I Love This

WASHINGTON - The rival presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama traded accusations of nasty politics Wednesday over Hollywood donor David Geffen, who once backed Bill Clinton but now supports his wife's top rival.

The Clinton campaign demanded that Obama denounce comments made by the DreamWorks movie studio founder, who told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Wednesday's editions that while "everybody in politics lies," the former president and his wife "do it with such ease, it's troubling."

The Clinton camp also called on Obama to give back Geffen's $2,300 contribution.

Campaigning in Iowa, Obama refused. "It's not clear to me why I'd be apologizing for someone else's remark," the Illinois senator said.

Pretty funny stuff. Hillary is in a dogfight and isn't really sure what to do with her top Democrat contender. She is the tired sequel and he is the new box office smash and she is getting concerned that she won't be filling the seats. Perhaps there will be some redeeming entertainment value to this whole fiasco.

As the blog title says...This oughta be good.

Fighting Back

Been a challenging month in the old trading account. I often use the word challenging to reflect issues in my life or a tough day...at least I try to look at it in those terms instead of, "My day sucked" or "Nothing is going right". Those kinds of statements are self defeating and imply that the difficulties (a relative term of course) in this world are gaining the upper hand on you. Granted, there are moments where I don't really feel like fighting back but hopefully those are few and far in between. But if I say something is "challenging" then it conveys the idea that even though I may be struggling I believe it is a battle that I can win...which then becomes a battle that will be won. It is quite true that life is often defined by how you view it. Obviously, the fact that we have God on our side should trump any feeling of despair, even over the little annoyances that come our way, but we are human and it is seemingly impossible to live in that victory 24/7. So, this is just one method I use to get me through.

Reminds me of the old Kirstie Alley line from Cheers..."I knew that positive thinking crap wouldn't work and sure enough, it didn't."

So anyway, the personal trading has been challenging this month. The goal of 10% per month is looking like a stretch for February. There are 6 trading days left this month and it is going to have to go perfectly to hit my bogey. The good news is that I am back to even for the month after being down almost 10% a few days ago thanks to a few bad breaks and not believing this market could make another leg higher. So when the market took off last week on Bernanke's comments that the economy was strong and inflation was under control I wasn't positioned properly. Nothing like seeing lots of green on the screen...except in my account. At the same time you want to be prudent and not chase so I ended up in no man's land. Things worked much better today as I have repositioned a bit. Hopefully, this will be the start of a nice little run. Only time will tell but one thing remains certain...I will keep battling the challenges.