AOL: Dumb as dirt

OK, so they swindled Time Warner out of billions of dollars worth of stock, but what have they done lately?

Nothing, except give every Internet user a reason never to trust AOL again.

Dead man walking

It ain't good news for Phil Angelides when the billionaire Hollywood left endorses Schwarzenegger.

Meet the nutroots

Clintonista Lanny Davis, working on the Lieberman campaign, discovers the tolerance of the left:

• On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

• "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).

• "Joe Lieberman is a racist and a religious bigot" (by "greenskeeper," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

Davis, who has been living in a frickin' bubble all of his life, is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that liberals can be mean, vicious, and racist.

Read the whole thing. His naivete is a laugh a minute.

If there were no laws, there would be no criminals

Who would have thought? Just months after taking power in Italy, the new government has a solution to prison overcrowding: let the prisoners run free!

But as a stream of released prisoners began heading straight back into the cells - one for attempting to strangle his former wife, others for attempted robbery - Italians began asking themselves if Romano Prodi's government had fully thought the measure through.

Who would have thought?

But that's not to say no one in Italian politics has any sense:

Antonio Mazzocchi, an MP with the right-wing National Alliance, suggested the first 700 prisoners rearrested should be put under house arrest, in the homes of the MPs who had voted in favour of the measure.

Uh-oh

Expect some turmoil in the markets from this today.

BP, formerly British Petroleum and now advertising with the slogan "Beyond Petroleum," has a deceptive environmental image. They are still a big oil company, warts and all, but they invest a very small amount in alternative energy. They make solar cells for example. BP's annual revenue is in the hundreds of billions, and profits were $32 billion last year. So their commitment to invest $8 billion over 10 years in alternative energy is a drop in the bucket. That's like if Enron announced that they planned to invest $25 million in apple pie and puppy dogs for little girls. Investing three months' worth of oil profits over ten years? That makes them "Beyond Petroleum?"

Nevertheless, the public falls for it. Ask environmentally conscious consumers, and you'll hear "BP good, Exxon bad."

Jeremy Siegel: weight your index by dividends

I like this idea:

"Value-based" portfolios and fundamentally-weighted indexes generally have produced higher long-term returns than comparable capitalization-weighted indexes over various historical periods tested (all assume the reinvestment of dividends).

Similarly, research that I and others have done supports the conclusion that weighting stocks by some fundamental metric of value, such as dividends, sales, or earnings, instead of by market value, has historically resulted in generally lower portfolio volatility than weighting by market-capitalization. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results and there are limits on the inferences we can draw from research results and back-tested index data. However, I believe the data on fundamentally-weighted indexes are compelling.

I'm a big fan of indexing in general, and anything to improve returns even marginally interests me. I'm going to do more reading about this, and look into the existing funds Siegel mentions. I suspect that this is a real opportunity to beat capitalization-weighted indexes over the long term.

Civilians at home

Check out this video of civilians going about their daily lives in southern Lebanon. You'll love the ending.

And while you're at it, this chart is good news / bad news. Fewer fatalities and injuries, but still lots of rockets. Hopefully the past day or two have been better, as Israel makes progress with its ground offensive.

But, wait... there's more! Euroweenies will not call Hezbollah a "terrorist organization." That's classic! They are too afraid of terrorists to call them terrorists!

Man, Vital Perspective is a great blog!

HT: Powerline via Ace of Spades.