Free Republic

The election of Barack Obama offered the promise of a new set of fixes for the financial crisis and the economy, a do-over that might help nurse the stock market back to health. Since then, the market hasn't just gotten worse - it's turned in its worst performance ever for a new president. The Dow Jones industrial average has fallen 21 percent during Obama's first seven weeks in office. Count back to Election Day and the results are even bleaker: That afternoon, the Dow closed at 9,625. Now it stands at 6,547, a loss of 32 percent. Stockholders have lost...

As if investors didn't have enough to worry about, a new land mine is lurking: "the Obama market." That's what I heard over the weekend from a veteran investment adviser, Charles Allmon. "Political ramifications represent a significant added market risk that should not be ignored," he says. Initial polling suggests that Senator Obama will be the next president, a view Mr. Allmon shares. An Obama presidency is certain to mean a big tax increase, he says. Further, the veteran adviser, who publishes a 46-year-old monthly investment newsletter, the Growth Stock Outlook, out of Bethesda, Md., made a marvelous market call...

President Obama has dispatched his best and brightest, unleashed hundreds of billion of stimulus money, used his political clout and soaring but pragmatic speeches without getting the economic engine restarted. When he took office on January 20, the Dow was at 9625, and it closed today at 6546, down 32 percent in the last 50 days.

Whatever your job title, the ability to make others listen to you, trust you, and act on what you say is critical to your success. Take this quiz, adapted for Fortune by Persuasion IQ author Kurt Mortensen, to see how well you influence others. For the full version, go to www.persuasioniq.com.

Considering the nation's predicament, it's hard to imagine a more ill-advised federal policy than one that would make it harder for Americans to remain in the homes they own. Yet that is exactly what President Obama is proposing with his plan to limit the amount of mortgage interest that homeowners could deduct from their federal taxes. Prudent homeowners determined how much house they could afford by including the amount of mortgage interest they could deduct from their federal and state taxes. To suddenly change the rules of the game would be to invite hardship - and the prospect of foreclosure...

Building upon the success of the February 27th "Chicago Tea Party" Rallies, many of the organizers are now working to develop an even larger day of protests set to happen on April 15th, 2009. These protests are known as the Tax Day Tea Party rallies.

"We are very, very worried about the future of firearms and the future of being able to carry a gun," said Zach White, a 22-year old college student. Williams said rumors are swirling among his patrons that Washington will restrict the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Comparing the United States to modern Europe, which has strict gun laws, Steve said the government is heading down a dangerous road. "Many people think the 2nd Amendment is a sporting amendment, one where people can go hunting and may not need a gun that shoots more than one time, but really the...

Facing sharply depressed oil prices and an economy that depends on public spending, the Iraqi Parliament reluctantly agreed Thursday to cut the government's 2009 budget. But mindful that it is an election year, lawmakers made sure not to touch workers' salaries, pensions or the social support system of food rations and health care. The government will absorb cuts of a little more than 7 percent, about $4.2 billion, which brings Iraq's 2009 budget down to $58.6 billion, according to the legislation that Parliament approved Thursday. Members of Parliament will take a 10 percent cut in their own salaries, bringing each...

The "For Sale" signs are just starting to sprout, but already experts worry that this spring home-buying season in the United States will be even grimmer than the last. Despite tentative signs of recovery in hard-hit areas like California and Florida, the broader housing market is far from hitting bottom, economists said. Across much of America, prices are likely to keep falling through 2010. So the March-to-June season, when most homes are bought and sold, will be bad this year - perhaps the worst since the market began to spiral down in 2006. Across the nation, 19 million houses and...

In a bleaker assessment than those of most private forecasters, the World Bank predicted Sunday that the global economy would shrink in 2009 for the first time since World War II. The bank did not provide a specific estimate, but bank officials said its economists would be publishing one in the next several weeks. Until now, even extremely pessimistic forecasters have predicted that the global economy would eke out a tiny expansion but had warned that even a growth rate of 5 percent in China would be a disastrous slowdown, given the enormous pressure there to create jobs for the...

Perhaps a film made in Hawaii will put the idea to rest that Obama was not born in the United States. For some skeptics showing a birth certificate might not have been enough. Now some University students are about to produce a film about Obama's birth. These University of Hawaii students will use a cast of local people for the story that takes place at Kapiolani Medical Center, the place where it is conjectured Obama was born. The story will relate how nurses and staff would feel if they knew that the child born there was going to grow up...

At 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 8, the time will officially change to 3 a.m. Don't forget to change your clocks before going to bed Saturday night.

But the steady substitution of private health care for a government run plan is only half of the nationalized medicine equation. As even President Obama noted yesterday, expanding government health care to more and more Americans will be extremely expensive. That is where the health care rationing comes in. President Obama already laid the groundwork for health care rationing by dramatically expanding funding for the Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) council in the stimulus bill, and even without former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) his health care plan will include a Federal Health Board that will turn that research into regulation.... But...

So let me do the preachers of Armageddon one better. Today's stock market isn't just the “worst since the Great Depression,” like they're so fond of saying. No, it's even worse than the Great Depression. Take a look at the chart, below. It shows the daily progress of the S&P 500 in terms of percentage change from the very top. The brown line is the change from the recent all-time highs on October 9, 2007. The blue line is the change from the all-time highs just before the Great Depression, September 6, 1929. As of yesterday's close (Thursday, March 5),...

The Senate intelligence committee reached an agreement yesterday on the framework of a wide-ranging review of the CIA's past treatment of terrorism detainees, even as members acknowledged that the bulk of the panel's work will be conducted in secret. The committee's Democratic and Republican leaders settled on a blueprint for a year-long probe that will examine the agency's detention and interrogation of about 100 suspected al-Qaeda operatives held in secret overseas prisons between 2002 and 2006. Panel members last week confirmed their intention to conduct such an inquiry. The scope of the bipartisan review will include the CIA's use of...

A House panel is expected to approve today sweeping tobacco regulation that would put the bill on pace for House passage far earlier in the congressional session than in the last Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee vote, expected this afternoon or evening, would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to police the tobacco industry. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (H.R. 1256) is nearly identical to a bill the House passed by a wide margin last summer. The Senate did not take action last year. Health advocates -- comfortable their bill will pass the...

The Dow is sinking and Obama's budget is a disaster. But despite dire trends, free markets will prevail. Officially, President Obama's $3.6 trillion budget is titled "A New Era of Responsibility." That's false on two counts. It's an era = not of responsibility, but of big-government taxation, spending, and regulation. And it's not new. History is full of attempts to inflate the state to grow the economy. Virtually all have ended badly. As Monday's sell-off reminds us, Wall Street's verdict on Obamanomics has been quick and sharp. To help pay for this, Obama proposes the largest tax increase in history....

Top aides to President Obama yesterday defended the ambitious plans laid out in the administration's proposed $3.6 trillion budget for next year, calling the spending necessary to reignite the economy and put the country on a path to sustainable growth. Speaking on the same program, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) called Obama's proposed budget "probably the biggest rewrite or transformation of our federal budget since the New Deal." The Republicans who have vowed to oppose Obama's budget say the rush of deficit spending and targeted tax increases would further damage the nation's floundering economy. "You don't raise taxes in a...

Speaking to a packed room at the opening day of CPAC in Washington D.C. yesterday, former UN Ambassador John Bolton warned convention attendees of something he believes "goes to the heart of the Obama administration" and that will affect not only us but our children and grandchildren. No, not the stimulus bill (although that’s a good guess) - it's what he termed "the coming war on American sovereignty." The problem, he said, is that liberals believe differences in policies that affect Americans shouldn't be debated here at home, but on the international stage - and we can expect it to...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP).... "STEPHANOPOULOS: Obama's ambitions. OBAMA: Health care cannot wait. Double this nation's supply of renewable energy. Make sure that you can afford a higher education. STEPHANOPOULOS: Is the president's bold agenda achievable? Will Congress choke on the cost? We'll ask the cabinet member who wrote Obama's budget and the congressman who's now the president's sparring partner. OBAMA: I'm going to keep on talking to Eric Cantor. Some day, he's going to say, "Boy, Obama had a good idea." (END VIDEO) STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Are you worried that the impression that you're not working with the -- the president, you're...