NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The stock selloff worsened near midday Tuesday as reports of slumping stocks in China and Europe and a steep decline in durable goods orders raised worries that the recent rally may be tapped out.

News that Vice President Dick Cheney was the apparent target in a Taliban suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan added to the morning concerns.

The Dow Jones industrial average (down 151.09 to 12,481.17, Charts) sank about 1 percent roughly two hours into the session, as did the broader S&P 500 (down 17.44 to 1,431.93, Charts) index. Both blue-chip averages have fallen for the last four sessions.

The Nasdaq (down 42.39 to 2,462.13, Charts) composite slumped 1.5 percent after having slid for the last two sessions.

Market selloff: Year of the bear?
Treasury bonds rallied as investors sought a safe place to park their money while the dollar fell.

Chinese stocks slumped 9 percent Tuesday - the worst one-day selloff in a decade - on concerns that the government would interfere to cool the speculation that drove the Shanghai market up 130 percent last year. (Full story).

Other Asian markets slumped in tandem. European shares also tumbled in late trade.

The slump in world markets exacerbated concerns that Wall Street is due for a selloff after a nearly eight-month rally that has sent the Dow industrials to record highs and the Nasdaq and S&P 500 to more than 6-year highs.

“The selloff certainly demonstrates somewhat starkly the inter-connectedness of stock markets around the world,” said Hugh Johnson, chief strategist at ThomasLloyd Global Asset Management.

“Markets can decline in one seemingly isolated part of the world and that decline can be transmitted to other parts of the world through the psychology,” he said.

More at CNN.com

Also in financial news:

Panic has begun to sweep the sub-prime mortgage sector in the United States after the bankruptcy of 22 lenders over the past two months, setting off mass liquidation of housing loans packaged as securities.

Analysts say the housing bust is pulling America into recession, citing a 14.4pc drop in housing starts

The rapid deterioration could not come at a worse time for British bank HSBC, which has set aside $10.5bn (£5.4bn) to cover bad loans in the US.

The cost of insuring against default on these loans has rocketed in recent weeks, from 50 basis points over Libor to 1,200, raising fears that a credit crunch could spread to the rest of the property market.

Low-grade BBB-rated securities - measured by the ABX index - have crashed from near par of 100 in early November to 72.5 this week.

Peter Schiff, head of Euro Pacific Capital, said the sector was in an unstoppable meltdown. “It’s a self-perpetuating spiral: as sub-prime companies tighten lending they create even more defaults,” he said.

More about this here

H/T Patriot for this second article. If you’re wanting financial news and feel like getting really depressed, just read our comments section. Our ever knowledgeable friend Bur$atil posts plenty on the financial woes of the world!!!

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I believe there’s 4 more American troops killed today, too.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A car bomb exploded Tuesday near a park popular with young soccer players, killing at least 18 boys in a city west of Baghdad known as a center of the Sunni insurgency, police said. The attack occurred just three days after more than 50 people were killed outside a mosque in a nearby village where the imam had spoken out against the group al-Qaida in Iraq - pointing to an increasingly bloody attempts to silence its opponents. But the deaths of the boys, aged 10 to 15, left authorities grasping for a possible motive.

The bomb-rigged car blew apart late Tuesday afternoon while the boys were playing in central Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Both local police and state television said 18 boys died.

The Interior Ministry did not immediately return calls for further details of the attack. U.S. Marines are stationed near Ramadi.

It was not immediately known if the children were the intended targets, but young people are often caught in Iraq’s daily bloodshed. On Sunday, more than 40 people, mostly college students, were killed in a bombing outside a mostly Shiite college in Baghdad.

Read more here

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Bush said Iraq would have to set up such a meeting…..and they have. Now let’s see if we attend. Seems the Iraqi’s have that part of this right. They don’t want to be a divider, but a uniter. Good on them…..

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Officials from regional states including Iran and Syria will join U.S. and British envoys at a meeting in Baghdad next month to seek ways to stabilize Iraq, the Iraqi foreign minister said on Tuesday.

The mid-March meeting would be a chance for Western and regional powers to try to bridge some of their differences over Iraq, Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said.

“Our hope is that this will be an ice-breaking attempt for maybe holding other meetings in the future. We want Iraq, instead of being a divisive issue, to be a unifying issue,” Zebari said by telephone from Denmark where he is on a visit.

In December, the bipartisan U.S. Iraq Study Group issued a report on the Iraq war in which it recommended the United States hold direct talks with Damascus and Tehran to persuade them to help stem the violence in Iraq.

President Bush reacted coolly to that proposal. Bush has not ruled out a regional conference to help Iraq, involving Iran and Syria, but the White House has indicated Iraq would have to set it up.

Read more at Reuters

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Ahhhhh this one must really piss off Cheney and Bush and their oil buds.

CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez ordered by decree on Monday the takeover of oil projects run by foreign oil companies in Venezuela’s Orinoco River region.

Chavez had previously announced the government’s intention to take a majority stake by May 1 in four heavy oil-upgrading projects run by British Petroleum PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Total SA and Statoil ASA.

He said Monday that has decreed a law to proceed with the nationalizations that will see state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, taking at least a 60 percent stake in the projects.

“The privatization of oil in Venezuela has come to an end,” he said on his weekday radio show, “Hello, President.” “This marks the true nationalization of oil in Venezuela.”

By May 1, “we will occupy these fields” and have the national flag flying on them, he said.

Read more at YahooNews

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica - Tens of thousands of union members, farmers and political activists marched through Costa Rica’s capital on Monday to protest a free-trade pact with the U.S. they say will be harmful to local businesses.

Costa Rica is the only one of six Latin American signatories to the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, that has not yet ratified the accord. Legislators are awaiting a court ruling to clear procedural issues before voting on it.

Some of the protesters who took part in Monday’s march carried signs reading “The North is Invading us Again” and “Farmers equal extinct species.”

Much of the opposition stems from requirements under the pact that Costa Rica open its telecommunications, services and agricultural sectors to greater competition. Employees of the state-run telecom company were a major contingent in the march.

Also Monday, the newspaper Al Dia published a poll showing that 47 percent of Costa Ricans support ratifying the accord, compared to 34 percent that are opposed. The rest had no response. The pollsters interviewed 1,215 people, and the margin of error was 3 percent.

The free trade deal has taken effect in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Dominican Republic, a Caribbean nation, was included in the pact, but its implementation there has been delayed by the need for changes in domestic laws.

Costa Rica’s Congress failed to approve the pact under former President Abel Pacheco, who had argued that lawmakers needed to pass a series of fiscal reform measures before considering it.

Current President Oscar Arias, who took office last year, is a strong supporter of the agreement.

Source: Yahoo News

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According to directors James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici, Jesus did not ascend to heaven upon his death. Rather, his remains, along with those of his wife and son, have been found.

This is sure to agitate a handful or two of people. Kinda knocks that last leg out from under Intelligent Design. Sorry Kansas!

Click for article: Tomb could be of Jesus, wife and son: directors

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Tell me again…… who doesn’t support our troops???? Send them in without the proper equipment, and without the proper training and then when they get severly wounded, screw them again when they come home. Makes me sick.

WASHINGTON - Rushed by President Bush’s decision to reinforce Baghdad with thousands more U.S. troops, two Army combat brigades are skipping their usual session at the Army’s premier training range in California and instead are making final preparations at their home bases.

Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to question the switch, which is not widely known. They wonder whether it means the Army is cutting corners in preparing soldiers for combat, since they are forgoing training in a desert setting that was designed specially to prepare them for the challenges of Iraq.

Army officials say the two brigades will be as ready as any others that deploy to Iraq, even though they will not have the benefit of training in counterinsurgency tactics at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., which has been outfitted to simulate conditions in Iraq for units that are heading there on yearlong tours.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Monday she is concerned about the “less-than-ideal training situation” for the 4th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based in her state and is one of the two brigades that did its final training at home. That brigade is to go to Iraq in April, one month earlier than planned.

Read more at Examiner.com

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Ok, I just put another post up that stated: The attack came as a city-wide security plan failed to halt the vicious sectarian carnage between Sunni and Shiite armed groups in Baghdad, which has seen a surge in bomb and mortar attacks since Saturday. Oh ok, so the only thing they can say is execution style killings are down. But overall, the sectarian violence is UP. Gimme a friggin break. How stupid do they think we are??? There’s still 1449 Iraqis dead so far this month and 76 coalition casualties. Yah…..things are going great with the new security crackdown.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Execution’style killings have fallen sharply in Baghdad since the security crackdown began this month, the No. 2 U.S. commander said Tuesday.

Figures compiled by The Associated Press from police reports show that the number of bullet-riddled bodies found in the streets this month totaled 628 as of Monday night. That was down from the 1,079 in January and 1,379 in December.

Such killings have generally been attributed to sectarian death squads - including Shiite militiamen, Sunni insurgents or rogue elements within the mostly Shiite army and police.

Read more at YahooNews

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Iraq’s cabinet has agreed a draft law which would regulate how the country’s oil wealth would be shared between its ethnic and sectarian communities.

The law, which will now be sent to the parliament for approval, will also set out terms regulating how foreign oil firms will be able to operate in Iraq.

Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister and head of the committee that drafted the law, told Reuters news agency on Sunday: “The council of ministers in an extraordinary meeting today approved the draft of the national hydrocarbon law.

“The law is hoped to enable Iraq to achieve its potential and utilise its revenues for the benefit of all Iraqi people.”

Kurdish concerns

The government of Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, had pledged to reach an agreement on an oil law by the end of 2006 but missed its self-imposed deadline due to Kurdish concerns about relations between the regions and Baghdad.

After the agreement al-Maliki said: “The benefits of this wealth will form a firm pillar for the unity of Iraqis and consolidate their social structure.”

The Kurdish government had reservations about the wording regarding the powers of a federal council, to be established under the law, which would set oil policy and lay down ground rules for contracts signed with foreign firms.

Officials from Kurdistan, where relative security has encouraged more development than elsewhere in Iraq, had said they wanted assurances that the federal council will not invalidate their existing contracts.

The draft law would allow the Kurdish regional government to review the contracts it has signed to ensure consistency with the terms of the new law, Salih said.

Read more at AlJazeera

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Somebody explain to me why we can’t manufacture these vehicles in America? I think the troops should have whatever it takes to protect them, but why can’t we make them? Just asking……..

JERUSALEM (AFP) - An Israeli firm is to sell the United States 60 armoured vehicles for use by its troops in Iraq.

The Golan vehicles, produced by the Rafael firm, are valued at 37 million dollars and will be delivered within three months, army radio said Tuesday.

The 15-tonne armoured vehicle is designed to transport 10 soldiers and their equipment. It was first unveiled in September 2006 and four months later the US army ordered 60 of the vehicles, which are not yet used by Israeli forces.

The Golan is fitted with a “floating floor” to reduce the effects of exploding mines and is “particularly adapted to operations in densely populated urban zones,” according to its manufacturer.

Israeli arms producers are already providing US troops in Iraq with drones, rockets and armour for tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

Source: YahooNews

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Already, signs point to this new plan in Iraq not working.

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Police probing how a bomb was smuggled into a Baghdad ministry in a bid to kill Iraq’s Shiite vice president believe the attack was carried out by an insider.

“Thirty-five employees of the public works ministry are now under interrogation by the interior ministry about how the bomb was brought into the building,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Tuesday.

“Most of them are bodyguards and ministry security men,” he said, adding that those wounded in the explosion will be questioned once they recover.

Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi escaped with little more than a few scratches when a bomb exploded Monday next to a room in the ministry where he was attending a function, but five people were killed.

The attack came as a city-wide security plan failed to halt the vicious sectarian carnage between Sunni and Shiite armed groups in Baghdad, which has seen a surge in bomb and mortar attacks since Saturday.

Read more at YahooNews

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Olbermann - Special Comment: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s comparison of Saddam to Hitler is not accurate. On “Fox News Sunday” Feb. 25, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paralleled World War II with the state of Iraq when discussing what would happen if Congress were to revise the Iraq authorization.

H/T Twolf1 for video

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For this post I’ll go by my Mom’s words: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anthing at all.”

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - A suicide bomber on foot killed and wounded some two dozen people outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, officials said. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said Cheney was the target.

The blast happened near the first of several security gates outside the base at Bagram, north of the capital Kabul. Cheney’s spokeswoman said he was fine, and the U.S. Embassy said the vice president later met with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

There were conflicting reports on the death toll. Provincial Gov. Abdul Jabar Taqwa said 20 people were killed, but NATO said initial reports indicated only three were killed, including one U.S. soldier and 1 coalition soldier. NATO said 23 were wounded. It was unclear why there was such a large discrepancy in the reports.

Read more MSNBC

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(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

There are those who complain the Bush administrationA-s federal budget proposal is wildly unrealistic, that they undercount war casualties, and that Bush’s proposed escalation could actually run up to 48,000 troops, double his claims.

Those so quick to condemn Bush would do well to remember Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or ignorance).

Can anyone not blindly partisan doubt that George W. Bush wants to be the very best president he can be? Can anyone doubt his commitment to excellence, and his desire to command every relevant fact on every pressing situation?

The Bush detractors are wrong. George W. Bush and his top officials are not evil, or even misguided. Instead, like millions of Americans, they hide a shameful secret: They-re not good at math.
Read more »

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(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

(Right-click on the cartoon and open in a new window for a slightly larger image)

Apologies for partially recapping a previous blog title, but I love this Doonesbury strip from Sunday, 10-9-05, and that line from Ecclesiastes really, really fits both this strip and Bush. This strip wonderfully articulates, with satire, an idea I remember struggling to express clearly back in a college piece. The stupidity of leaders or the pointlessness of a mission do not diminish the heroism of the troops themselves. Troops only die in vain if we are too stupid to learn from our mistakes or face our own vanities. Having the courage to admit someone acted heroically, but died unnecessarily, can be essential for preventing more unnecessary deaths. No one should die for pride and image alone, and the pain of facing the harsh truth of a given mistake is as nothing to the pain of actually dying or the pain of mourning a loved one. To pretend otherwise is dreadful, deadly vanity.

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