ROAD TRIP

From a road trip through Pennsylvania to revisit some old times as a graduate student/instructor at the Pennsylvania State University in 1976-77.

This is 136 Longmeadow Lane, our home in State College. It was new in 1976 (we were the first tenants) and the neighborhood has hardly changed in the 30-plus years since we left.

Sunset Park, immediately behind our duplex. The house that is barely visible in the center background belongs to Joe Paterno, the head coach of the Nittany Lions.

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a small town about 20 miles from State College. The older parts of the town along the river don't appear to have changed from 1977.

The river and park that run through downtown are still as pretty as ever.

Rural Pennsylvania is still beautiful country.

GALVESTON ISLAND - 1 YEAR LATER

These were taken on the western side of Galveston Island looking out into the Gulf of Mexico. There is little evidence remaining of the devastation caused by hurricane Ike just under a year ago.


The beaches are clean and almost fully restored, although there is some beach erosion in places and there are a few piers that haven't been either demolished or fully restored.


Downtown Galveston has been almost fully restored. The port area and tourist district were busy, with a cruise ship in port, and this offshore drilling platform appeared ready to be towed out into the Gulf.


Hard to believe the island was almost completely devastated less than a year ago.

IS OBAMA'S LOSS WALL STREET'S GAIN?

Jim Cramer seems to think so. Cramer plotted the Obama disapproval numbers against the S&P 500 performance index and found a nearly identical trend line since the March low. I tend to agree with Cramer, though for somewhat different reasons, as I posted as far back as last March (here and here).

Here's a chart similar to that Cramer showed. I've plotted President Obama's approval index as taken from the Rasmussen daily tracking poll against the Dow Jones Industrial Average (year-to-date) taken from the CNN Money web site. The Obama approval index is in black; the DJIA is in lighter blue behind it.

Until early March, the two indices both declined, almost in lockstep; then in March they began to diverge, and as shown, the DJIA is increasing at about the same rate that Obama's approval is declining.


And, yes, I know correlation does not imply causation.

My speculation is that it took roughly the first two months of the Obama administration for Wall Street to realize that the administration is simply incompetent and decide to "go it alone." In that sense, Wall Street was about two months behind the American people, who came to the same realization much earlier.

The tea parties and now the health care townhall debates are simply the physical manifestations of that realization.

Hat tip to Instapundit.