Yesterday, stocks plunged for the second straight day, bringing “the Dow’s two-day drop to 873 points, or 10.6 percent, its worst two-day percentage loss since October 1987.” On Fox News last night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove tried to pin the blame for the drop on President-elect Barack Obama.
Though he admitted that there had been bad economic news yesterday, Rove questioned “how much of it is the news of the day.” “I mean, how much of it is that, and how much of it is the market saying, You know what? The economy is not in a good place and we’re looking at the future, and how much confidence should we have in the team that’s coming to make the economy better any time soon?,” said Rove.
He then suggested that the problem was that Obama hadn’t named his Treasury Secretary yet:
ROVE: Well, I got to tell you, I’m a little bit surprised. If the number one issue facing the country is the economy, then it strikes me the new administration, the president-elect, would be putting a lot of emphasis on getting a Treasury secretary and an economic team in place in order to signal to the country what he’s going to do.
But instead, we’ve seen a leak about the secretary of state. We’ve seen pretty serious rumors about who’s going to be attorney general, pretty serious rumors about who’s going to be head of HHS, Health and Human Services, who’s going to be Homeland Security counsel — Homeland Security department chief.
Watch it:
Though some economic analysts believe it would be helpful for Obama to name his econ team, it is laughable for Rove to blame the market’s problems on Obama. Indeed, the market is much more likely reacting to yesterday’s “grim economic data,” which included “a 16-year high in weekly unemployment claims and the failure of Congress to reach a deal to help U.S. automakers.”
Rove says the market is “trying to look four months, six months, a year in advance.” That may be so, but anyone hedging their bets is probably much more concerned about the economic outlook released by the Fed on Wednesday — warning “that a recession believed already to be underway could last until mid-2009 or later” — than who Obama picks to head the Treasury Department.
"It is fair to say that Norm Coleman's lead is now in the double digits," said Marc Elias, a lawyer for the campaign. He added, more optimistically that, "there are more Democratic areas with votes left to be counted than Republican."
The Franken math is not official. They are basing their findings both on the 51.1 percent of the state-wide recount that they have completed, but which is not reported by the Secretary of State, as well as a portion of the 800-or-so contested ballots that they believe will be easily resolved.
The dwindling margin separating the two camps, however, is making for high political drama. If Franken's numbers are to be believed, the Democratic challenger has more than halved his deficit with just over half the recount completed. The election, in short, could be decided by a single digit difference, though there is no telling if the margin will continue to close at the same pace.
All of which has upped the ante when it comes to contesting each and every vote. For the first time since the recount commenced, aides to Franken made a specific example of what they thought was a concerted effort by the Coleman campaign to frivolously challenge very specific ballots. Holding up sample ballots for members of the press, Elias noted that on ten separate occasions the Minnesota Republican had contested votes simply because the individual backed both John McCain and Al Franken.
"It must be heartbreaking that there were people who voted for John McCain and not Norm Coleman," he said. Elias went on to note that each side had likely challenged many ballots where the intent of the voter was clear. But in this instance, he added, the Coleman campaign's challenges seemed "more pattern-istic than over-exuberant."
If, in fact, the election boils down to a matter of determining the intent of a handful of voters, observers say that the campaigns could resort to court order for what would be, in effect, a second recount. In this instance, the Court would look at a much narrower batch of ballots and -- ostensibly -- have a specific set of standards for counting for whom the vote was determined.
Vatican Appears to be Attacking Opposition to SOA. [...just as much as charging that women have no role in leading churches. This past week,Democracy Now did a lengthy interview with Father Roy Bourgeois on the surprisingly strong threat he has received from Pope Benedict to be excommunicated before this weekend if he doesn't disavow his belief and support of women taking over leadership and ministry of the Catholic Church. Catholics need to stand behind women as priests [OpEdNews - OpEdNews.Com Progressive, Tough Liberal News and Opinion]
12:51:56 PM comment []
