reality that, at least for now, their portfolio has been getting ripped up, no doubt with margin calls forcing some to get out.”

Dow down -250.82.  Maria Bartiromo is a hopeless shill, even now plaintively whining “Isn’t there any valuation at which you’d buy banks?”

A Brief History of Modern Egyptian Politics

As Mubarak Lay Dying

Posted by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker

June 20, 2012

Sixty years ago, a group of military officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, forced Farouk I, an Ottoman leftover who styled himself King of Egypt and Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, Kordofan, and Nubia, to rush to his yacht and seek exile in Monaco. In this effort, they were assisted by the C.I.A., which was dismayed by the decadence and corruption that characterized Farouk’s reign. The operation was known informally as “Project FF”-Fat Fucker. It was one of the many attempts to steer Egypt in what American policymakers think might be the right direction. They must look back at that period with a sense of woe-if, indeed, they ever reflect on history at all.



Nasser’s charisma and energy awakened the entire region to the postcolonial era, but he failed to find an accommodation with the Islamic trend, and he turned to Israel as a scapegoat. Sadat, his successor, had the courage to reach a peace treaty with Israel. He saw the foolishness of depending on the Soviet Union as an ally and socialism as an economic model. He also tried to find a way to incorporate the Islamists into civil society, at least by letting them out of prison, and they responded by murdering him.

Hosni Mubarak, who now may be dying-Tuesday, he was briefly reported clinically dead-was an excellent military officer, and a capable bureaucrat, but he had no independent vision and no idea how to escape the impediments to progress that the original coup had imposed. Immediately after Sadat’s assassination, in 1981, Mubarak imposed emergency rule, which essentially authorized unbridled dictatorial power masked by a façade of democratic elections. Under his rule, freedom of speech and assembly were tightly constrained. These restrictions on liberty crushed other forms of political expression, so that the Islamists-the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical forms of political Islam-became the only real way to voice opposition to Mubarak’s reign. Military dictatorship and Islamism became the axis upon which Egyptian politics revolved.



The decision by the Egyptian military to dissolve a freely elected parliament earlier this month-predicated on a court decision by Mubarak holdovers-amounts to a second military coup. Once again, it has been assisted by the American decision to continue to support the antidemocratic forces that have retarded the development of Egypt. A moderate Islamist government, responsive to the social needs of the country, is the best that the U.S. can expect now, and what the people of Egypt have demanded by their votes.

America is unlikely to have any influence on the future of Egypt if it continually opposes and demonizes the longing of Egyptians to achieve real democratic expression, with all its hazards. Sixty years of unaccountable military dictatorship have shown how sterile the alternative is. … (I)t’s time to pull the plug on American support of this antidemocratic, military regime.

Of course it could merely be a bathroom slip and fall.  Nothing to see here.

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5 x Five – Hot Button Issues – Birth Control 3:06

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5 x Five – Hot Button Issues – Gun Control 3:20

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