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It can be curtains for those stupid enough to buy stocks because of professionals engaged in window dressing. (See 1 below.)
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I learned everything about writing from my oldest daughter. (See 2 below.)
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More Left Wing hypocrisy:
--- Black on Black dissing! (See 3 below.) --- President EGO!: See PJTV -"Trifecta: The Stunning Narcissism of President Obama President Obama has re-branded the millennial generation to “Gen44” after himself. Bill Whittle, Steve Green and Scott Ott discuss the president’s stunning narcissism, and whether this move will work or backfire." --- The Supreme Court cannot initiate cases it might wish would come before it but when a gift horse comes along they certainly should not, as they seem to be doing, dismiss the opportunity to rethink a decision and its impact on bad past decisions. We may just have such an opportunity provided by 'Obamascare.' Obama's arrogant over reach and his desire to play with fire could boomerang and would not that be delicious and all deserved. Stay tuned! (See 4 and 4a below.) --- Dick' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) |
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| The stock market's cheerleading squad was out in full force on Monday. The day started off with a speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who said the same thing he said last week… which was the same thing he said last month… and the month before that… and the month before that. Investors responded like Pavlov's dogs and pushed the S&P 500 to a new yearly high. Then came the parade of bullish analysts and talking heads on every financial news network. "Buy stocks because interest rates are low," they cheered. "Buy stocks because the dividend yields are higher than what you can get on government bonds!" "Buy stocks because the economy is growing and corporate America is profitable!" These are all fine reasons to buy stocks. Sure, they're arguable. But if you're looking to buy stocks today, these are logical, rational reasons to jump into the stock market. But the reason that got the most airtime was the single stupidest reason to buy stocks… "Buy stocks because it's time for portfolio window dressing!" "Window dressing" describes what happens on Wall Street every quarter. Basically, institutional money managers attempt to spruce up their portfolios and make them bright and shiny for any customers who may want to have a look inside. They do this by selling off all the underperforming positions and buying all the stocks that have been the biggest winners. So when a customer looks at the fund's holdings, the money manager can say, "Look at all the wonderful stocks we own." It doesn't matter if they bought them yesterday at their 52-week highs. All that matters is that the fund can show it owns the quarter's best performers. It's a terrible reason for you to buy stocks. The best time to buy stocks is when they are out of favor and on sale. The best time to buy a winter coat is in the summer, not when it's prominently displayed in the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue. The best deals are tucked away near the bottom of the "clearance bin" in the back of the store. Of course, if you need a designer-brand swimsuit for your upcoming spring break vacation, you have no choice but to pay top dollar for it today. That's the dilemma money managers face now as they pay 62 times earnings for shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill. If you don't need to add a new stock to your portfolio today, you'll probably get a much better deal on it a few months from now. That's particularly true with most of the stocks that are trading at new highs this week. Best regards and good trading, Jeff Clark -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)To Mrs. Condrey and Ms. L’Engle |
It’s good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. (Madeleine L’Engle, 1918 – 2007)
Some time ago, a dear friend shared with me the quotes she receives from her church each morning. Most are thought-provoking, some are comforting. I send some of the gems to Elliot and Emma when they seem especially à propos. If you want to join the club simply go to All Souls Meditation and join in.
This morning’s quote by author Madeleine L’Engle reminds me that I’ve wanted to write about this great lady for quite some time. Her career-changing book, A Wrinkle in Time, was published 50 years ago this year and I cannot see the title without thinking of my third grade teacher, Mrs. Condrey. She was doing DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) back when it was still just the salutation to a letter, not an acronym coined by educators who looked around and said, “Oops! We are suffocating our kids with so much learning, they no longer have reading time!”
Every afternoon, after we had mastered our lessons, learned our learning and cleaned our desks, Mrs. Condrey would read to us until the dismissal bell rang. A Wrinkle in Time was one of our rewards. Those of you who’ve read the book don’t need a plot summary; those of you who haven’t, go treat yourself and open it up. A better book never started with the perennially-mocked line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
While every page Mrs. Condrey read kept me spellbound, what touched me the most was the relationship Meg had with her five-year-old brother Calvin. The genius in a family of Mensa-worthy members, Calvin ends up in the clutches of the evil force “IT” who takes over his mind. Meg frees him, finally, by realizing that the “only thing that she had that IT didn’t was her love for her baby brother.” The passion Mrs. Condrey brought to the scene where Meg liberates Calvin, facing down his Hitlerian captor to do so, was the high point of third grade. (Except perhaps gathering pecans with my friend Cindy Wright in her back yard in preparation for our Georgia project.) “I love you, Charles Wallace. I love you Charles Wallace!” Meg says over and over until IT’s hold on her brother is loosed, catapulting the family back to its eventual reunion.
It would be a dozen or so years before I would have a brother to love, and many years after that until I learned, over and over again, that the power of love is impotent to liberate those held in the grip of damaging inner forces. (Said brother has never been gripped by any evil forces and is happily in the grips of making wonderful baked goods.) Love’s futilities aside, Mrs. Condrey, and Ms. L’Engle, brought to life love’s possibilities. They held rapt the attention of a winsome nine-year-old, revealing how solid the ground built from the grains of sand that are words.
Cindy Wright, second row, third from left.
Yours truly, end of third row on the right.
You cannot see that my beloved Mrs. Condrey
had bright red hair!
Cindy Wright, second row, third from left.
Yours truly, end of third row on the right.
You cannot see that my beloved Mrs. Condrey
had bright red hair!
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3)
Why I Do Not Like The Obamas
By Mychal Massie
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4) The ObamaCare Reckoning
Overturning the whole law would be an act of judicial restraint.
After the third and final day of Supreme Court scrutiny of the Affordable Care Act, the bravado of the legal establishment has turned to uncertainty and in some cases outright panic. Everyone who said the decision was an easy fait accompli has been proven wrong by a Court that has treated the constitutional questions that ObamaCare poses with the seriousness they deserve.
This reckoning has also been a marvelous public education. The oral arguments have detailed the multiple ways in which the individual mandate upsets the careful equilibrium of the American political system. The Obama Administration's arguments in favor of the mandate to buy health insurance or pay a penalty stand exposed as a demand for unlimited federal power.
Most of the Justices seem to be discomfited by this proposition, to one degree or another, and in Wednesday's session they grappled with the Court's options and the consequences if the mandate falls. Over the 90-minute exchange the Justices conducted a tutorial about the limits of judicial power in handling a huge bill if its core is found to be unconstitutional.
Editorial board member Joe Rago takes apart the government's argument that the individual mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause. Plus, new polling shows that the law unpopular.
The issue is known as "severability," or what happens to the rest of a law if part of it is struck down. Usually Congress includes a clause that clearly defines its intent in that event. But the Obama Democrats neglected to include one amid the political rush to pass the law, and Supreme Court precedents are less than clear.
The Court could uphold the individual mandate, in which case the point is moot. It could overturn the mandate without invalidating any other provision. Or it could say that everything else never would have passed without the mandate, so everything else should be taken down with it.
That last is the persuasive contention of Paul Clement, the attorney who argued for the 26 states challenging the law. He argued that the mandate is "the very heart of this act" because it is meant to subsidize the insurance regulations that drive up costs. It forces the younger and healthier to buy coverage they may not need to finance people who consume more health care.
That requirement is also tied to ObamaCare's "exchanges" where everyone will buy coverage, which are in turn tied to the new entitlement subsidies, which are in turn tied to the Medicaid expansion, the many tax increases and all the other things on the periphery of the law that wouldn't have passed without the individual mandate.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Mr. Clement is asking the Court to conduct "a wrecking operation," before stating that "the more conservative approach would be salvage rather than throwing out everything." The Obama Administration didn't say exactly that, but it did argue that the mandate is indispensable to its supposedly well-oiled regulatory scheme and if it is thrown out the insurance rules should be too.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy doubted Justice Ginsburg's logic, since by taking out only the individual mandate the Court would in effect be creating a new law that Congress "did not provide for, did not consider." To wit, costs would soar without any mechanism to offset them.
"When you say judicial restraint," Justice Kennedy said, "you are echoing the earlier premise that it increases the judicial power if the judiciary strikes down other provisions of the act. I suggest to you it might be quite the opposite." Overturning the mandate alone, he continued, "can be argued at least to be a more extreme exercise of judicial power than to strike the whole."
Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in to note that severing would require the Justices to comb through ObamaCare's 2,700 pages and pick out the parts that are connected to the mandate and those that aren't—essentially asking them to play omniscient time travellers, if not legislators. Striking it down altogether would paradoxically be a gift of judicial modesty by avoiding the legal invention of a new law. A clean slate gives Congress the most options.
As Mr. Clement argued, the best analogy is the Court's misbegotten 1976 Buckley decision, which struck down some campaign finance provisions but not others and has led to a hash of contradictory and ambiguous rules for political speech that continues to this day.
The Court's liberals pushed back by suggesting that the individual mandate is "just a tool to make other provisions work," as Justice Elena Kagan put it. Yet by that standard the Court ought to strike down the entire law or most of it if it strikes down the mandate, because it shows that Congress used an illegitimate device to do things that it could have done constitutionally without it.
***
So far the larger liberal reckoning hasn't been as nuanced as the High Court's, as evidenced by the media mugging of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Liberals castigated his performance during oral arguments Tuesday and all but blamed him for any ObamaCare defeat.
Mr. Verrilli may not be Daniel Webster, but he was more than competent. The problem isn't that he's a bad lawyer, it's that he is defending a bad law with the bad arguments that are the best the Administration could muster. Liberal Justices such as Sonia Sotomayor all but begged him to define a limiting principle on the individual mandate and therefore on federal power. He couldn't—not because he didn't know someone would ask but because such a principle does not exist.
Mr. Verrilli came closest to a limiting principle—and got some sympathy from Justice Kennedy—when he claimed that everyone will use health care at some point in their lives, so what's the big deal with making young people pay more earlier?
Even if this were true, it is a deeply radical claim. The government is mandating that everyone buy health insurance specifically, but by this reasoning any economic or personal decisions that touch on health care could be used as a pretext for federal police powers. People who lead healthy lives consume fewer medical services than others, so the government could mandate exercise, a healthy diet, and more.
This is power without limit, which is not what the Constitution provides, or what its framers intended, or what the Supreme Court has ever tolerated. That is why this week's arguments have been so careful, why they have revised the establishment's thinking, and why they are so important for the future of American liberty.
4a)We're Not France, Yet
ObamaCare is the coup de grâce of America's policy mandarins.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Maybe the United States dodged a bullet this week. Make that a deep-penetration bunker buster into the original idea of America. On Tuesday, the justices of the Supreme Court sounded, on balance, to be disposed against affirming the Obama health-care law's mandate.
The Obama administration's lawyers argued that the mandate to purchase health insurance is a routine extension of the Commerce Clause, which in the 1930s became the most potent sentence in the U.S. Constitution. It is not a certainty that Tuesday's discussion of the ObamaCare mandate means it will be overturned. It's still worth thinking about the implications if the court affirms the law's individual mandate.
Should that happen in June, two things would follow: The Commerce Clause's authority would be unfettered. Big as that is, the implication of an unfettered Commerce Clause is larger: That will be the day the United States becomes France.
Like the U.S., France also had "liberté" in the short version of its founding idea. Democracies always begin in liberty, but they don't always keep it. France is in economic decline today because the structure of its government is so severely centralized. An anecdote describes what eventually such centralization does to national hope.
A story in the New York Times a few weeks ago reported on two small towns on the border between France and Germany. French Sélestat, in Alsace, has an unemployment rate of 8% and a youth unemployment rate of 23%. Across the border in Emmendingen, the rates are 3% and 7%. (The U.S.'s own unemployment rates these days are closer to those in Sélestat.)
Deep in the article, the mayor of Sélestat explains why this is so. In Germany, he said, local and state governments can set many of their own rules. In France, "the national Education Ministry wants to keep all control." The Affordable Care Act is our road to France's ministry of education. For its designers, ObamaCare is their administrative coup de grâce.
But something more is in motion with this case than a potential, once-and-for-all movement of government authority from the nation's parts to its center. As important is who exercises control. The answer is: the mandarins.
Mandarins are the intellectuals who design and order legally enforceable public systems within which the rest of the population resides, or tries to. French policy mandarins are the most celebrated in the world. Their most ardent admirers in America are the people who made the Obama health-care law.
The Affordable Care Act is not merely a "law" that the Supreme Court argued over this week. It is a massive Rube Goldberg contraption. Its 2,700 pages include every pipe, whistle and valve that the nation's academic health-care economists and doctors have soldered together from infinite studies of hospital data. The new machine even has its own boiler-room crew, the 15 health-care academics of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, who will monitor and adjust the flow of medicine through the national health-care pipelines.
They say their magnificent machine will work for everyone in America only if everyone in America is inside of it. This was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's argument before the Supreme Court on behalf of the law's mandate. This is what the Catholic hospitals discovered when the ACA's designers pulled the sheet off the new machine.
Why are we so close to falling into the grip of an American mandarinate of the centralizing sort now smothering France? Our version of these controllers came to life in the 1960s. They are a byproduct of the passage in those years of a succession of federal rights and entitlement laws. The former were more admirable than the latter. But the singularly bad effect of that period on the American political psyche was the sense of moral triumphalism that spread among liberal policy intellectuals. From this certitude came the belief they could do anything they wanted to the booboisee in the untrustworthy states.
And they did, for example writing an Endangered Species Act whose coverage mandated federal government protection for such minutiae as the delta smelt. Only a mandarin would insist on this.
For the political left affiliated with Barack Obama—in the bureaucracies, the punditocracy and the courts—objections to these expansive laws on liberty grounds, then and now, are mainly arguments over abstractions. The liberty objections simply don't matter. ObamaCare itself is a masterpiece of mandarin abstraction. Yet 67% of polled Americans believe this masterwork's mandate is unconstitutional. What are these people thinking?
In the closing pages of "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," Bernard Bailyn summarized the core concern about the Affordable Care Act's reach that is trying to find its voice today: "At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that would dominate the nation."
We shall see.
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