Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Wall Street “abruptly ended an earnings-driven rally and closed sharply lower Thursday after a steeper-than-expected decline in existing home sales and worries about the financial sector chilled the market’s recent optimism. The major indexes fell about 2 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which lost more than 275 points.”
* How bad were the housing numbers? “Sales of existing homes fell more sharply than expected in June as the housing industry continued to be bruised by the worst slump in more than two decades. The National Association of Realtors reported that sales dropped by 2.6 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.86 million units. That was more than double the decline that had been expected and left sales 15.5 percent below where they were a year ago. The downward slide in sales depressed prices, too.”
* On a related note, first-time unemployment claims rose last week to the highest level in nearly four months. The jobless numbers were worse than economists’ predicted.
* Bloodshed in Baghdad: “Iraqi police say at least eight people have been killed in a suicide bombing at a checkpoint manned by U.S.-allied Sunni guards northeast of Baghdad. A police officer says…. at least eight guards were killed and 24 other people were wounded. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.”
* He’s a very poor choice, given the task at hand: “Former CIA Director Porter Goss has been appointed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) as co-chairman of the new Office of Congressional Ethics.”
* If journalists would stop letting Drudge dictate their lives, I’m sure the rest of us would appreciate it.
* Oh dear: “The major Sunni sheik who John McCain said was protected by the surge and subsequently helped lead the Anbar Awakening, was actually assassinated by an al-Qaeda led group in midst of the surge.”
* On a related note, Karl Rove is willing to acknowledge that McCain screwed up the surge timeline, but he’d prefer that none of us notice. When Alan Colmes brought it up last night on Fox News, Rove said, “Look, let’s not get into this,” and adding, “[D]on’t make a big deal of it.”
* The right is raising a fuss about Obama’s decision not to use campaign funds to visit U.S. troops stationed in Germany. Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs explained, “During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops. For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign.”
* McCain’s principal talking point today was that he doesn’t think presidential candidates should give foreign speeches until after they’re in office. This, of course, contradicts McCain’s own record.
* Obama was in Germany. McCain was in a German restaurant.
* You’ve got to be kidding: “The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed ‘in good faith’ that harsh techniques used to break the will of prisoners, including waterboarding, would not cause ‘prolonged mental harm.'”
* An increasingly regional disease? “AIDS specialists are calling for a fundamental rethinking of HIV policy after a new report showed that infection with the virus was rising dramatically in the South even as it dropped everywhere else in the country.”
* Don’t be too surprised if sometime soon, Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, announces his desire to spend more time with his family.
* Attorney General Michael Mukasey thinks the Vice President is part of the executive branch. Will wonders never cease.
* How many Democratic Senate candidate support net neutrality this year? All of them.
* When Dems say McCain seems to have forgotten about the war in Afghanistan, we mean that literally.
* The questions in Fox News polls are always so darn amusing.
* And finally, Color of Change and MoveOn.org launched an initiative to bring attention to racism on Fox News. Stephen Colbert devoted half his show last night to bringing attention to the project. Good for him.
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.
