Follow this link to a Reuters report with the above title.

Hardly any Republican would agree with this premise.  The PBS show Nightly Business Report assumes that this is not true. The “Money Honey”, Maria Bartiroma of CNBC, openly assumes in her interviewing and reporting that a Democratic sweep would be a disaster.

However, this is what history seems to show.  Of course we need more than a story from Reuters with just a bit of convincing evidence to make us believe.

In the seven periods when Democrats had complete control of U.S. political power, the S&P 500 .SPX rose 14.7 percent on average while in the eight times a Republican was president and Democrats controlled Congress, the benchmark index rose 7.4 percent, according to data compiled by research firm Bespoke Investment Group, in Harrison, N.Y.

I’ll see what I can do to come up with some corrobarating numbers to make this idea more palatable to the skeptical.

I have posted a comment on the NBR Blog asking them if they can  report what is, rather than what they want to believe?

I did a Google search on Democrats “Stock Market”. There were only 5,660,000 results.

I took a look at the first two results.

The CNN web site had an article titled Surprise: Dems are better for rallies. This was published January 22, 2004.

… study by  two finance professors at the University of California at Los Angeles, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov.

According to their paper, entitled, “The Presidential Puzzle: Political Cycles and the Stock Market” and published in the October issue of the Journal of Finance, stock market returns are on average about 5 percent higher when the White House is run by a Democrat than during Republican rule.

There is more interesting information in the rest of the article.

The USA Today web site had the article titled Democrats or Republicans? Just the facts. This was published on 12/2/2005.

Many investors assume that Republican presidents are better for the stock market. That’s not true.

There is much more in the article and more nuance.

I have been hearing rumors about some story connecting Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi. I decided to find out a little more about this person.

The first item I found was this story about McCain funded Rashid Khalidi. I found a similar item on Huffington Post, McCain Funded Work Of Palestinian His Campaign Hopes To Tie To Obama.

To find out a little more about who Rashid Khalidi is, I read this transcript of Professor Rashid Khalidi interviewed by Joe Scarborough circa 2003. Amazingly, the link to this interview is on the Daniel Pipes web site.  Daniel Pipes is the antagonist of Khalidi in the interview. If Pipes thinks this interview is a good argument against Khalidi, then he really is living in a cocoon of his own making.

Another anti-Khalidi web site led to this item where Jordan Elgrably Interviews Rashid Khalidi. According to this website, “Jordan Elgrably, an Arab Jew, is a writer and an activist who founded the Sephardi/Mizrahi organization Ivri-NASAWI in 1996, and Open Tent Middle East Coalition in 1998.”

For those among my family and friends who grew up with yearly Passover Seders that ended with the phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem”, what Rashid Khalidi says may be hard to take.  However, if we are able to step outside our own milieu and try to see Palestinians as the human beings that they are, then nothing that Khalidi says in the above items is shocking or unreasonable.

Khalidi says several times in these interviews that attacks on civilians are war crimes no matter who commits them.  This applies to suicide bombers as well as some people on the Israeli side. It seems that his antagonists cannot hear what he is saying.  I know some people who will read this and will also not be able to hear what is being said.

It is truly hard to sit down with your adversaries and try to understand where they are coming from.  Frequently the way they tell you what they think is not couched in the best ways to get you to listen.  That is not an excuse for actively filtering out the message.

Despite what your adversaries say and do, it is still in your own best interests to understand them and their motivations.

I suppose that advice applies to me and understanding  many Republicans, but there is a limit to even my open mind 🙂

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On October 30, 2008, Huffington Post brought the following Washington Post editorial to my attention: An ‘Idiot Wind’ John McCain’s latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism.

This editorial also fills in some of the details of the story of Rashid Khalidi’s relation to Barack Obama..

There are just some things that President Clinton can explain like nobody else can. Watch the video. It starts out slowly, but when he gets rolling he says things I have been waiting for someone to say.