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We all know, when it comes to the market, what goes up comes down. Graphically speaking, overvalued markets always reach enema levels.I still believe the market is rich, particularly in certain sectors, mostly technology. I also believe there are plenty of value stocks laying around in energy, health care, telecommunication all decent dividend payers etc.
I mention this because, a few days ago, I caught a radio advertisement about an art mutual fund. What
goes around comes around. Not ready to head for the door but there are some additional warnings flashing like The Fed raising rates, inflation, growing prospects of a flare up in The South China Seas and/or The Middle East, more Biden errors impacting the economy, supply chain issues impacting Christmas sales etc.
goes around comes around. Not ready to head for the door but there are some additional warnings flashing like The Fed raising rates, inflation, growing prospects of a flare up in The South China Seas and/or The Middle East, more Biden errors impacting the economy, supply chain issues impacting Christmas sales etc.
There are also some positives like people returning to work, world economies have yet to link, corporate earnings have been favorable and, I repeat, there are many sectors where stocks are reasonable, pay decent dividends, enjoy solid balance sheets and have announced buy back programs etc.
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Did the AP Call New Jersey Race Too Soon? 326,611 Votes Still Uncounted
Fraud is rampant.
by Daniel, UNCOVERDC
The Associated Press has officially called the race for Democrat Phil Murphy.
But as we all know, it’s not the media that decides elections. It’s the people.
And there are still 326,611 New Jersey votes left to be counted.
It was initially believed these votes were from blue counties.
However, it turns out that might not be the case (more details below).
Couple the massive amount of votes left uncounted with the other election irregularities, you can see how it wouldn’t be inconceivable for Jack Ciattarelli to mount a comeback.
Fewer than 30,000 votes currently separate the two candidates.
But here’s the thing: There are 326,611 votes left to be counted.
And these aren’t all votes in blue counties.
These are early votes that weren’t allowed to be counted until election day.
If these are in-person early votes, then, perhaps, we can expect a major comeback from Jack Ciattarelli.
Per PJ Media:
New Jersey Republicans are angry at the Associated Press and they very well may have an excellent reason. AP called the state’s governor’s race for Democrat Phil Murphy last evening with nearly 10 percent of the vote outstanding.
Out of almost 2.5 million votes cast, Murphy was in the lead by less than 36,000 votes. Stami Williams, the communications director for Republican Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign, criticized the Associated Press for calling the race when it did.
AP made the call because their models showed them the Republican candidate was extremely unlikely to overcome Governor Phil Murphy’s lead. The votes that were yet to be counted were from heavily Democratic precincts and outstanding votes from GOP precincts weren’t enough to overturn the decision.
Meanwhile, there are increasing reports of election irregularities in New Jersey.
Take a look at the video below.
It appears to show a voting machine that allows the voter to vote for EVERY candidate EXCEPT Ciattarelli.
But that’s not all.
It turns out Democrats were caught counting ballots TWICE!
Now that the “error” has been corrected, Ciattarelli gained at least 10,000 votes.
How many more “errors” are there like this?
Ciattarelli’s campaign has not conceded.
Despite the Associated Presscall, they have announced they intend to fight.
NJ.com confirms:
A day after the New Jersey governor’s race was called for Gov. Phil Murphy, Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli apparently has no plans to concede.
In fact, Ciattarelli’s campaign put out a fundraising appeal on Thursday that it said was needed to help continue the fight.
In a mass emailing with the subject line “Our next steps,” the campaign said: “This race is far from over.” It asked for contributions of any amount.
“Our team is making sure every legal vote is counted and the will of the people is heard loud and clear,” the campaign wrote. “To make our path to victory as smooth as possible, we rely on assistance from grassroots supporters, like yourself, to help us get there.”
Its use of the term “every legal vote” echoed a familiar rally call of Republican former President Donald Trump, which some have criticized as a constant insinuation there were illegal or fraudulent votes.
In addition to the 326,611 remaining votes, there are rumors the entire election may be recounted.
WND reports:
In what might be the biggest stunner of the 2021 election, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, and his Republican rival, Jack Ciattarelli, have been trading the lead in the gubernatorial race throughout Wednesday.
As of 12:40 p.m. ET on Wednesday, RealClearPolitics reports Murphy, with 1,201,420 votes (49.9 percent), now tops Ciattarelli who has 1,186,337 votes (49.3 percent), a difference of 15,083 votes. At midday, Ciattarelli led by over 1,100 votes.
This is remarkable in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.1 million.
Clearly, this race is too close to call, and it’s impossible to predict who will prevail. Townhall’s Guy Benson spoke to the state’s former Republican Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday morning. Christie told him, “Every pollster was wrong. This is likely to be a recount race, either way … There’s a very legitimate chance Jack could win this.”
Benson noted Christie was “concerned about data discrepancies in reported totals & haziness on where outstanding votes are.” I think that’s a concern many of us share.
Turns out even former Governor Chris Christie believes Jack Ciattarelli could still win this.
Meanwhile:
New NBC Poll Spells Bad News for Democrats
A new NBC poll shows that Americans have more faith in Republicans to get things done across the board. The news comes as Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the White House.
According to Town Hall:
President Joe Biden is underwater by double digits on overall job approval, and Republicans lead Democrats on a wide array of issues, according to a devastating new national survey from NBC News. Some liberals and Biden supporters had questioned whether previous ugly polls from outfits like blue-leaning Quinnipiac were outliers, but the NBC survey would appear to kill that particular form of spin. Voters don’t like what they’re seeing from a president who campaigned on the promise of being truthful, competent, moderate, bipartisan, and unifying. That’s not how the Biden presidency is playing out at all, and the displeased American people are noticing:
A majority of Americans now disapprove of President Joe Biden’s job performance, while half give him low marks for competence and uniting the country, according to results from the latest national NBC News poll. What’s more, the survey finds that 7 in 10 adults, including almost half of Democrats, believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, as well as nearly 60 percent who view Biden’s stewardship of the economy negatively just nine months into his presidency…In the poll, 42 percent of adults say they approve of Biden’s overall job as president — a decline of 7 points since August, with much of the attrition coming from key parts of the Democratic base. That’s compared to 54 percent who say they disapprove of the president’s job, which is up 6 points since August. Using Gallup’s historical data, Biden’s approval rating in this poll (42 percent) is lower than any other modern first-year president’s at a similar point in time, with the key exception of Donald Trump (whose approval averaged 37 percent in fall 2017).
Biden was (+14) in this series in April. In August, he was still above water, albeit barely. Now he’s (-12). What about personal favorability? From NBC’s write-up: “Finally, Biden’s favorable/unfavorable rating in the poll (40 percent positive, 48 percent negative) is almost identical to Trump’s in the same survey.” That must sting. Biden’s personal likability has taken a nose dive. Let’s look at some specific issues:
Finally:
Are American riled over?
Are American riled over?
FIRST: Biden CANCELED all border Wall contracts...
THEN: Biden let millions worth of Wall materials waste away...
NEXT: Biden promised huge checks for illegal immigrants...
NOW: Fox is reporting a "massive caravan" heading right toward us!
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We were actively engaged with Newt when we lived in Atlanta and he was a Congressional Representative and we were not even in his District. We were early on members of Friends of Newt and went to D.C for a tour he gave of the Capitol.
I first met Newt because he was given my memos (yes, I have been writing them since 1960) by a friend and subsequently Newt asked me to meet him for breakfast. Our relationship grew from there.
I have been out of touch with Newt for well over 2 decades but I know him to be a shrewd reader of voter sentiment and believe he still has the knack of listening to forming groundswells.
Newt Gingrich Says Republican ‘Tsunami’ Is Coming
(LibertySociety.com) – After newly-elected Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia on November 2, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) shared some predictions for the 2022 elections. Considering the Democratic defeat, the American politician believes Republicans could flip four seats in the Senate and 40 to 70 seats in the House, creating an electoral “tsunami” of epic proportions.
Gingrich thinks the only way to prevent such a thing from happening would be for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to adjust the Democratic Party strategy and align more with the desires of the American people. However, he believes they won’t be able to manage such a feat.
Reflecting on the Virginia election, the president blamed the loss on the administration’s recent struggles, but congratulated the winner. Gingrich simply sees the victory as a sign of things to come. He encourages Republicans running for election in 2022 to “study Youngkin’s acceptance speech” and follow his positive vision for the country.
If the Right listens to and connects with the American people while highlighting the Left’s unpopular “big government socialism” agenda, then the former politician and author feels Republicans will have no problem taking both chambers of Congress as soon as the coming year.
Meanwhile:
A retired truck driver knocked out a top dog long time New Jersey Democrat:
A retired truck driver knocked out a top dog long time New Jersey Democrat:
Retired Truck Driver Dethrones Incumbent Democrat
(NewsReady.com) – Many political pundits have spent the last few days discussing the Virginia election. Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated the Democratic machine and will become the next governor of the state. But, the biggest upset of the 2021 election actually happened in New Jersey.
On Thursday, November 4, the media announced Republican Edward Durr won the Senate race in South Jersey’s 3rd Legislative District. He beat out one of the most powerful lawmakers in the state: Senate President Steve Sweeney (D). The Democratic lawmaker was reportedly seen as a possible replacement for Governor Phil Murphy (D) in 2025 when his second term ends.
Durr is a truck driver who only spent a couple of thousand dollars on his race. His campaign video showed him stepping out of his truck and introducing himself to voters.
Sweeney’s defeat is probably the most shocking loss for the Democratic Party since progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a bartender at the time, ousted one of the most powerful Dems in the US House, Rep. Joe Crowley. Durr’s win is extra hard to swallow because he’s a Republican.
Referring to the New Jersey race, Democratic strategist Joshua Henne told CBS New York nobody saw the race’s outcome coming. As for Durr, he said he wants to be a lawmaker who speaks for the people.
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If art dealer Berges is right then we have become one pathetic nation where dope, power corruption and money is the story:
‘Hunter Biden’s Story Is the American Story,’ Hunter’s Art Dealer Announces
Hunter Biden’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, announced to the New York Times Friday that Hunter’s artwork is a testament to the “American story.”
The president’s son, who grew up under the tutelage of a United States senator since age three, is supposedly a bastion of the American dream, or so Bergès claimed to the Times. “Hunter Biden’s story is the American story, Bergès declared. “It’s a redemptive story.”
Hunter’s American “story” includes being under investigation by the FBI for money laundering, according to CNN, along with reportedly using the N-word, using his father’s last name to cut deals, demanding millions of dollars to unlock Libyan assets, flying to Communist China with his father, maintaining a stake in a Chinese company while his father is president, living in a mansion in Malibu, sleeping with prostitutes, and smoking parmesan cheese.
A part of the American dream, of course, is selling artwork to anonymous investors for hundreds of thousands of dollars while his stepmother reportedly displays the artwork in the White House.
Bergès tried to tamp down concerns of shady wrongdoing to the Times by revealing he only is the caretaker of Hunter’s art endeavors. Only he sets the prices, vets big-money clients, and negotiates with buyers, he bragged.
“It’s all on me,” he claimed. “Who is buying and who is not, it’s solely on my shoulders.”
Though Hunter’s American “story” has escaped the microscope of the media for some time, being censored by Twitter just before the 2020 presidential campaign, the Times raised significant unknown details Bergès has not disclosed.
“Would there be contract provisions for purchasers designed to minimize any ethical concerns? Would foreign nationals, for example, be excluded from purchasing?” the Times questioned. “He deflected the questions, asserting that as a private dealer he must keep those details confidential.”
Bergès’s deflection from hiding answers to questions about the existence of ethical concerns seems to square with Bergès’s own story.
An investor in Bergès’s gallery reportedly sued him for fraud and breach of contract in 2016, and he filed for personal bankruptcy in 1998, was arrested in California, and was “charged with assault with a deadly weapon and ‘terrorist threats.’”
Bergès also planned to be the “lead” Chinese art dealer in 2015, as Hunter reportedly consummated deals with the Communist Chinese and earned tens of thousands of dollars each month by serving on the board of Burisma in 2014.
“My plan is to be the lead guy in China; the lead collector and art dealer discovering and nurturing talent from that region,” Bergès schemed. “I plan to find and discover and bring to the rest of the world those I consider China’s next generation of modern artists.”
In late October 2021, Bergès was photographed wearing a Camp David hat. As Breitbart News reported, it is still not known how Bergès would obtain such a prize without the help of the presidential family.
So far, Bergès has reportedly managed to sell multiple paintings by Hunter for a total of $375,000.
Meanwhile, the White House has praised Hunter for his business acumen. “The president remains proud of his son,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in response to a question about ethical concerns.
Hunter has also defended his art business as a “pretty courageous thing to do.”
“Is to have the courage to kinda go out there and do that, and, you know, I could just stay my studio and paint for myself, and, ahhh, and, and, and I ultimately do do that,” the recovering drug addict said, trying to find his words.
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Liberals Keep Voting For Leftists – It’s Ruining The Country
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Durham Unravels the Russia Case
His indictments reveal facts embarrassing to former special counsel Robert Mueller and the press.
By The Editorial Board
Special counsel John Durham’s latest indictment is an important step in unraveling what really happened in the long tale of false Russia-collusion allegations against the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. The facts in the indictment add to the evidence that this was from first to last a dirty trick by Hillary Clinton's campaign—and that the media were its gullible promoters.
Mr. Durham this week indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian national who worked at the Brookings Institution in Washington and who was the main source for Christopher Steele’s dossier claiming Donald Trump was in secret cahoots with Russia. The FBI interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 as part of its investigation of the dossier, and the indictment claims Mr. Danchenko lied repeatedly, depriving the FBI of crucial information. (Mr. Danchenko’s lawyer has indicated his client will plead not guilty.)
Mostly notably, the Russian hid the extent that he was working with a Democratic public-relations executive with ties to Hillary Clinton. Press reports have identified the executive as Charles Dolan, a Clinton associate who in 2016 was actively working to make Hillary the President. The indictment suggests Mr. Dolan was behind several of the salacious and derogatory claims about Mr. Trump that Mr. Danchenko fed to Mr. Steele. Mr. Dolan’s attorney told the New York Times that his client could not comment on an ongoing case.
The purpose was to present the FBI with oppo-research that masqueraded as “intelligence,” and it worked. Mrs. Clinton lost the election, but the Russia tale sabotaged an incoming President with relentless media assaults and a special counsel investigation. The country spent years obsessing over the Trump conspiracy that didn’t exist—rather than the Clinton conspiracy that did.
This Durham indictment reads like a story with more to come, but some lessons are already clear. One question is why the country is only now learning these facts. The Durham indictments treat the FBI as the duped party, but the record shows former FBI director James Comey and his investigators knew from the summer of 2016 that Clinton campaign fingerprints were all over the dossier.
A transcript in the Danchenko indictment suggests that FBI officials knew Mr. Danchenko was lying in the 2017 interviews. But they did nothing to blow the whistle, nor to tell the public or Congress everything they had learned about the origins of the Russia collusion tale.
The Durham prosecutions also speak poorly of former special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Mueller’s job was to learn the facts about the collusion allegations, and he had access to everything that the FBI had learned. Yet the Mueller team, led by Democratic partisan Andrew Weissmann, never told the public the Clinton side of the story.
The media also has a lot to answer for. In its conformist disdain for Mr. Trump, the Washington press corps with rare exceptions pursued the Russia collusion story with partisan blinders. They gave each other awards for stories that in retrospect amounted to nothing or, worse, misinformation. Anyone who raised doubts about this narrative, even as the facts mounted against it, was deemed a “Trump enabler.”
The Washington Post this week offered a first sign of media self-reflection, noting the Durham indictments “cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations,” including its own. Yes they do.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who was also vilified by the press, deserves credit for giving Mr. Durham the status of a special counsel to protect his investigation after the change in administrations. Mr. Durham is telling a story that many, if not most, in Washington would prefer to stay hidden. All the more reason for him to keep telling the public the facts, and holding people accountable.
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On Russiagate, Durham Indicts the Press Too
His latest arrives just in time to expose a pathetic ABC News ‘special’ report on Christopher Steele.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
It is the nature of any inquiry that more information is gained with the passage of time. Today’s information is more complete than yesterday’s. It affords better insight, deeper perspective and sounder judgment.
And this is exactly what’s wrong and upside-down with ABC News’s recent “special report” on Christopher Steele and his dossier. By any measure—man-hours invested, expertise, intellectual rigor, standards of accountability, resources deployed—the credible efforts, by a proverbial country mile, were not those of Mr. Steele and his “primary sub source,” but their debunkers, including the Mueller task force, the FBI, the Justice Department’s inspector general and its special counsel John Durham.
Through a pitiless accumulation of detail, we now know the efforts of Mr. Steele, Glenn Simpson and their journeyman gofer Igor Danchenko were a joke, a flimflam. And any journalist approaching the story five years later would frame it this way, though not the parade of reporters from ABC, including Martha Raddatz and Pierre Thomas, who play it docudrama style for an obvious reason: So they can trail off at the end and ignore the fact that it was all a hoax, never mind the 100 shoes that have dropped since.
Another shoe dropped on Thursday, after this column was half-written. You can find the details in the indictment itself, which is worth reading, as if Mr. Durham gave himself the assignment of rubbing the media’s face in the stories it let get away when it abandoned its standards of skepticism and reportorial rigor. To wit, Mr. Danchenko, whom Mr. Steele employed to put distance between himself and his fabrications, never even had a conversation with the Russia-connected U.S. businessman Mr. Steele’s allies quietly presented all over town as a source for key revelations, including the alleged scurrilous hotel tape and the alleged Trump-Putin conspiracy.
Mr. Danchenko just made the conversation up, according to the indictment. Much else that he and Mr. Steele passed off, and embellished, as originating from Russian sources apparently came from a Democratic public relations guru with Hillary ties. (Mr. Danchenko has indicated that he intends to plead not guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI.)
Mr. Steele’s own defense for all this, in what laughingly passes for an interview with ABC, amounts to: You can’t prove a negative. He also lays on a howler of the begging-the-question school: His unprovable dirt on Mr. Trump couldn’t have been Russian disinformation because that would be inconsistent with Mr. Steele’s theory that the Russians were trying to help Mr. Trump.
This is like saying, “I know there was a second shooter in Dallas because no other fact is consistent with my theory of two shooters in Dallas.”
But it works with ABC. The only journalist with a perceptible IQ seems to be former New York Times reporter Barry Meier, who patiently explains Journalism 101 to an ABC interviewer, saying that Mr. Steele can claim to believe anything he wants, but must show evidence if he expects others to believe it.
But the most epochal stupidity is provided by two ABC producers, Lucien Bruggeman and Matthew Mosk, who insist that, regardless of flaws, the dossier “proved prescient” because it revealed Kremlin influence operations aimed at the U.S. election.
This has reality backward. Mr. Steele was exploiting the pre-existing, known habits of the Kremlin to make his own fabrications plausible. I’ve cited my own 2015 email to colleagues saying it looked like Putin trolls were getting aboard the Trump express. This was not a searing insight. It was akin to saying the sun appears to be rising in the east this morning. By then, the whole world knew the office building in St. Petersburg where Russia’s trolls stir up controversy and generate click revenue. A year earlier, NATO’s secretary general publicly laid out how they were promoting the anti-fracking cause. If you don’t understand this by now as a journalist, you aren’t paying attention.
It’s no surprise that ABC’s exercise in inhibited corporate journalism, obviously structured not to embarrass corporate journalism over its own role in the Russia hoax, was led by that embodiment of corporate neoteny, George Stephanopoulos. The term is from biology. It refers to the preservation of juvenile characteristics into adulthood to appear unthreatening and invoke protective parental feelings.
Our press spent three years pursuing the Russiagate red herring, remind yourself, in preference to giving an honest, searching account of the Trump phenomenon, one of the most interesting stories they would ever cover. It’s almost as if our media had a contact case of Hillary neurosis, sharing her need to falsify what happened in 2016. But at least their comeuppance is a torpedo aimed at the mainstream press’s post-objectivity business model of pleasuring its audience by feeding its prejudices.
The flaw in this strategy is now apparent. When reality breaks through, the public has only their news sources to blame for their disappointed fantasies. Whatever else Mr. Durham accomplishes, he may be saving the soul of American journalism.
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