Comments by TonyB-US

This whole discussion is a bunch of hogwash. Left shamelessly ceased the opportunity for political gain. Right is playing their card by trying to defend against the accusation. What a political theater!!!

If one wants to blame heated speech, he may just as well descend on Hollywood and video-gaming industry and blame them for violence by the deranged. And let's not forget to blame the classics - like Crime and Punishment. What a crock ...

Shame on the Economist for jumping to conclusions. Get the facts of the case and motivation of the killer before pushing its editorial untigun agenda.

Bunch of gossip and unconfirmed crap. I wonder who planted stuff - leakers or site owners.

So why is that Arabs can live in Israel proper, yet Jews cannot live East of the old line?

Before any significant reform can take place, there is a lot of opportunity on the table to reduce cost by eliminating waste and abuse. This should be bi-partisan.

Look at rate of change only is quite useless.

What a waste of effort and focus.

I do not see how the writer of this article can state that impact of the sun on climate change is "benign". I guess politics of global warming and are far more important than science.

I guess it is nice to be sitting in a comfortable office, ponder on the virtue of human releationship and expect to be treated the way you treat others ... And then there is real world out there with people who have very different values and respond to different forms of persuasion. With current administration witch hunt for whatever convoluted reason they may have makes me feel a lot less safe.

For those bleeding heart human rights idealists, look at what they did to people they captured (Daniel Pearl) and let us know how you propose to interrogate those martyrs, who view Western prisons as vacation spots and want to be killed to get to them virgins. Or yeah, I forgot. We read them Miranda Rights.

How about making deal with Russians and send the terrorists to Gulags. I am sure Russians can use some extra help.

In my view this conflict is caused by oil money to prop up the falling prices. It is interesting how terrorist with home made missiles and cross border defensive move some 1200 miles away from oil fields, coupled with media frenzy and hysterics would move the price of oil. There will not be piece in the middle East until oil consumers will confront oil producers and their funding practices of terrorists world wide. This is beyond any religious, historical and social issues that Israelis and Palestinians need to overcome if left alone to resolve their disputes.

One might also watch the oil shorts to see who is benefiting from the actions. I am sure it is all planned and Jews (as always) take the fall.

It is all the matter of expectations and perceptions. If consensus turns around and people would start believing that the marktet is undervalued than you do not need huge infusion of funds for markets to go up. If you believe that "things are not as bad or as good as they are perceived to be", then we are definitely up for a decent rally. I believe the market is grossly oversold as many companies, banks and individuals paniced and sold stocks to imporove their cash position.

The question on crude oil pricing is whether it is a good predictor of future activity or it was grossly oversold with the prices over $100/barrel.

The economic slump was made worse by erosion of confidence. In my opinion, the confidence crisis was stimulated by presidential campaign and the engineered fall of Lehman.

When campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars drilling the whole country that economy is really bad and will get worse, eventually people will start believing it and act accordingly. Now we are in "lowering expectations" phase where the winning party is telling us that things are much worse then they expected and we should focus on job preservation, not creation. They are establishing lowest possible baseline.

In a few months once they take control of the government, we will start receiving messages of hope, improvement, etc. and over time that positive thinking will contribute to take the economy out of recession.

Meanwhile, business will process its excesses and will be in position for growth.

So to summarize, in my opinion, a large portion of the crisis was engineered by the election campaign which might have spun out of control. I hope they have enough brains to start driving up confidence in the future.