We are looking forward to a weekend visit from one of my favorite op ed writers, her husband and their three kids.
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TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE!
Obama's Self Image!
Obama believes the Supreme Court is engaged in judicial activism if they overturn 'Obamascare' because The Court would deem it unconstitutional. For an esteemed law graduate and professor he does not understand the English language. Activism refers to making law not over ruling bad and unconstitutional legislation.
He think picking a fight with the Supreme Court is the political way to go. For him it might be but sullying The Court, throwing doubt on its legitimacy and making voters suspicious of their rulings is typical 'President Pinata.'
If he really wants to pick a fight do it with Syria, N Korea, Iran,The Muslim Brotherhood but he does not have the 'cahonies' so he looks in the mirror and sees what he sees.(See 1 and 1a below.)
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Russia will do nothing but then so will Obama. Unlike Kennedy, Russia knows Obama will blink. (See 2 below.)
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Down from 78%, but still too many Jews are likely to vote for Obama because they cannot break the mold. They historically like betting against the gallows. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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From a technical standpoint the market is extended, even over extended. With plenty of money floating around and plenty of investors in disbelief the rally could extend further and defy gravity, as it were, but it would make the subsequent correction more vicious.
I remain suspect that the current rally is justified based on the slow down in Europe, growing likelihood corporate earnings will slow, China is also slowing and we have had a significant move upward without any meaningful retracement.
We have now entered the beginning month when the market historically under performs as well. Perhaps today's decline is the beginning. Time will tell.
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Dick
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1)Obama vs. Marbury v. Madison
The President needs a remedial course in judicial review.
President Obama is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. But did he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?
That's a fair question after Mr. Obama's astonishing remarks on Monday at the White House when he ruminated for the first time in public on the Supreme Court's recent ObamaCare deliberations. "I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," he declared.
Presidents are paid to be confident about their own laws, but what's up with that "unprecedented"? 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.
1a)Obama's Preemptive Strike on the Supreme Court
By W. JAMES ANTLE, III
What's ahead if the president doesn't get his way on the health care decision.
Harry Truman ran against the "Do Nothing" Congress in the 1948 presidential election. Will Barack Obama run against the Supreme Court this year? Answer: he will if the nation's highest court repudiates his signature health care reform law as unconstitutional.
The president nearly gave away the game during his press conference yesterday. After a long soliloquy about the "human element" the justices would be letting down if they ruled against his administration, Obama slipped and almost said he expected the law to be overturned rather than upheld. (He corrected himself mid-sentence.)
"Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," Obama averred. Perhaps he meant "democratic" with a capital d. Only Democrats voted for the law and it passed the House by just seven votes despite a three-fifths Democratic majority in that chamber.
According to one careful estimate, the Supreme Court has struck down 53 federal statutes between 1981 and 2005. So in post-Marbury v. Madison America, it wouldn't be exactly "unprecedented." Didn't Linda Greenhouse teach us that "unprecedented" was a word used by people whose legal arguments are without merit?
Obama chided conservative commentators who complained about "judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint" when "an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." He concluded: "Well, this is a pretty good example."
Supporters of the president have been laying the groundwork for this reaction ever since it became clear that the Supreme Court wasn't simply going to rubber stamp the adminstration's request for untrammeled federal power. Greenhouse insisted the constitutional challenge was baseless but sighed "the justices will do what they will do." Paul Krugman asserted “while most legal experts seem to think that the case for striking the law down is very weak, these days everything is political.”
This has nothing to do with the law, they chant. It is simply the "wingnuts" on the Supreme Court deciding to impose the Tea Party's vision of the Constitution on America. (Yet if the law is upheld, the same people will celebrate the Court as a great and powerful body whose wise rulings should go unquestioned, with the "wingnut" who cast the deciding vote venerated as the preeminent jurist of modern times.)
What is at stake here isn't the Tea Party's Constitution. It is the Constitution written by the Founding Fathers and ratified by the American people. It is the idea that the federal government derives its power from the consent of the governed, consent given not merely every two to six years at the ballot box but when a large majority of the states and the people expressly delegate power to the central government.
Nowhere in the confident declarations of the health care law's constitutionality do we see any evidence that the people who wrote or ratified the Constitution intended to give the federal government these powers. More than half the states in the country have joined in the constitutional challenge and plainly don't want to delegate this police power to Washington.
What we see instead is the insistence that liberal policy preferences simply must be constitutional. "I'm confident that this will be upheld because it should be upheld," said Obama.
For all the talk of ideologically rigid conservative justices, it was always the four members of the Supreme Court's liberal bloc who were viewed as locks to uphold Obamacare. The persuadable justices were John Roberts, the chief justice nominated by George W. Bush, and Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan. They tried in vain to get the solicitor general to establish some limiting principle for the power he ascribed to the federal government, to tie the mandate to something enumerated in the Constitution.
"The plaintiffs had no coherent constitutional theory on severability and on Medicaid," writes American Enterprise Institute legal scholar Michael Greve. "For that reason they will lose on both issues, and all the partisanship on the Court, real and imagined, won’t help them." Greve continued by noting "the justices gave the government every chance in the world to draw a constitutionally grounded enumerated powers line. It couldn’t, and so it will lose."
Just as he did when he lectured the justices about Citizens United, Obama plans to demagogue any Supreme Court ruling that is unfavorable to his health care program. The same president who holds Roe v. Wade inviolate, a decision that invalidated the laws of all 50 states on an issue no one had previously imagined to be under federal jurisdiction, will inveigh against judicial activism.
But Obama's cheering section also gives away the game when they lament that the Supreme Court has for the past 75 years allowed Congress, with the president's permission, to act as a national problem-solving machine without the Constitution getting in the way. What changed in the last 75 years? The Constitution or the composition of the courts? Raw political power, indeed.
In fact, it was 75 years ago that FDR unveiled his "court packing" scheme to scare justices away from enforcing the enumerated powers doctrine when it interfered with his legislative agenda. It worked then. Will Obama's version work now?
As it happens, probably stronger majorities than passed the Affordable Care Act. Readers may recall that the law was dragooned through a reluctant Senate without a single GOP vote and barely the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Despite a huge Democratic majority in the House, it passed by only 219-212.
One reason the law may be overturned is because it was rushed through Congress without a standard "severability" clause that says that the rest of the law stands if one part is judged unconstitutional. Congress jammed it into law because it became ever more unpopular the more the public looked at it. The law is even less popular today than it was on the day it passed in 2010.
Mr. Obama's remarks suggest he is joining others on the left in warning the Justices that they will pay a political price if they dare to overturn even part of the law. As he runs for re-election, Mr. Obama's inner community organizer seems to be winning out over the law professor.
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2)Russian warships launch drill from Tartus versus US-Israeli-Greek naval exercise
Not 24 hours after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that a pre-emptive strike (by the US and/or Israel) would violate international law, Moscow put muscle into his warning: Tuesday, April 3, the Russian guided missile destroyer Smetliviy arrived in the Syrian port of Tartus from its Black Sea base for a naval exercise. The warship’s support group is on the way.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Russian flotilla carried a threefold message for Washington:
1. The Russian-Iranian strategy of propping up the Assad regime which has brought the Syrian ruler close to victory over his foes, will continue: Diplomacy will be propelled by military impetus.
2. Russia is providing the Assad regime with defense systems capable of repelling foreign military intervention.
3. Consigning the Smetliviy warship to Syria illustrates Moscow’s new rapid response policy: Russia is launching a naval exercise in the eastern Mediterranean to match the “Noble Dina” air and naval maneuver the US, Israel and Greece are conducting across a broad expanse of sea between Crete and the Israeli bases at Haifa and Ashdod.
Israeli warships and air force jets may therefore find themselves not just operating alongside US naval and aircraft but confronted suddenly by one of the largest destroyers in the Russian fleet (NATO-coded ASW-submarine warfare), whose decks are the launching base for anti-air, anti-ship and anti-submarine missiles.
The Smetliviy’s support group, believed to be a supply vessel and a submarine, passed through the Bosporus Saturday, March 31 on their way to Tartus.
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3)Survey: Most US Jews support Obama's re-election
Public Religion Research Institute poll finds 62% of Jewish voters would like to see Obama re-elected versus 30% who prefer a Republican to win election
American Jews strongly support President Barack Obama's re-election even though backing by the key voting group has slipped since he was first elected to office, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
Sixty-two percent of Jewish voters said they would like to see Obama re-elected versus 30% who prefer a Republican to win the November election, the Jewish Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute said.
Jews make up only 2% of the US population but are crucial for Obama. They are heavily Democratic and are concentrated in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Florida that are important to Obama's bid for re-election.
Obama, a Democrat, has come under attack from Republican presidential candidates who allege he has not been supportive of Israel.
Overall support for Obama is nearly identical to the backing he had at the same point in the 2008 campaign when he was locked in a primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the survey said.
But support is down from the 78% of Jewish votes Obama garnered in the 2008 election when he defeated Republican John McCain.
Obama's approval rating is 61% among Jewish voters, the survey showed, above the 50% notched among Americans overall in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month.
The Jewish Values Survey shows 51% of Jewish voters say the economy is the most important issue for the 2012 election.
Israel and Iran, whose nuclear program the West suspects is a cover to develop atomic weapons, rank at 4% and 2% respectively.
The survey was carried out among 1,004 Jewish adults over 18 and interviews were done online between February 23 and March 5. The margin of error is 5 percentage points.
The poll also asked who US Jews view as people who best represent Jewish values. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu topped the list with 73%, followed by Supreme Court Judge Elena Kagan (66%), New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (65%), The Daily Show host Jon Stewart (60%), actress Natalie Portman (56%), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (38%) and entertainer Sarah Silverman (37%).
3a)Report: Obama Blaming Israel for Rising Fuel Prices
The Obama administration is blaming Israel for the recent rise in global crude oil prices, says its "posturing" on Iran brought the rise.
By Elad Benari
The Obama administration is blaming Israel for the recent rise in global crude oil prices, according to a Sunday report in The World Tribune. The rise in fuel prices is deemed as harming the U.S. economy and has also hurt Obama in the polls as he seeks re-election in November.
The report cited a leading U.S. analyst, Robert Satloff, who returned from talks with Israeli officials.
Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, according to The World Tribune, that the Israeli leadership saw Washington as attributing the higher gas prices to “Israel’s posturing” on Iran.
“They think the Iranians should be held responsible for the higher gasoline prices,” Satloff was quoted as having said.
He added that the officials told him the Obama administration was staging a campaign to undermine Israel.
“I cannot underscore how deep and visceral the [Israeli] comments of the leaking that came out of Washington were,” Satloff said, noting Israel is alarmed by what officials determined were leaks by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama of purported Israeli preparations to attack Iran.
The Israeli concerns come in the wake of a report in Foreign Policy magazine last week, according to which Israel has purchased an airfield in Azerbaijan on Iran's northern border, prompting the United States to watch very closely.
Journalist Mark Perry wrote that the Obama administration is monitoring Israel's relations with Azerbaijan, particularly its military ties.
The Americans believe Israel may use the site as a springboard for an attack on Iran's nuclear plants, or as a landing and refueling spot following one. The site could also be used for aircraft needed for search, rescue and recovery in the wake of an attack.
“We're watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we're not happy about it,” an official told the Foreign Policy writer.
Azeri president Ilham Aliyev later dismissed the speculation and said, “Azerbaijan's territory will never be used to launch an attack against its neighbor, Iran.”
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