Author: Pogo

It was a wild ride on Wall Street last week, and by the time they turned the power off at 11 Wall Street the DJIA Wayback machine had taken us back to the first week of January, 2017.  Ready to see SFB’s head explode? 

Under Obama the DJIA went from 7550 to 19827 – or an increase of 148.3 percent over 8 years, or 18.5% per year. *

So far the DJIA has gone from 19827 to 25409 under SFB or an increase of 28% over 3 years or an average of 9.38% per year.

That means that the Dow has experienced half of the growth per year so far under Trump than it did under Obama.  Great job on the economy, SFB – as far as growth in my indexed investments, I’ll take Obama’s market thank you very much.

*The dates are approximate due to the scale of the DJIA graph I have access to.

Live Democratic Debate Thread tonight. 8-11pm ET on ABC

So Joe was the front runner and likely nominee until the voting started. OK, it wasn’t voting, but what passes as voting in corn country. So now Bernie’s tied with Pete going into maple syrup country and Pete is rising as the first actual voting occurs next week, and Joe? He’s taking the day off.

We’re breathless over who is rising, who is fading, and who’s running out of money. And it’s all to see who gets to challenge Mike on Super Tuesday and beyond. And we won’t worry about him running out of money will we? And there in the distance is the real contest, against 3*, which seems to be getting lost in the primary contests. And who still polls best against him? The guy taking the day off in N.H.

Some system we’ve got, right?

Aaron Blake, Wapo, tries to review the arguments about why the Bidens matter to the impeachment trial fo Donald J. SFB Trump.

President Trump’s legal team set about making his impeachment trial about the Bidens on Monday, with former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi offering an extensive case for why Trump’s interest in the investigation was legitimate.

Trump’s Senate allies had in recent days been advising the defense team to hone in on the Bidens and Burisma Holdings, the company that employed Hunter Biden.

“I told them, look, nothing matters more than the facts on Burisma,” Sen. Cruz (R-Tex.) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday, adding: “They built their entire case on this house of cards. Lay out substantive, factual reasons why investigating Burisma — the president had a responsibility to do so.”

Their argument would be that Trump’s concerns about the Bidens and Burisma were legitimate, and so would have been his efforts to secure an investigation into them.

***

The article continues and fails to answer the question IMHO. Maybe you can.

Or maybe that will be subject of the what, 8 hours of question for each side? God knows someone needs to tell me why the Bidens matter in this trial.

We all have our opinions and we are entitled to them. One of mine is that the two House committees did not issue subpoenas and force the administration to ignore or move to quash them. It is the pall over today’s obstruction presentation. I liken it to arguing to a judge that I need a continuance because I don’t have enough information to proceed to trial and have no answer about why I didn’t issue discovery requests to the other side.

In a totally predictable response to the killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani Iran launches a dozen or so ballistic missiles against a couple of Iraqi military bases housing US military personnel in Western Iraq. Baghdad is between Iran and the Al Asad base, and Iran apparently threw in the attack on Irbil for good measure.

No need to link to articles on this – they are everywhere, so just open your eyes. For me the title of this comment says it all.