I've seen stocks marked for takeovers ... and haven't tracked them enough to know whether to pick up the parent company or the company being taken over. I would appreciate some education, please.

I do tend to buy for long term and am telling myself this is a buyer's market. But it's a REAL spooky buyer's market and there are days when I have to go back and look at the recession markets of the 70's to sort of get a sense of perspective.

Motley Fool had some site recommendations that I thought were interesting. This site tells you the number of stocks being shorted for the past number of months (you get to pick the months) for any stock, and the percentage of total trades that represents:
http://www.viwes.com/invest/shorts/

They also recomended this one:
http://www.multexinvestor.com/home.asp
Haven't done much reading at the site, but thought y'all might find it interesting as well.