Secular bear Rosie not throwing in the towel . . . again

 Rosie was on the wrong side of the trade in April 2011 when the bear went bullish. Is he again now?

He uses the same phrase, too, "not throwing in the towel", lol.

In April 2011 he claimed he wasn't throwing in the bear towel after the S&P 500 had already recovered from the 2008 debacle. Then the market slid 20% all the way to October 3, 2011, with the index falling to 1099 again, right where it was exactly three years earlier on the very same date.

It was . . . spooky!

If you had followed his take that April, you'd have lost 20% again. On top of all your losses in 2008. Ouch. Ouch.

Many of us who had kept our powder dry couldn't believe it in October 2011. We thought we were headed back to the depths of March 2009 again, too, just like the last time the market fell to 1099. I mean, that was a free-fall from there in 2008. TARP got signed in a panic that week to stop it, to no avail.

But October 2011 turned out to be more of a retest than we realized, one of the last great buying opportunities of the period. It was a brutal, crushing period of doubt, which some of us still live with.

Now it's the reverse, with unbelievable euphoria everywhere, with the S&P 500 at 6075.

A period of euphoria seems to me like a damned strange time to throw in the bear towel again, after missing out for two years by his own admission. I have no idea if Rosie is the contrary indicator he appears to be.

But the valuation of the market is pre-1920s crazy right now. It is literally not on the charts of our experience in the post-war, or even from the roaring '20s. We have GDP of $29.354 trillion, meaning a valuation of 207, when fair value has been 81 since the Great Depression.

I'm not in it, and I intend to keep staying out, because I can.

Good luck out there to those of you who go where angels fear to tread.

Trump and Harris agreeing on ending the filibuster rule reminds me of McCain and Obama agreeing on something inadvisable in 2008

 

They both interrupted their campaigns to vote for TARP on October 1, 2008, which became law on Friday, October 3, but did nothing to stop the panic.

On Monday, October 6 Jim Cramer came on the Today Show at 7am and told people who needed their money in the next five years to sell their stocks.

The S&P 500 fell from 1099 to 848 by October 27th, almost 23%, on its way to the March 9, 2009 closing low at 676 (there was an intraday low of 666 on March 6).

Over 500 bank failures marked the era fueled by these events, and more than 6 million lost their homes.

And no one went to jail.

Nothing good will come of ending the filibuster, either, not with the country this divided.

 

Judd Gregg, Senate author of TARP bank bailouts which picked bank winners, calls Trump conservative in name only

Judd Gregg's idea of a conservative president is one who abandons free market principles in order to save the free market system.

Pot, meet kettle, kettle, pot:

There is probably nothing short of runaway inflation that does more damage to a market economy than to have the government pick who is going to be successful and who is not. It perverts the fundamental purpose of a free market, which is to allow the forces of private exchange to decide the winners and losers in commerce.

MSNBC April 2018: Nancy Pelosi insisted impeachment had to be bipartisan

Now she says she didn't say that.

Hank Paulson, who championed the crackpot TARP as Treasury Secretary under Bush 43, is a Christian Scientist

From the story:

But the reality of the existential crisis remained elusive to church officials. In 2005, Nathan Talbot and J Thomas Black, longtime church leaders who had promoted recklessly irresponsible policies encouraging the medical neglect of children, endorsed ambitious plans for raising the dead. Black argued that Eddy wanted to keep alive the possibility of defeating mortality, saying, “What would set us apart as a denomination more than raising the dead?” What indeed? Black himself has had ample opportunity to demonstrate it: he died in December 2011, and hasn’t been seen since. ...

 

So did the softening of some Christian Science attitudes suggest that the church was undergoing a genuine change of heart? Or were they trying to save their jobs, their pride and the institution? At that time, officials were grasping at relationships with ecumenical groups and New Age alternative healers – anything to boost membership. Shirley Paulson, for example, sister-in-law of former US treasury secretary Hank Paulson (also a Christian Scientist, taught by Nathan Talbot), contributed to a series of summit meetings – known as “Church Alive” – which sought to jazz up services with ideas fresh from the 1950s: reading from recent translations of the Bible (more recent than the King James version, that is), singing hymns a cappella, and urging Sunday School students to rap their narcotic weekly “Lesson Sermons”.

Neel Kashkari and other Fed members seem aware at least of the nosedive in labor's share of business income, but are oblivious to its roots in globalization

Fooling around with interest rates isn't going to bring back the core manufacturing businesses which once formed the hubs of American middle class prosperity. That will be just as ineffectual as it has been throughout the Obama administration. Why should it work now all of a sudden when it hasn't worked for ten years?

Well, what else would you expect from the man tasked with implementing the useless TARP sideshow?

Neel Kashkari still hasn't got a clue, but he sure does sound like the workers' friend.

Kashkari Says Worker Bargaining Power Should Inform Fed's Stance: 

Minneapolis Fed chief links rates to labor share in interview

Kashkari’s break from Fed tradition on inequality adds to the case for keeping interest rates low. He suggested faster wage growth and low unemployment may not be putting much upward pressure on inflation because workers have lost a lot of their bargaining power in recent decades, echoing a point Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida has made. ...

Wow, WaPo's Glenn Kessler almost becomes Rush Limbaugh, doubts Bernie's $1 trillion bailout claim

If anything, Bernie underestimates the scope of the secret loans during the financial crisis ten years ago. The Freedom of Information Act inquiry which brought them to light went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ben Bernanke only relented at the last second.

Discount Window lending behind the scenes during the crisis period soared into the multi-trillions of dollars by the time it ended in 2010 while everyone was fixated on the shiny object known as TARP ($700 billion, about a tenth the size of the generally accepted figure of $7.7 trillion). That's probably why TARP was undertaken to be honest: Oh look! A deer!

The DW loans were made to all kinds of entities for whom normal lending had disappeared. In too many cases very questionable collateral was put up. The loans were ultra-cheap, at rates unavailable to homeowners defaulting on their comparatively much more expensive mortgages because they had lost their jobs. Many of the loans rolled over and over and over again for protracted periods to keep the entities from going under, while Bush & Co. and then Obama & Co. did nothing for Joe Six-pack. Many millions lost their homes while businesses which should have gone bankrupt did not.

Hard to believe this clueless so-called fact checker still has a job.

That idiot Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire thinks Woodrow Wilson changed America for the better

He's also the idiot who wrote the TARP bailout.

And now he's the idiot who blames the Baby Boom for the programs bankrupting America: Social Security and Medicare, which pre-date it and were passed by spendthrift Democrats.

Here.

Maxine Waters is a discredited has been, got a federal TARP bailout for husband's bank

From the story in March, here:

During the height of the 2008 fiscal crisis, Waters helped arrange a meeting between the Treasury Department and top executives of a bank where her husband was a shareholder. Using her post on the House Financial Committee as leverage, she called Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson personally, asking him to meet with minority-owned banks.

When Treasury followed through, there was only one financial institution present: OneUnited. Had that bank gone under, the New York Times reported, Waters' husband would've lost as much as $350,000. Luckily for the Waters family, OneUnited received a cool $12 million in bailout funds.

After three years of special investigation, the ethics committee eventually ruled that Waters didn't technically break any rules. But that ruling came after unearthing her more than questionable family business practices, like making her grandson, Mikael Moore, her chief of staff.

Obama's Justice Sotomayor is the total and complete racist Americans should be worried about

New York Times transcript of 2001 Sotomayor speech, here, where she says physiological differences may and will make a difference in the administration of justice and make decisions better:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Senate Republicans Alexander, Bond, Collins, Grahamnesty, GreggTARP, Lugar, Martinez, Snowe and Voinovich voted to confirm her, 68-31.

Despicable Paul Ryan, Congress and Obama stiff-arm Puerto Rico bondholders who will end up fronting the inevitable taxpayer bailout

Paul Ryan is the establishment all the way. And he hasn't changed since 2008. He is not Tea Party, he is not Freedom Caucus, he is not for the taxpayer, period.

From the story here:

In essence, the bondholders will front the money for the bailout while taxpayers would have to pay them back for this cash advance.

This is something that Speaker Ryan and his allies, including the Obama Administration, don't want you to know. 

Sleeping with the enemy for 23 years, Bush cheerleader Mary Matalin switches to Libertarian Party

Quoted here:

"I'm not a Republican for a party or a person," she explained, adding she pledged party loyalty in more of a "Jeffersonian, Madisonian sense." For her, the Libertarian Party "continues to represent those constitutional principles that I agree with." Matalin, who served as the campaign director for Bush No. 41 and as an assistant to Bush No. 43, swears her latest move isn't because of Donald Trump's ascension in the GOP, noting that so far she likes what she sees. 

Elsewhere she tried to explain:

“I didn’t leave it, it left me,” she added. “When we had a standard-bearer with impeccable credentials in Ted Cruz and he’s loathed by the party leaders and he’s called a ‘wacko bird’ by the party leaders, where does that leave us? They left us!” 

Evidently this is about the complete absence of any Republican commitment to reign in the size and scope of the federal government, but why doesn't she just come out and say so if that's what this is about? You know, like maybe mention Obamacare and Cromnibus?

That said, government got pretty big and intrusive under her pals George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George W. Bush when they were presidents. Hate speech legislation, Americans with Disabilities Act, savings and loan bailouts, drugs for seniors, TARP, et cetera. Where was the libertarian outrage then, huh?

At least we know she can't stand the John McCain, Lindsey Graham wing of the Republican Party.

TARP ends, but conservatives still don't realize it was just a sideshow

Existing crisis loans 1st of the month in billion$

That TARP was just a sideshow was not known at the time in 2008, but it should be known by now.

Too bad conservatives haven't paid attention.

TARP assumed the role of the main actor on the stage of the financial panic as the liberal government of George W. Bush tried to show that it was capable of doing something to bring the panic of 2008 to an end. Bush at length signed the TARP legislation on October 3, 2008, at which point the stock markets promptly rewarded him by caving over the next three weeks, setting the stage for the final denouement by March 2009. Only Securities and Exchange Commission changes to mark-to-market accounting rules at that point stopped the cratering and put a floor under stock prices. Meanwhile behind the scenes the liberal government of Woodrow Wilson in the form of the Federal Reserve had already been hard at work for months frantically doing the real rescue.

Now that TARP is over, liberal political operatives are wont to characterize TARP as a success because it supposedly made a profit accruing to the government, and hence to The People, who are ever almighty in liberalism. They also say this to keep our eyes off the ball. "Conservatives" continue to take that bait and argue there was a loss to TARP, never examining themselves to see if they are in the larger truth. National Review's Matt Palumbo is just the latest example, here, quibbling over a few measly billions of dollar based on an argument from inflation to substantiate a loss to TARP.

It doesn't get much more pathetic than that.

TARP became the sideshow it always was once and for all when Bloomberg News, using the Freedom of Information Act, forced the Fed long after the fact in late 2010 and early 2011 to reveal the true scope of its bailout of the world in 2008-2009. Behind the scenes the rest of us had groped in the dark trying to fathom TARP's $700 billion bailout, when that turned out to be just a decimal point in the real bailout, the Fed's $7.7 trillion lending authority through the discount window and other programs.

"Conservatives" still haven't grasped this.

Over five million Americans lost their homes in the wake of the panic, almost 30 million ended up filing first time claims for unemployment in 2009 (85% more than did just last year), and almost eight years after the employment peak of 2007 full-time jobs still have not recovered, the most disgraceful record in the post-war.

The Federal Reserve bailed out hundreds upon hundreds of large banks and corporations not just in the United States but all across the globe by backstopping them with promises of huge sums if needed while regular Americans were simply left to fend for themselves:

$7.77 trillion -- The amount the Fed pledged to rescue the financial industry, according to Bloomberg research that examined announced, implied or actual upper limits on lending and guarantees. This number, which represents potential commitments, not money out the door, was first published in March 2009, when it peaked.

“One of the keys to understanding why we’ve avoided another Great Depression, so far, is to see how bold the Fed was in 2008 and 2009,” said Niall Ferguson, a Harvard University history professor. “That boldness consisted of a range of contingency commitments that backstopped the banking system. Just because they weren’t used doesn’t mean they weren’t important.”

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Actual loans at rock bottom prices over time amounted to about half that, at $3.3 trillion, as can be appreciated here in just one of the lending programs of the Fed, the famous discount window. The low interest rates charged there, a sideshow in themselves, are thought to have benefited the banks at the same time by about $13 billion, according to Bloomberg, over what they would have had to pay at market rates.

That was simply the cherry on the gargantuan crony capitalism cake, an object, I am sure, of singular fascination for the likes of the Matt Palumbos of the world.

That spike in the graph is the discount window lending in the 2008 panic

Terri Lynn Land is basically a TARP Republican, not a capitalist who believes in bankruptcy

Terri Lynn Land quoted here:

I think that doing something to protect the auto industry was the right thing to do, but I would have preferred a plan with more private financing. However, if the options were choosing between going this route and doing nothing, I am glad the auto industry was preserved and is growing again.

Bob Brinker was right in March 2003, but not until May 2009 at the earliest

Bob Brinker's gain since March 2003 when he called for his followers to fully invest in the stock market has been an impressive 7.14% per annum inflation-adjusted, on average, in the S&P500 index through March 2014.

Things didn't look anywhere near that good in April 2009, however, when his  return was still -0.45% per annum, inflation-adjusted, on average, for the 6 years plus one month. His returns had plunged at their worst to -2.32% per annum just the month before, through March 2009, because of the market crash, which of course he never saw coming and he never predicted. Bob remained fully invested into the teeth of the 2008-2009 banking apocalypse cum financial panic, and never told his followers to sell, as did Jim Cramer, infamously, the Monday after TARP was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008, a Friday, on national television no less. Who needs Monday morning coffee with that kind of news on NBC? I say Bob Brinker gets a lot of credit for that courage, and Cramer gets nothing but ridicule.

Bob Brinker's advice began to turn positive again in May 2009, as the stock market began to recover with the suspension of mark to market rules by the SEC in late March. Brinker never told anyone to get out of the markets, but soldiered on to where we are today. Was it prescience? Bull-headedness? Luck? Faith?

Here's what I think it was: Bob believes in secular markets, and he knew the secular high in 2000 was not matched in 2007 on an inflation-adjusted basis (1753), so there was no need for caution even though there might be a big correction. The financial collapse made him look like a fool for the size of it, but he knows that today even at 1967 the S&P500 remains well off the real 2000 high of 2045. We could just as easily get a big correction here before we march on to retest that real high.

Either way the market should retest the former high before the secular bear comes to an end, which means we have a bit more to go in point terms, but not very much.

I'm expecting a stock market sell order from Bob Brinker in the not very distant future as we get closer to 2045.

Anyone wanna bet we get as high as 2249?

h/t politicalcalculations.blogspot.com

Don't blame QE for the decline of the dollar, blame Bush or Greenspan or global warming or war

The decline of the dollar under QE has been nothing when compared with its decline from 2002 to 2008.

Between high water marks in early 2002 and a low beneath 70 in March 2008 the trade weighted dollar sank a whopping 36% in just six short years, 6 times more than the 6% it fell since TARP passed on October 3, 2008 and QE began in late November 2008 until now.

Say what you will about QE, but it's just dumb to blame it for a decline of the dollar.

The dollar was already dead! The dollar declined 36% during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall the dollar is down 6% since the emergency measures of 2008, but is recovering somewhat.

Memo To Larry Kudlow And Other Defenders Of GM/TARP Bailouts: Free Market Capitalism This Is Not

General Motors, bailed out at a loss to the American people in 2009, has now had to recall approximately 2.6 million vehicles according to this story, many built well after the fact:

General Motors is boosting by 971,000 the number of small cars being recalled worldwide for a defective ignition switch, saying cars from the model years 2008-2011 may have gotten the part as a replacement.

The latest move brings the total number of cars affected to 2.6 million. The questionable handling of the problem, including GM's admission that it knew the switches were possibly defective as early as 2001, has embarrassed the nation's largest automaker. The recalls — which are under investigation by Congress and federal regulators — have overshadowed the improved quality of GM's newer cars.

---------------------------------------------------

Improved quality? You mean like the Volt which catches on fire? The Cruze whose steering wheel comes off? If this were a free market capitalist economy, Larry, GM would have been allowed to fail instead of being allowed to keep on selling this garbage to the American people.

GM should have gone through bankruptcy instead of being bailed out. It might have been reorganized as a result, but not as a worthless union shop. Otherwise its assets would have been acquired by the highest bidders who know how to build cars. Unfortunately GM's still here making crummy cars with shitty parts, some of which could kill more people, all thanks to the taxpayers, some of whom are still dumb enough to keep buying the things. Just Google the forums and read the horror stories. I'll bet they're the same ones who don't know Monday is the deadline to sign up for ObamaCare.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: no more GM cars for me, ever. The bailout was a bridge too far.

Ditto Chrysler.

Arguably Obama's 2008 Election Caused All The Job Losses, And We Still Have Not Recovered

total nonfarm employees n.s.a. 1/07-2/14

Arguably the response of business to the election of Obama was outright fear, leading to record job losses. And just as arguably, Obama's class warfare rhetoric has justified those fears. The number one enemy of a communist after all, is a climber. You wouldn't know that of course because the socialist fellow travelers who've taught you and your kids since the 1960s conveniently left that out of the narrative. But that is a separate story.

The fact of the matter is, the so-called Great Recession had already been long in the tooth on election day 2008, and total nonfarm had declined just 2.7 million from its zenith in November 2007 at 139,443,000. But there is really nothing out of keeping for such a large decline given that total nonfarm usually falls off at the end of calendar years. A good example which raised no alarms at the time was in December 1998 when total nonfarm fell 2.7 million . . . in one month.

December 2008 was the worst month on record for t.n.f.

But more people lost their jobs in the first full month following the 2008 election than in any other month in the data series. For a country which supposedly saw Obama as a savior, the response of business was clearly otherwise: nearly 30 million Americans went on to make first time claims for unemployment in 2009 because they lost their jobs in his wake, 13.3 million more than in George Bush's best year 2006 when such claims came in just over 16 million. You can call business a bunch of spineless cowards who took the everyman for himself approach. But isn't that what the healthcare industry did when faced with ObamaCare? Play along to get along, or face the consequences. Few are the fighters for principle who sacrifice themselves for a cause. The only people we have who even make a pretence of doing that do it safely atop places like Berkshire Hathaway (taxes), Apple (global warming), Microsoft (birth control), the Oval Office and the well of the US Senate where no man can touch them.

total nonfarm employees, n.s.a., 2/07-2/14, monthly arrows

The data show that the bottom for total nonfarm did not drop out until December 2008. Nearly 3.7 million Americans lost their jobs in December 2008 alone, the most on record. November 2008 had been only a warning of what was coming. By the end of that month, in which the general election had occurred on November 4, just over a million total nonfarm employees lost their jobs. The dust settled at 135,656,000 on December 1st. Then as December unfolded, the bottom fell out with total nonfarm dropping to 131,965,000. And one year later, despite "jobs saved or created", the February 2009 stimulus, cash for clunkers, TARP and the GM, Chrysler and AIG bailouts, scores of big bank failures and trillions of dollars of cheap loans by the Federal Reserve to all and sundry banks and businesses here and abroad, total nonfarm fell another 4.2 million to 127,736,000.

And where are we today? On February 1, 2014, after 5 full years of Obama, total nonfarm is 136,183,000, barely 200,000 jobs ahead of where we were at this same point in 2007. While the trend has clearly been positive for total nonfarm, with a consistent pattern of higher, if muted, highs and lower lows alternating summers and winters as is typical of the data series, the profile of total nonfarm remains terribly weak.

usually work full time 2/07-2/14, n.s.a.

Consider that those who work usually full time today are 2.7 million fewer in number than at this same point in 2007, the record year for full time jobs and for total nonfarm jobs, despite adding 15 million to the population.

part time for economic reasons 2/07-2/14, s.a.

And while those who work usually part time are up nearly 2.4 million, those working part time for economic reasons remain up almost 3 million, seasonally adjusted, February 2007 to February 2014.

For the last four full years monthly job growth has averaged barely 167,000 new jobs per month. Compare that to a Clinton or Reagan when job growth clipped along at an average of 235,000-250,000 per month for years.

I predict jobs will come back when Obama goes away, unless of course Hillary Clinton becomes president. Right now I can't think of a better candidate to complete the job of eradicating the middle class. She'll burn through them like she does through jet fuel and vodka.

Mish: Credit Dwarfs Money Supply

Just as the Fed's overnight window dwarfed TARP in the 2008 panic.

Mish hits a homer, here:

I have little doubt the Fed (central bankers in general) will step on the money supply spigot in response to another slowdown. But credit dwarfs money supply. Once again, those who view inflation and deflation in the myopic eyes of money supply alone will come to the wrong conclusions about prices of goods, services and assets, just as they did in 2008 when they thought hyperinflation was just around the corner. Those who understand credit and credit market to market will get the picture right. I repeat my claim that I made in 2007. The US will go in and out of deflation over the course of a number of years. Deflation is once again nearly at hand, but Europe will be first.

Obama thinks he has achievements, which must mean he is suffering a psychosis

From the long story in The New Yorker, here, by image-accommodating biographer David Remnick:

As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's see.

Starting with the economic rescue, Obama said at the time in early 2009 that he had more than enough on his plate without having to worry about the financial crisis.

So who fixed that?

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. While everyone was fixated on the controversy over TARP and the crony capitalist, fascist character of that bailout in the mere hundreds of billions of dollars as millions of Americans were losing their homes, behind the scenes the Fed was providing multiple trillions of dollars of short-term loans to just about any bank or business in the world which was in trouble, at rock-bottom low interest rates which homeowners could only dream about, right into 2010. They all got fixed while 5.6 million Americans went on to lose their homes through 2013.

And what did Obama do in response to that?

Disgracefully fire Bernanke in public by saying he'd overstayed his time at the Fed, but that came only long after everything looked like it was truly stabilized. And I do mean "looked". The fact of the matter is extraordinary measures remain in place at the Fed because the banks' condition is still not healthy enough to do without them. When those end, the crisis will be truly over, not before. The rescue is still underway, with no end in sight.

Then there's the 44 months of job growth claim. Well, the truth is we are in the 72nd month of the jobs recession as we speak today, the longest jobs recession in the history of the post-war by a long shot. Bush's had been the longest previously, at 47 months. And it is estimated that the current jobs recession will not be over for another 6 months, which means we'll finally have matched the number of payroll jobs which existed at the time the recession began, but only after about 6.5 years have gone by.

But that says nothing about a return to normalcy. Include the shortfall which exists in the numbers because of net population growth over the period and the country will still be in a serious jobs deficit once the jobs recession is over, and for a long time to come without some major driver for jobs appearing on the scene.

Finally, I'm not sure how anyone measures a reduction in carbon emissions when China keeps them billowing into the air at a record rate, burning coal and oil in huge quantities. Obama can point to the closing down of coal power plants in this country if he wants, but all that does is make American electricity more expensive as China's waves of pollution waft ever eastward over the Pacific, polluting our air, water and farmland.

But if anyone's contributing to the reduction in carbon emissions in this country, it's the American worker who isn't working. Travel on the road in this country has been stuck at levels first reached between 2004 and 2005 for five long years because so many people no longer have a job to which to commute. Every month that goes by shows the same statistical result: no progress in miles traveled back to the levels of the 2007 peak. It's an odd thing to be taking credit for.

If it is clear from these facts that Obama is delusional and lives in a separate reality, it is also clear from Remnick's story that Obama has to work hard at crafting it, even about what is probably at the heart of his mental problems in the first place: 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Why does the smartest president ever have to edit everything, all the time, until it makes sense to him?

Who do you call to have the president committed?