Gun and ammo manufacturers seem to be doing well. I wonder why?

Chiefly because of the Republican love of playing chicken with the debt ceiling and the 'fiscal cliff,' with Obama in office.

TV heads talked about Europe, which is only in a little worse shape than it was, and the bad bets on Romney. But Wall Street knows the world will not end because of Obama. I hope that what frightened them was the Elizabeth Warren victory.
The forces of evil were able to keep her out of the administration, but now she will be making the rules.

niceoldguy:
Yup, someone to be really proud of: Fauxcahontas (or Lie-awatha, take your choice).

I think the smart money knew the stock market would be kept artificially high through the election no matter what, so get out now in case of a drop.

I also managed to glean the entire story line of the Republican narrative through watching a little of the election reactions of Rush, Sean, Ann Coulter, and O'Reilly:

To them the problems of America had nothing to do with the derivatives scandal that vacuumed trillions of dollars of wealth away from the nation. They don't even mention it. They blame the whole thing on freeloading lower class people who are destroying America by asking for handouts. Oh, and they make these charges while accusing the Obama people of playing the class warfare card.

It is breathtakingly stupid of course. The fraud of Wall Street isn't just the elephant in the room here. It's a herd of elephants and these clowns don't see it at all. They see no connection whatsoever in the timing. Gee, shortly after banks turned into casinos, the trillions started vanishing. Was that the problem? They don't even see it as a coincidence. The only time they even talk about banking, it's to praise the frausters for being good at business. Classic.

To them the problem is that the lower classes want to be on food stamps and are lazy. It's really quite disturbing to see the level of their belief in this. It's like watching people in some kind of weird religious trance. Right-wing zombies stuck on stupid.

For example: If you really look at Greece, you see that it was Goldman Sachs that sold Greek politicians the weird financial instruments that brought down the country. But Sean and the gang don't even glance at that for a second. To them Greeks are freeloaders who refuse to accept their rightful austerity measures because they just want it easy. It's the people's fault - not the bankers. That's the message the people who own these channels want preached, and these sell-outs are all too eager to spew the corporate line.

Of course, it's total BS. The American People know something is wrong and I think they sense that they've been sold a cover story for what happened that completely leaves out the true perpetrators. There was a huge effort to blame the missing trillions on Obama, but we could see he didn't suddenly start flying an Air Force One plane made of solid gold. He didn't take the money. Wall Street did. He was just there to take the blame.

So to them, reelecting Obama was allowing the cause of our problems 4 more years to finish us off. Rush said he went to bed thinking the country is lost. But they never once really looked at who took the money: The biggest fraud in the history of the world. They never mention that the reason there are so many unemployed on benefits is BECAUSE of what these bankers did. Bankers who - interestingly enough - were the ultimate freeloaders to the tune of trillions.

Now that the narrative didn't succeed in getting Obama out so they could put one of their own in to continue the plunder, they're frantically doubling down on the idea of freeloaders who don't want to work, causing the USA to go trillions and trillions of dollars in the red.

It's ridiculous. But that's the narrative and they're stuck to it. They recite it with the trance-like zeal of a religious cult.

Meanwhile it's a complete crock. They're spinning themselves right into oblivion.

Let's hope they keep it up. These buffoons had their moment. If they were smart, they'd see it's time to grow up. Christie and Bloomberg get it.

How about old turd blossom himself, Karl Rove? Just look at the damage one man did to America.

I believe he stole Florida in 2000 with the help of Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush. I also believe he stole Ohio in 2004 with the help of Mike Connell, Rove's IT guru who died in a mysterious plane crash before testifying about the election.

These crimes alone gave us 8 years of George Bush, the Iraq War and the economic meltdown we're still in.

So how does Karl do when he doesn't cheat? They gave him 400 million to influence this election, and he has very little to show for it. Meanwhile he put on a little pout-fest last night that pitted him against FOX News, and made him look that much more ridiculous.

It could be time for Karl Rove to slink off back into the swamp he slithered out of. He's done enough for this country.

Bill McD: Well I can't be that bitter about Karl. After all, he is very good at getting billionaires to spend some of their hoard. I did want to see him squirm more than he did on Fox, and I was glad to see the Fox anchor poke fun at him.
It's Mike: We are talking about what an Oklahoma City girl was told about her great-great-great-grandmother. I spent only 21 months in Oklahoma, and as near as I could tell, nearly everybody claimed and possibly believed they were part Indian. And given the way things were 100 years ago many of them may be right.

Yeah seriously Bill McDonald. O'Riley was blaming freeloaders for why Romney lost. No mention of the REASON there is so much demand for social programs. Their solution is to trust the free market, but the free market does not create a middle class without buttressing. The free market creates what we have, a top heavy and wildly unstable system.

Nope, I'm wrong, the issue was 'Obama won because he promised to give people stuff.' Man. Living in a bubble you can only hear your own echo.

The demographic trends and poverty trends make it hard for a candidate like Romney to win, for better or worse. It's not like he couldn't have won though. It was still rather close in key areas. The guy lost in the primary.

Fighting off all the wackjobs in the primary, taking hard lines in order to win, that's what lost it.

Blame the hurricane and Christie too if you want. That may have swayed some people, but seeing a president respond like he should in a bipartisan way SHOULD sway people a bit. It's so refreshing.

Next time the right shouldn't take seriously any candidate that has never won, at least, a statewide election. Governors preferred, senators in a pinch. Perry, Huntsman and Romney should have been the only guys in that race, with Santorum making noise early and fizzling out quick.

Gah it's so frustrating to see the right under perform so tragically. It's just hard to unseat an incumbent, I mean the left couldn't even get rid of Bush in 2004.

That said, here's a list of people that could have won last night.

-Christie
-O'Donnel (Mitch)
-Huntsman
-Jeb Bush
-Romney of 2005
-Hillary Clinton. [You know it's true!]

Bill, I had a particularly satisfying jolt of schadenfreude about Karl Rove's meltdown. The last time I heard such a petulant tantrum from a Cat Piss Man about voting results, "Annie Hall" had just beaten "Star Wars" for the Best Picture Oscar.

"To them the problems of America had nothing to do with the derivatives scandal that vacuumed trillions of dollars of wealth away from the nation. They don't even mention it."

That would be the derivatives scandal that began under Clinton, featuring Rubin, Greenspan & Summers? Is that the one?

Allow me to suggest that thinking that Obama & Geithner et al are going to be saving anyone, any day, or the country, from these deeply entrenched and totally twisted horrors of misgovernance is at least as much "complete crock" as worrying about what pinhead shills like Hackity, Coulter, O'Reilly et al -- or their counterparts on the so-called left -- spin.

Can anyone envision a fix? In this lifetime or the next 10? Buckle up and enjoy the ride. (Which you seem to do rather nicely & I mean that as a compliment.)

No doubt the banking industry deregulation statrted under Clinton with Greenspan at the helm. Now the question is will true reregulation stick? It doesn't look like it.

In constant 2012 dollars, the sum of all Reagan's deficits is $3.05 trillion over 8 years.

Obama has exceeded $4 trillion in just 4 years, and is likely to end his 2nd term with a $20 Trillion national debt (vs. $12 Trillion when he came into office).

In the history of fiat money, a massive rise in national debt has always ended in a currency crisis and/or trade war.

Once it becomes clear to our bond buyers that we are going to repay them in massively deflated dollars, they'll demand a much higher interest rate to rollover the debt. Eventually, the debt service, driven up by rising interest rates, will exceed the % of our national budget spent on defense or medicare. Refinancing too much debt with even more debt is a losing strategy unless economic growth (and tax revenues) rise faster than the debt service expense.

At some point, when the debt is too enormous, that becomes mathematically impossible. When the bondholders figure that out, they begin selling our Treasury Bonds at a discount and refuse to buy new ones. That will mark the end of the American Age.

Sally,
It's true that Clinton signed the legislation in 2000 that ensured derivatives would not be regulated. He admits it was a huge mistake. But there is the concept of minding the store, and the Bush administration was in charge for the 8 years until the idea brought down the global economy. As Clinton tells it, “I think what happened was the SEC and the whole regulatory apparatus after I left office was just let go.”

But arguing over which party allowed Wall Street to destroy the financial security of America is one thing. In fact, I wish this had been one of the main issues of the campaign. Wall Street should have been front and center in the debate but it wasn't.

Instead, the entire right apparatus went into deflection mode, where Wall Street was only discussed in passing, and then to praise it because Big Business is God to Fox, etc..

The result was a disconnect in their world view where Sean Hannity, etc...built themselves into a frenzy insisting that what threatens to destroy the United States was food stamps and other freeloading. It's such blatant propaganda and it almost worked. And it wasn't propaganda to blame the Democrats for derivatives either. It was part of the propaganda by both parties to protect the true culprits: Wall Street. This wasn't a debate - this was a smokescreen.

Why would they do that? Because they calculated that if they protected the Wall Street elite, the elite would give them enough money to buy the election. It didn't work.

So now they're doubling down on blaming the lazy, poor masses, even as they insist class warfare is wrong. This is a tremendous failure in terms of right and wrong, and I hope they follow their jaded logic into the trash bin of history.

Myopia is the hallmark of sycophants on both sides of the ideological chasm in this country. I only hope the fools don’t burn it down.

Here's the talking points phrase you hear over and over:

"There are more takers than makers."

You'll also hear a lot about the American People only wanting handouts. Meanwhile the Fed is pumping trillions to banks all over the world, draining our current wealth and running up huge tabs for the future. Rather than the Iceland model of letting troubled banks pay for their own mistakes, we have opened the floodgates and drained our national security.

The reason so much attention is paid to citizens wanting handouts is to deflect from the ultimate financial handout by the Fed to the banks - a handout that is leading to insolvency.

These aren't really even tabs for the future as much as the destruction of the country in the same way the Mafia burns down a restaurant after the credit is shot and they can't take anymore cash out of it.

Sheldon and the Koch brothers needed money to pay their bills.
There is some satisfaction knowing that in spite of all that money being spent, every one of Adelson's candidates lost!

It amazes me that after all the damage Romney's 47% video caused, that the talking heads and other right-wing ideologues would double down on the maker-taker theme. And blaming Obama's victory on those who supposedly just want to suck off the government teat is just demonstrably false. There's a lot of those "keep your government hands off my Medicare" tea party types who most assuredly did not vote D.

It's not that there are more takers than makers. It's that the bankers are wankers.

"They never mention that the reason there are so many unemployed on benefits is BECAUSE of what these bankers did."

You kinda overlooked one thing - Between Obama and Bernanke, the banks are even more flush with money than when the evil Bush left.

If you think Obama has any more a clue on what it'll take for the average guy to do better, I'd disagree. We have the same easy money policy for all the stakeholders like banks and investors (aka Romney's buddies), meanwhile the deficit soars and the average guy doesn't see one more penny and crappy job prospects. OTOH, the stock market rises because all this easy money has to find a home someplace, even if the economy is lousy.

So, I'd disagree with Rush, I think the outlook is the same whether Obama or Romney would've won.

Politicians are totally disconnected from the real world.

The freeholders and the hangers on have won. And I don't get that information from a news source -- I get that from having spent decades studying and evaluating economic, financial, political and market data and trends.

It's no accident, for example, that Obama's margin of victory in Virginia came entirely from inside the Beltway, where government employees, contractors and their associates fear they would be destroyed if the fiscal insanity that started during the Bush administration, and which Obama has doubled and tripled down on, was stopped.

As for protecting the middle class and building a recovery to last, what a joke. When the full data for the last four years are tabulated and published over the next several years it should become clear that Obama's policies have created, if not the most, one of the most rapid increases in wealth inequality in our nation's history.

So who is really getting screwed here by the big O? Don't listen to Obama's lies. Why it's the people in the middle whose compensation is static or falling, yet they shoulder inflationary cost increases year, after year. By the time they get hit by the big, obvious inflationary bomb that's building on the Fed's balance sheet, it will be way, way too late to change policy.

Personally I don't care. The system has won and I can work the system. Sadly, I can also work the economy, and would much prefer to do so because the real economy (not the financed by the Fed deficit spending economy) is the key to rising tides that would benefit all.

Uh, freeloaders, no freeholders. Have had Jersey on the mind too much lately.

Stock market move was all about Europe.

Under Obama we'll have four more years of Bernanke printing, which benefits the market.

Under Obama, we'll have four more years of Goldman Sachs control of the financial market, with SEC very occasionally nailing some small time lower whilst people like Corzine continue the pillaging.

Remind me again how may too big to fail institutions have been broken up during the first four years.

Wall Street loves Obama.

...that's building on the Fed's balance sheet

I'd put that a little stronger. That suggests it's being done to the Fed by outside forces such as the federal government.

The Fed is a private bank hooked up to the wealth of America. It is working for bankers both here and abroad rather than the American People. What was once quantitative easing has become an open spigot spewing out numbers as fast as possible. Some are reported - others are not.
And if the American People even ask to see the balance sheet, the Fed throws a fit.

Outside of Ron Paul, in this election cycle, there was zero discussion of the role of the Fed in our economic downfall. Certainly FOX news was too busy blaming poor people to mention this banking monstrosity that in a mere hundred years, has driven the United States to the brink.

My concerns are closer to home than the beltway (good grief - Virginia decided this election? And - among those " Beltway hangers on" is there not an army of military-industrial types who were just slavering for a Romney victory given his promise to open the spigot to the promised land for those fine fellas?)
No, I will leave the silly cherry-picking of preferred facts to the party that lost (or, in the immortal words of Jon Stewart - the party of personal responsibility that is now falling all over itself to blame everyone else for their loss.)
What I worry about is that silly woman in my own county who doctored those ballots - I think of her every time I read a Facebook post from some of my Republican FBfriends - they are terrified, and they believe they are called to protect their country. They think they are going to be sent to death panels, they think the streets will run with blood, they think their children will be sent to death panels. They expect the Apocalypse - in the next 4 years. They title their posts things like "Guns, God and Gold". (Yes, there is a reason gun sales are up - and it should scare the crap out of any sane American.) The drumbeat to rise up to protect the righteous from the evil liberals should shame every self-serving right-wing pundit - making a fine living out of scaring these decent people out of their minds. I know what they have been told, we listen (as much as we can stomach it) to right-wing talk radio and to Fox news. The concerted, shameful effort to delude and dummify these folks for the benefit of a few very small people, is appalling.
I fear for my President's safety. I fear the silly Clackistani vote-tamperer is just a taste of what will come.

Just think, Rove-r took almost a billion dollars from a Vegas Pimp and a couple of mid-west polluters and blew it on a crap shoot...maybe people will forget who created the mess we are in and maybe they will invite us back in to finish the job? And his strategy? Take a good, middle of the road politican and try and repackage him as a Right Wing Tea Party "outsider" and then lets bring in a Tea Party kook who wants to get rid of medicare. And our final great idea: lets alienate women with some really stupid comments about rape. Well they won the Angry White guy vote and lost the rest. Maybe someday we will have a sane Republican party again but not for a while. Already they think they lost because they were not crazy enough. Woo hoo....

Maybe some of the moderately conservative independent voters should reregister as Republicans and try and pull that bloated, foaming at the mouth Elephant back from the brink of irrelevance and kick out the Right wing nutjobs. I do remember a time when they were a viable alternative. 1968-1988, 5 out of 6 wins. 1992-2012 2 out of 6. And one was a steal thanks to good buddy Jeb. If it wasn't for Gerrymandering they would not even have the house.

George - regarding re-building the Rs, on that subject (in Oregon) I heard a local pollster comment on NPR (I think it may have been Tim Hibbits?) say that as local Rs try and reclaim that middle-ground by running better, smarter, more sane candidates - they are discovering it is way easier to break something, than it is to rebuild it.
In essence his opinion was that in the intervening years since they ran centric candidates they have burnt the brand. (My summing up - but I believe he would agree with it.)
I see the national scene following right in Oregon's path. Run crazy right-wing people. Lose the independents and fiscally conservative liberals - Remake your brand to appeal to just a splinter of the electorate. Whine when you lose. Do it again.

mister tee, "the sum of all Reagan's deficits is $3.05 trillion over 8 years." Put that number in the money-value-of-time context, $3.T in its Historic site.

There was federal debt from the Revolution and 1812 wars, which PrezJackson paid off, to $zero debt in 1835. But annual deficits accumulated up to 1980 so Reagan faced $1.T federal debt to begin with, and 8 years later he had quadrupled 150years of currency debauchery, to $4.T fed.debt; (there's your $3.05T = Reagan). Bush Sinister pumped it over $6.T in 4 years, near $7.T, and rising, in 1992 when Clinton began. And it did reach $7.T before leveling off and (from late-Clinton surplusses) got paid down approaching $5.T again by 2000. When Bush Jughead began. ...

wait. what? we interrupt this timeline with cognitive dissonance from a sideshow comment -- about "the derivatives scandal that began under Clinton, featuring Rubin, Greenspan & Summers? -- yeah, that distraction bait. Switch it: September 10, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Announces Defense Department Cannot Track $2.3 Trillion in Transactions. THAT perp.war "scandal" known complicitly by Clinton, Rubin, Greenspan, & Summers as much but more known in (debt service) complicity by Bush Sn & Jg, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. Whatever "derivatives scandal" manifested later, as of Sept.10, 2001, military madness had 'misplaced' and lost like $2.5T which was about half the $5.T approx. debt in dollars those days. wait. what?

And then Bush Jughead in 8 years redlines the debt gauge from $5.T to $10.T -- all-time DOUBLEing down ... the Rockefeller-Bush-Cheney Zapata -to- Carlyle -to-Halliburton permanent war profiteering. Going on since WW II didn't end, for bankers loaning 'debt service' burden to mil.indus.complexions as IKE told all at the time, sort of the ultimate perniciously steady-interest-bearing investment at very low-risk (from politics upheaval and resort) as long as taxpayers stay in the low-information inauthentic-propaganda bandwidth.

From $5.T to $10.T, includes $3+ (4?)T of Jughead's 100 war-terror months, in 8 years 2001-2009. $30 or $40 Billion per month, $.36 or $.48 T per year. Terror waste only, not counting debt service during those 8 years. of Historyscope.

And Obama goes $10.T to $15.T in only 4 years. Yeah. So? Duh. Wha'd you expect?

Stop military madness. Abolish the 'CIA' complex. Abolish the 'Pentagon' complex. Survive that 1950-2010 hate'enemy' propaganda bubble, pop it, and Americans can recover. Or else nobody of 300+million souls now held hostage gets out alive.

btw, at the start of 2012 an extra $3.0T credit surplus was stockpiled, and growing, in Soc.Sec. deposit accounts. It's not clear to me where the financial 'instruments' are placed which hold that current $3.0T Soc.Sec.surplus, yet I understand that 3 Trillion is our money-value of time remaining for elder opinionleaders to document the 60-yr Peace Depression history.

Sights in This Modern World.

Bill McDonald - People who counter your wallstreet blaming by mentioning other presidents who are to blame are missing the point a bit.

Everyone since Carter is to blame, every president and elected official that stood by and let it happen.

It's a nonpartisan blame game. That's my take anyway.