Free Republic

The first time I read a statutory severability provision I said to myself, “I just wasted my concentration on something that will never be important.” Yet, severability will become a burning national issue, if the Supreme Court finds that the feds cannot compel people to enter into an unwanted contract, as now required by the individual mandate in Obamacare. We live in strange times. The Court has been called upon to decide whether to keep parts of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), or throw out all of it, by looking at “severability” in National Federation of Independent Business...

Here's how I would say it so that the 14 to 30 demo "gets it." We need to quarantine the Obama performance drags and reboot the economy. The policies of a swarm of small businesses will put unemployment on the run far better than Washington laws that do not update. The people in the 14 to 30 demographic don't know what a pump that you can prime is. And why you would talk about "spurring" the economy when nobody rides horses, let alone barbaric Western, is beyond me.

There have been a number of times in my life when I’ve realized that my instinct was contrary to my interests. It’s no easier for me to cope with than it is for anyone else. But if you want broader success (and I do) then the only option is to set aside those instincts and do the smart thing instead of the thing that feels best at the time. We all must do it sometimes. We’re conservatives after all. We aren’t some childish liberals only worried about intentions and sentiment. We are interested in actually accomplishing things and the only...

Newt Gingrich said today he would be willing to be second on a Mitt Romney ticket. “No, I wouldn’t say no,” Gingrich said on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto about what he would do if he was asked to become Romney’s vice president. “I can’t imagine him offering.” He also blasted Obama’s remarks caught on mic to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. “The question it raises is how many countries, whether it is Iran or somewhere else has he had a similar conversation with?” said Gingrich. “You know, let me pretend I’m tough long enough to get reelected,...

A month ago, Zero Hedge readers were stunned to learn that unemployment among Europe's young adults has exploded as a result of the European financial crisis, and peaking anywhere between 46% in the case of Greece all they way to 51% for Spain. Which makes us wonder what the reaction will be to the discovery that when it comes to young adults (18-24) in the US, the employment rate is just barely above half, or 54%, which just happens to be the lowest in 64 years, and 7% worse than when Obama took office promising a whole lot of change...

Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management, It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator. The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their...

If yesterday's news broken by ZH that one bank was in dire need of US dollars and ended up borrowing $500 million from the ECB was enough to send the market down almost 5% today, then the follow up news that the FRBNY just reactivated FX swap lines with Europe will likely send ES limit down at tomorrow's open. The FRBNY has just announced that in the week ended August 17, it lent out $200 million to not the ECB, not the BOE, but the "most stable" of all banks: the SNB. This is the first use of the Fed's...

The interests of each constituent group in the Democrat Party coalition shows how distorted our federal government has become, all due to the errors of the Supreme Court. Swift v. United States, 196 U.S. 375 (1905) found that federal regulation of meat packing to prevent price fixing permissable because the regulated activity had an "affect" on commerce. And the trust busting Teddy Roosevelt smiled. A generation later, the New Deal took root in the the redefinition that consideration of an "impact" or "effect" on commerce permits. Justice Thomas filed a brilliant concurring opinion in U.S. v. Lopez 514 U.S. 549...

LONDON - Her husband was in the hot seat, but Wendi Deng has emerged as the unlikely star of a British hearing into phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. Video of 42-year-old Deng jumping forward to smack a protester with a pie aimed at Murdoch's face quickly went viral, and numerous fan pages quickly popped up on social networking sites such as Facebook praising her quick rapid reflexes. For the better part of the hearing, Deng - Murdoch's third wife - sat behind her husband and stepson, James, as they answered questions from British lawmakers. When a protester approached Rupert...

DEPEYSTER — Enos Yoder fiddles with a metal gear and won't make eye contact with a stranger who is asking him about his troubles with the state Department of Taxation and Finance. Instead, he looks out onto his field, where a two-horse sleigh is carrying a stack of hay on a cart, ridden by a young man probably in his teens. Mr. Yoder, who owns a machine shop business, explains his problems politely, although with few syllables. The department, he says, wants him to file his sales taxes electronically rather than mailing them in as he has done for years....

When the Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the flash within the constellation Draco, astronomers thought it was a gamma-ray burst from a collapsing star. On March 31, however, UC Berkeley's Joshua Bloom sent out an email circular suggesting that it wasn't a typical gamma-ray burst at all, but a high-energy jet produced as a star about the size of our sun was shredded by a black hole a million times more massive. Careful analysis of the Swift data and subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirmed Bloom's initial insight. The details are...

So last summer we stood peering off the brink, with the markets all set to roll keel over mast before bubbling to the bottom. Then the Fed implemented QE2. I personally think QE 2 was useful in that it propped up risky assets. This pushed us back from the brink a bit, and gave the government time to smell the coffee and begin to make rational economic choices. They have since squandered that opportunity. So here we are again. Same people, same brink, same choices. A few months ago I got in a big argument with one of my more...

More and more I like the idea of not raising the debt ceiling. I like it financially and I like it politically. If congress leaves the debt ceiling where it is, then assuming that Obama is responsible enough to continue to make debt payments, we’re talking about roughly a 29% across the board cut in spending. That’s steep and would no doubt hurt, but it wouldn’t be the end of us. So long as Obama gives every indication that he is going to continue to make our debt payments, the markets will probably like it. It would put a real...

I’ve been very busy the last few days so I haven’t been able to research these numbers, but if you’ll forgive the unconfirmed ‘back of the envelope’ estimates, I have an interesting idea to put up. There is no doubt whatsoever that federal tax revenues for next year will be more than enough to cover all of out interest payments on our federal debt. There will also be enough left afterward to cover a substantial portion of our federal operating budget for 2012. How much? I’m not sure. A number I heard in conversation yesterday was something like 72% of...

LONDON — The eye-popping hat worn by Princess Beatrice at Britain's royal wedding is to be auctioned to raise money for charity, Buckingham Palace said Thursday. The famous creation — which some said looked like antlers— will be sold on eBay with the proceeds to go to the charities UNICEF and Children in Crisis. The hat was the handiwork of Britain's leading milliner, Philip Treacy, who designed many of the ladies' hats worn at the April 29 nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton, now known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The unusual design of the beige hat...

There is some talk about how we can’t balance the budget with cuts alone, and that we will need to raise taxes in order to make up the difference. In effect, I think this is correct but still misleading. Let me explain. The current tax code punishes productive behavior and rewards unproductive behavior. Do nothing, and you’ll get a vast wealth of government give-backs. You won’t live like a billionaire, but compared to global living standards you’ll be firmly in the ‘middle class’. If averages can be believed, you’ll have cable TV, air conditioning, a cell phone, three meals a...

Personally the actions of the Wisconsin Republicans used to pass their Civil Service Reform bill seem considerably less dubious than the parliamentary tricks that the Democrats used to pass Obamacare. The Obamacare 'deem and pass' specifically ignored the will of the voters, while in this case, the Republicans had the election on their side. The media will never tell you this of course, but it seems pretty clear to me that once again it's the Democrats who are the ones trying to rewrite the rulebook. But the thing I'm really taking away from the Wisconsin debate is the graphic picture...

Here’s a pretty good piece on how the Democrat’s future is tied to the future of the public service unions. As you can imagine, that’s not where I’d want to be if I were them. As I’ve said a thousand times, the purpose of a union is to increase costs and lower accountability in spite of any economic realities. They also increase unemployment and lower productivity, and through it… GDP. If you’re a political party and your stated agenda is to "put people back to work" that is not the agenda that you want your closest partner to have. I...

It was just 10 days ago (before anyone had even heard of food inflation) that Zero Hedge first predicted food riots were just around the corner (before anyone had even heard of Tunisia). Little did we know how quickly things would escalate out of control. Here is one man who is 100% confident he can leave the country before protests over runaway inflation succeed in getting him to face his (very hungry) population (presumably in close proximity to a decapitation device). This is probably the first confirmed case of a corrupt government overthrown as a result of the daily POMO...

*** Home prices have fallen 26 percent since their peak in 2006, exceeding the 25.9 percent drop registered in the five years between 1928 and 1933, the housing data company said in a report on Monday. *** Declines are accelerating, and it will take a while before falling unemployment and other signs of economic improvement support the market, Zillow said. Home prices fell at a 0.78 percent pace in November, the fastest since February 2009, the company said.