There Is No Lie Obama Will Not Tell

"[T]he Supreme Court has been overturning acts of Congress ever since [1803], on average every 16 months. So overturning Obamacare would be about as unprecedented as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning. ...

"Franklin Roosevelt called the [National Recovery Act of 1933] 'the most important and far-reaching ever enacted by the American Congress.' But that didn’t stop the Supreme Court from overturning it in May 1935, by a vote of 9-0.

"The National Recovery Act passed the House by a large majority and the Senate by 46-39. The “strong majority” mentioned by Obama in the passage of Obamacare did not exist. . . . It garnered not a single Republican vote in either house, the first time so important a piece of legislation was passed on a totally partisan basis.

"As I said, one can only admire his chutzpah. It seems there is simply no lie President Obama will not tell in pursuit of his agenda. He can count on the mainstream media buying it, but will anyone else?"

-- John Steele Gordon, "Presidential Chutzpah"

Don't miss the full opinion, here.

The Law Isn't The Only Jackass

On Political Violence

"I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him."

-- George Orwell on Adolf Hitler, 1940

Evidently Obama Learned Hostility Toward Marbury v. Madison (1803) at Harvard Law

From an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, pointing out there would be nothing unprecedented in the Supreme Court overturning ObamaCare:

In Marbury in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall laid down the doctrine of judicial review. In the 209 years since, the Supreme Court has invalidated part or all of countless laws on grounds that they violated the Constitution. All of those laws were passed by a "democratically elected" legislature of some kind, either Congress or in one of the states. And no doubt many of them were passed by "strong" majorities.

Read the full opinion rebuking Obama's complaint about judicial activism here.

I don't buy the argument that Obama is ignorant of these fundamentals of the history of American law. I think he's hostile towards them, and wants them all swept away, along with the Constitution.

Without Low Valuations and Widespread Skepticism, True Bull Markets Are Not Born

From Joseph Calhoun at Alhambrapartners.com:

"Bull markets are born from low valuations and widespread skepticism, neither of which is extant in the current environment. At best, stocks are currently at average historical valuations; at worst, based on measures such as the Shiller P/E, they are considerably overvalued. Sentiment, as measured by the various surveys, is approaching euphoric levels. I don’t know yet what will upset the bullish mood but the last few years have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when it happens, the move down will not be pleasant for the fully invested."

Read the full entry here.

John Hussman Notices Troubling Upward Revisions to Initial Claims Data

And remarks how few others have noticed:

"[W]e've been watching the new unemployment claims data for some time. Almost without fail, when a new number is released, the new claims figure for the previous week is revised upward by about 3000 or so. Last week, we saw an unusual revision in new claims data, not just for the previous week, but in months of prior releases, with upward revisions averaging about 10,000 in the most recent reports (e.g. the Feb 25 figure was revised from 354,000 to 373,000). ... Given that so much investor enthusiasm has focused on the new claims figures, it's interesting that the large and generally upward revisions in months of prior data seemed to go virtually unnoticed."

Read his complete remarks here.

Obama Calls Supremes "An Unelected Group of People" Like That's a Problem

Now that we know that the constitutional "scholar" grasps the fact that the Supremes are not elected but appointed by the president, I guess we can safely conclude that Obama's period of learning the ropes of the presidency is finally over.

It took him long enough, except all we've really learned is that he thinks that's wrong and that the Supremes should be elected, or subservient to the Congress, at his beck and call, or something.

Here's the line:

"That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law."

Here's the source.

Isn't it the argument of the likes of Obama that the Civil War was fought to overturn the duly constituted and passed laws upheld by the Supremes' Dred Scott decision?

Just doing our job, sir.

A tirade like this from a president should be an automatic verdict against the law, just to put him in his place for a change, since no one else seems to have the balls to do it.

Current Federal Spending Implies a Head Tax of $12,338 on Every Man, Woman, Child

$3.8 trillion in spending divided by population of 308 million equals $12,338 per person this fiscal year, including every baby and everyone in a nursing home.

It would probably be as popular as was Margaret Thatcher's Community Charge.

But it might drive out the illegals.

When the People Lose Control of the Public Finances, Tyranny Often Follows

Herbert Hoover has captured the imagination of a number of writers recently, from Walter Russell Mead to R. Christopher Whalen.

Now James Grant weighs in too at The Wall Street Journal, here, contrasting Hoover's fear of tyranny with our desire for it:

Herbert Hoover, who learned a thing or two about debt and adversity, warned in his memoirs that, unless the dollar was convertible into gold, the people would lose control of the public finances, "their first defense against tyranny." Simon Johnson and James Kwak, the authors of "White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You" could not seem to disagree more. To them, the problem today isn't paper money but a government that hovers too little and taxes too lightly. More regulation—especially financial regulation—and selectively higher taxes are the answers, they contend. ...

Johnson and Kwak are special pleaders. Human life being uncertain, they wish to protect us from it. How much risk of sickness, unemployment or indigence do you, a mere individual, wish to bear on your own? "The question we leave you with is this," the pair write: "Are you and your family willing to face these risks alone, not knowing what will happen in the future, or do you want to live in a society that will protect you from misfortunes that lie beyond your control? For that is what the debate over the national debt boils down to, and its outcome depends on you."

More than likely, the outcome does not depend on you, whoever you are. It rather turns on the intellectual climate in which the people at the top frame public choices.

And Mr. Grant makes another good case for the choice of free men: gold.

Why Obama Loves Condoms

His condoms allow for . . . inflation!

His condoms halt . . . production!

His condoms destroy . . . the next generation!

His condoms protect . . . a bunch of pricks!

His condoms make you feel protected . . . while you're getting screwed!

Precisely

"Why does Obama feel the President of Russia is entitled to know more about Obama’s plans than the American public?"

-- William A. Jacobson, here

Worst President Ever Seen In Liberal Minnesota

(source)

One Promise Obama Has Kept

Seen here:

. . . a Post It note left on a gas pump.

Fertility In All Tiger Economies Has Fallen Below Replacement Rates

So says Joel Kotkin for Forbes here:

"All Tiger nations now suffer fertility rates roughly half the 2.1 children per household needed to replace the current population. By 2030 these countries could have fewer people under 15 than over 60."

The fault of prosperity, or at least the pursuit of it, at the expense of the old traditional, especially Confucian, ideals of family.

The Joke of the Day: 239 Bean Irish Stew

Why do the Irish put only 239 beans in their stew?

Because just one more and then it would be too farty, if you know what I mean.

h/t Cathy

Tax Policy is Social Policy, And It's Anti-Marriage, Just Like ObamaCare

So says Phyliss Schlafly here:

[A] fourth of those unmarried heads of household have an unreported live-in partner with a job. Simple arithmetic shows that a single parent with an unmarried live-in partner would then be valued at 2.4 persons, which is more favorable tax treatment than respectable married couples struggling to support their own children.

That means, if the single mom has a live-in boyfriend who files his own tax return, they end up with more favorable treatment in the income tax system than a married couple raising their own children. We should not allow marriage to be discriminated against in the income tax code.

Even ObamaCare contains a marriage penalty by reducing the insurance subsidy when cohabiting couples marry. As a Democratic staffer explained to the Wall Street Journal reporter who questioned the marriage penalty written into ObamaCare, "You have to decide what your goals are."

The Democrats know that 70% of unmarried women voted for Obama in 2008. Democratic consultant Tony Podesta has cooked up 83 bills to increase handing out more taxpayers' money to single moms.

The real war on women is a Democrat war on married women.

Larry Kudlow Has Been Sensitive About "Socialism" Since His Support Of TARP

He got ripped big time for it by the left:

No wonder he's been slow to slam Obama as one.

Kudlow Changes His Tune: Calls Obama A Socialist

Last July Larry Kudlow was positively insisting that Barack Obama is just a liberal, not a socialist.

Today on his radio program in the opening hour he's changed his tune, calling Obama's policies socialist in most respects.

Progress.

It Turns Out, The Cost Of Free-Riding Is A Straw Man Argument For ObamaCare

Thanks to Ronald Reagan's signature on EMTALA in 1986, hospitals must by law provide service to anyone, regardless of ability to pay among other things.

It turns out that the costs of this beneficence have indeed grown into a big problem, but it is nowhere near as big a problem as advocates of ObamaCare would like to make out.

Here's the government's best estimate of the problem, from the Congressional Budget Office, which everyone has known about since 2008 (italics added):

"A recent study by Hadley and others, which used that analytic approach, examined a sample of medical claims for uninsured individuals and projected that they would receive about $28 billion in uncompensated care in 2008. That study also examined cost reports from hospitals and a survey of doctors and generated a different estimate: The gross costs of providing uncompensated care would be about $43 billion in 2008, of which $35 billion would come from hospitals and $8 billion from doctors. Total spending on hospital care in 2008 is estimated to be about $750 billion, so those figures would imply that uncompensated care accounts for about 5 percent of hospital revenues, on average. Those findings are consistent with CBO’s analysis of uncompensated hospital care (cited above), which found that a sample of for-profit and nonprofit hospitals incurred costs for such care that averaged between 4 percent and 5 percent of their operating revenues."

So there you have it. The government has known all along that this  has been a problem in the neighborhood of 5 percent of the gross costs of care overall, yet it is preparing under ObamaCare to spend $200 billion annually to bring in the uninsured, almost 5 times as much as the problem warrants, wrecking insurance for everyone else in the process.

Who Knew The American Red Cross Was UNIONIZED?!

They went on strike today in Michigan!

I must be the last person alive to realize this. The photo shows Red Cross workers on strike in Ohio in February (image source here).

Story here:

More than 200 American Red Cross workers in Michigan went on strike this morning.

Staff members represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 459 and Teamsters Local 580 walked out because of a dispute over health care benefits.

The strike affects blood collection centers in Kalamazoo, Jackson, Lansing, Flint and parts of northern Michigan.

That's the last time I give them any dough. If they can go on strike, so can I.