News is important information that may influence your investments. Noise is talk or buzz or some headline that prevents you from seeing a story clearly. News is useful. Noise is a distraction. Calling what's noise and news after the fact is easy.

Maria Bartiromo




Funny thing how this terrible new practice of making sure people who get on a plane in this country are safe has suddenly come to dominate the news the last few days. Maybe 2% of people who go through security are being searched in a more effective way. There are as always with something like this a lot of outraged voices heard and a lot of botched implementation of the TSA policies. My question is, why has this suddenly become the most important talking point coming out of the conservative message machine. Lots of outrage and lots of misinformation filling up a lot of TV talk time and print space that contained information on other issues. Whatever happened to the unemployment extension votes and the Bush tax cut fight. I had started to notice that people seemed to be paying a little more attention to what the Republicans in Congress have been up to and not in a good way. Then there is the report that just came out showing that big business profits are the highest in recorded history this year combined with the announcement that unemployment will remain high for a long time. A lot of people don’t seem to be able to take in more than one issue at a time and it funny how something always seems to come up to distract them just when they seem engaged. But no jobs or unemployment benefits and more money going into the richest pockets so we can have even more debt does not matter. Hell, being groped in the airport might be the highlight of your holiday.