Best Ex-VP and Obama for your Stocks

I've said that Jimmy Carter is the best ex-President of my lifetime, now I'm thinking that Al Gore is our best ex-Vice President. Not that he has a whole heckuvalot of competition.

I was never a big Al Gore fan while Bill Clinton was in office, nor while he was running for President, but I finally watched his movie this weekend, An Inconvenient Truth. I tend to steer away from this type of films, like I haven't seen any of Michael Moore's films since Roger and Me. (I know someone with an editting credit on that one, though he doesn't show up on IMDB.) They tend to make my blood boil or make me feel like I'm wasting my career, or both. But I watched and it was compelling, and somniferous at the same time. Al Gore himself is the dull part, although there are spotty bits of true humor. His presentation though is strong. Like comparing the current denials and "balanced reporting" on global warming to the counter-propaganda of 40 years ago from the cigarette companies. He debunks the "balance" with facts like that in a survey of 968 peer reviewed scientific papers on global warming, exactly zero of them found that humans were not a cause. That, yes, there have been historic "warm" periods as recently as the middle ages, but there has never been carbon dioxide at its current level in the atmosphere, never above 300 parts per million, it's currently above 370 ppm. Ouch. And he squeezes the current administration on twisting the arms of scientists and editting their reports. That's something I hope the next White House reverses.

Which leads me to point at an interesting editorial from Ken Fisher, a self made billionaire and fiscal conservative who sees an Obama Presidency as not necessarily bad for Wall Street in his latest article (since these tend to disappear after a few weeks, here's the salient quote: "First, years in which Democrats capture the White House are usually bullish years for the stock market. Second, inaugural years following a Democratic win in November are better than Republican inaugural years.")