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I'm going to reprise a Ticker from 2011-10-18, which you can read here if you want the original, but in a political context.

There was once a nation that was comprised of fish.  The fish lived in a pond that was 64x64 in size, or 4096 square units of surface area.  As with all fish they survived on dissolved oxygen in the water, which came to the water by exchange with the atmosphere above.  Plants grew in the water, receiving their energy from the sun while recycling the waste emitted by the fish as nutrients, and the fish ate the plants. All was well in the nation of fish.

But the economy of fish was limited by its growth.  Some of the bottom where the fish lived was rather rocky, and not much suited to cultivation of aquatic plants.  Some of the bottom was fertile, and beneath still more were various rare and natural treasures, such as energy sources that the fish could use for manufacturing.

One day a bright fish that worked for a bank called "Goldfishbank" got the idea that since plants were food, and more growth is better, the nation would be served by faster "growth."  He introduced to the pond a species of lilly that reproduced very rapidly.  In fact, it produced a new lilly once each day.  He began by placing just one lilly of one unit of size, or 1/4096th of the surface of the pond, in the water.

The next day there were two, and the fish nation cheered.  Then four, and the fish nation demanded that this fine fish be President.  Then eight, and all was even better in the world.

There were, however, some fish that became alarmed, for they had not been sleeping in school.  They knew, as well, that their very survival depended on the exchange of oxygen with the air above, and that absent this exchange all of the fish would surely die.

The great prosperity that appeared to flow, however, led the scholars to be shouted down. 

Unfortunately the great prosperity resulted in the price of fish dwellings, foods and fuels rising precipitously.  The credit created by all of this growth, which had heretofore appeared to be impossible, made everyone feel wealthy.  After just eight days what was 1 lilly had become 128; both great and permanent prosperity appeared to have blessed the fish.

Two days later the pond was 12.5% covered with lillies. 

But in the middle of this prosperity there was much corruption and theft.  The interest rates charged to lend money were corrupted by some of the fish banksters, who reasoned that they were merely making very small changes in what they reported, and due to the leverage they employed, reaped billions of profits.  This they did by stealing pennies from each fish per day.  Nobody would jail them, for some of those "profits" were simply diverted to political contributions in order to make sure that the fish nation government left the thieves alone.

There were other fish that were involved in lending for dwellings, and they too scammed the public.  Some of the lenders collapsed, yet they paid only small fines while most of the fish suffered monstrous losses, with many losing their homes.

Still other parts of the fish economy were involved in health care, and they got laws passed to make differential pricing, cost-shifting and other monopoly behavior protected, for this was their way to riches.  Soon the fish nation spent twice as much on health care as a percentage of its economy as all the other fish nations, but all these monopoly protections, enacted into law, were not seen as the corruption they were.

Unemployment became a problem and the fish nation saw its standard of living decline.  This was puzzling, for the proponents of the new lily had said that such prolific growth would lead to permanent prosperity.  There were many who claimed that the lily was simply not prolific enough, and that means must be found to spur even more lilies to grow.

The three major political parties sparred over the unemployment and economic malaise.  The two largest ones offered that taxes should be increased on the most-fortunate fish and that taxes should be decreased for all fish, respectively.  But neither put forward a plan to cut down the size of the government, which was sapping an increasing amount of the economy.

The third party decided to state that it should cut the size of the government by 43%.  But it refused to address the main growth drivers of the government, that being the medical industry's special protections.  Nor did that party appear to give a damn about all the scams and frauds, which had stolen monstrous amounts of wealth from all the fish.

Soon the political debate within that third party turned to whether fish should be able to smoke pot, which was currently prohibited under penalty of law, and whether a fish named Steve should be able to marry one named Larry.  Some fish believed this was a civil right and of the utmost importance, while others believed it was Satanic. 

Yet these were the only points of political debate on which this third party focused, instead of on the financial institutions that had skimmed off all the "prosperity" that had been promised to the fish nation by the Goldfishbank and others in the financial industry, along with the medical industry that had lobbied for their special protections and which were bankrupting the fish nation's government.

A few of the third party analysts saw that in point of fact the lily issue was soon to kill all the fish and the entire fish nation economy.  They were poo-pooed and called alarmists, for the sun was still visible in the sky above, and their rising stridency was called "divisive" or that "if you simply changes your approach you could actually influence people."  They were even told that their commentary was "self-righteous."

But that commentary, labeled "divisive" and in fact dismissed with "that ends our conversation and damages both our working relationship and friendship" was based the simple fact that while just 12.5% of the pond was covered, the entire fish nation was only three days from extinction, and the last two days had been wasted arguing over gay marriage and dope smoking instead of addressing the impending and mathematically-certain disaster.

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Now I've seen it all.

The USSC upheld Obamacare by, basically, twisting the Constitution into a pretzel, crapping on it, whizzing on that and then eating it.

Finding first that the Commerce Clause bars the government from compelling one to enter into commerce, the analysis then turned to whether there was any way to save the constitutionality of the act.

The justices found one.

They re-interpreted the penalty clause as a tax.

And of course, Congress can levy taxes.

That's the path taken by this tortured process -- a path that could only be dreamed up if someone had already determined the outcome they sought instead of being an independent jurist.

The real surprise, however, is that Chief Justice Roberts, believed to be a strict constructionist on the court, managed to not only agree with this piece of tortured logic he found and constructed it as the opinion is his!

So much for judicial restraint and strict construction!

You really ought to read the dissent that starts on page 127 of the opinion.  Justice Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito eviscertate the majority, saying in part:

Here, however, Congress has impressed into servicethird parties, healthy individuals who could be but are not customers of the relevant industry, to offset the undesirable consequences of the regulation. Congress’ desire to force these individuals to purchase insurance is motivatedby the fact that they are further removed from the marketthan unhealthy individuals with pre-existing conditions, because they are less likely to need extensive care in the near future. If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, "the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane." The Federalist No. 33, p. 202 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

What little was left of The Constitution died today, June 28th, 2012.

And incidentally, the math on federal health spending coupled with this decision means that by the time a 55 year old man reaches 85 (his life expectancy, roughly) the Federal government will be attempting to spend roughly $15 trillion a year on health care.

(No it won't, no we won't get that far, and the detonation of our government on the fiscal side is now assured -- or your health care will be sacrificed.  This is mathematics, not politics.)

PS: For those who think that the majority opinion somehow "upholds" limits on the Commerce Clause, you're reading this wrong.  Dead wrong.  The opinion finds that anything that Congress wants to do it can compel with any sort of financial penalty and construe it as a tax -- even though such is blatantly unlawful under both the Anti-Injunction Act and, for many such instances as a direct tax (as it would not be apportioned as required by the Constitution.)  The justices simply ignored these infirmities when it suited them; in effect they used the Clinton argument -- the word "is" means whatever they want it to mean even when it required two different meanings at the same time

What was left of the Constitution and our Republic literally died today, and not one political candidate or party that I've seen respond to this thus far has gotten it right.

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Folks, cut this crap out.

Really.

Here are the facts:

  • Rubio was born to two parents who were not citizens at the time of his birth.  They were here in the country and he was born here, but his parents were not citizens at the time of his birth.

  • At a later date his parents became citizens of the United States.

Marco Rubio is ineligible to be President of the United States under the natural born citizen requirement.  He is a citizen but will never be a natural born citizen as he was not at birth due to the Cuban citizenship of his parents and you cannot retroactively acquire natural born citizenship status.

He therefore must not be nominated as VP, since the primary qualification for that office is the ability to stand as President if something happens to the President while he is in office.

The Constitution's 12th Amendment specifically says:

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

I know there are people who think the Constitution shouldn't read this way on natural born citizenship as a requirement for this office, but it does read this way AND IS WHAT IT IS.

If you want to change this the proper thing to do is to amend The Constitution before you run someone who is currently ineligible.  Circumventing it as was done with Obama is wrong, no matter which party does it.

We've had enough lawlessness in this country at the top and we are way past the point where we should be tolerating it in any fashion, irrespective of whether you happen to like someone or not.

THE RULE OF LAW MUST STAND ABOVE THE "DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS" OR THIS NATION IS NO LONGER A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC.

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I wish there was something approaching an honest reporter left in this country among the mainsleaze media.  But there's not.

Updated 4:05pm ET The trustees of the Social Security system said Monday the fund that helps sustain retiree and survivors’ benefits will become exhausted in 2033, three years sooner than they projected last year.

At that point, payroll taxes and taxation of Social Security benefits will provide only enough income to pay about 75 percent of the benefits that Congress has promised to retirees and survivors.

In practical terms, this means that a 40-year-old worker who is eligible to collect retirement benefits in 2039, would see his or her expected retirement benefit cut by about 25 percent, unless Congress took action to change the program’s funding or its benefit structure.

So far so good.  But it's the assumptions that are the problem:

The trustees said that to keep the Social Security trust funds solvent over the next 75 years, Congress could take a number of steps:

  • increase the payroll tax rate from its current level of 12.4 percent to 15.01 percent;

Huh? 

The Payroll Tax is not 12.4%; that's a lie.

Millions of workers will see their take-home pay rise during 2011 because the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 provides a two percentage point payroll tax cut for employees, reducing their Social Security tax withholding rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent of wages paid. This reduced Social Security withholding will have no effect on the employee’s future Social Security benefits.

So the tax is actually 10.4%.  And note carefully that the Trustees said that a roughly 2.5% increase would balance Social Security.  But we've done exactly the opposite by almost exactly the same amount.

So who's going to be honest and call for (1) an immediate full stop to that payroll tax cut and (2) an increase in the payroll tax to 15%?

Nobody.

In point of fact there's another option for Social Security that would make even more sense -- index to longevity.  That would, along with a less than 1% increase (to 13%; the "cut" that's allegedly temporary must go away right here and now in any event) put the system back into balance.

In short Social Security is pretty easy to fix.  It's unpopular to talk about what has to happen to fix it, but it's fixable and at a reasonably-small cost to the average employee in terms of tax impact.

Separately, the trustees, who are also the trustees of the Medicare program, reported that the Medicare fund that pays hospital costs for older and disabled Americans will be exhausted by 2024, the same forecast as they made last year.

After the assets of the Medicare fund are gone, if Congress were to take no action, projected Medicare revenue would be adequate to cover 87 percent of the estimated spending in 2024 and about two-thirds of projected costs in 2050.

Nonsense.  These figures are nowhere near accurate as they do not include the 9.2% rate of increase that is currently being suffered.

The BEA says that compensation of employees is $8.4 trillion (last quarter of 2011, which is the latest available at present.)  That's $244 billion a year in Medicare tax (2.9%, both employer and employee parts.)

But the Federal Government spent $820 billion last year on health costs, approximately $550 billion of it in Medicare and Medicaid.  While the program claims to have taken in $530 billion there's obvious game-playing going on here as the total employee compensation as of the last quarter of 2011 is annualized to $8.4 trillion and Medicare tax is 2.9% of this, or $244 billion.

On a basic cash-flow analysis and given the $244 billion of actual bonds in the system for Medicare there is about one year of benefits available on a cash-flow basis, including tax receipts and "bonds in the drawer" for Medicare.

To be succinct Medicare is functionally bankrupt right here and now!

Medicare and Medicaid cannot be fixed at all as the problem is not found in those programs -- it is found in the underlying medical system in our nation.

Simply put we have to shut down the cost-shifting, including that represented by:

  • EMTALA, which resulted in the destruction of charity care in general; the Catholic Church "cheered" this as it's roughly six hundred hospitals were largely relieved of being fully-charity-funded (that is, from your donations in the plate on Sunday) and managed to shift a huge part of that funding to you, the taxpayer, via explicit health "insurance" and private payer support!  This of course the Church does want to talk about; a "gun up the nose" isn't charitable at all, yet this is much of what so-called "charity hospitals" do today.  The Church needs to be called out on this loud and long; they're liars and frauds and have done their level damndest to pretend to provide charity care while offloading it on the general public.  This sort of intentional deception is a Satanic abuse of the alleged moral high ground the Church claims for itself.

  • Outrageous development cost shifting from the rest of the world to the United States; price controls in other nations effectively prohibit the cost of development of new drugs and devices from being borne by health systems in other countries.  Canada and the UK are two of the worst offenders but hardly the only ones; other nations frequently threaten to break patents wholesale unless they get favored pricing.  The medical industry then got passed laws prohibiting reimportation, codifying a "wall" in federal law with felony penalties for breaches that allows this rip-off of the American consumer to continue. As a consequence Americans often pay 10x or even more what a Canadian pays for the same drug or device; we effectively cover all development costs for the entire planet.  This must end -- now.

  • Specific legal exemptions from anti-trust law and shielding from consumer-hostile practices such as permitting and even encouraging disparate billing for procedures, drugs and devices depending on how one pays; a discriminatory act that when taken for the purpose of reducing competition is flatly illegal in other fields, blatant limiting of competition for various technological practices (e.g. licensing restrictions prohibiting the free opening of new MRI centers to drive down costs) and other acts that in any other field would land the parties involved in the graybar motel for felony criminal violations of anti-trust and restraint-of-trade law.

All of this combines to cause the cost of medical care in the United States to be a literal double that which is charged and obtained in other nations.  We simply cannot afford to continue on this path as the growth rate (9.2% compounded for the last 30 years) will result in the bankruptcy of the federal government and destruction of our economy within the next two decades.

The game-playing within the system cannot be maintained; eventually cash flow always wins.  You can move things around and pretend for a while but doctors, hospitals and others in the supply chain don't take empty promises, they want checks.  Eventually you are forced to admit that the money doesn't exist and you're shuffling the deck and playing with the cash flow from one place or another so as to avoid telling the truth about what's really going on in the budget and these funds.

This problem has to be solved, and solved now.  Neither political party will talk honestly about this, but we must as Americans demand both the truth and real resolution, as the path we are on will resolve in a disorderly collapse of our medical system and shortly thereafter our economy and government.

We cannot afford to continue to play the game that both the Republican and Democrat parties are running in this regard, nor are the so-called "third party" claims (e.g. Gary Johnson) honest assessments either.

The medical system in this country is terminally broken and if it is not corrected now we will all discover that there is simply no money and thus what people claim they have been promised will be shown to be a sham and collapse -- and this outcome will be apparent much sooner than people think.

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From the bond hearing:

George Zimmerman was allegedly recognized by the Mayor for his intervention in the events surrounding the homeless (black) man that was beaten by a Sanford police officer's relative.

There has been a near-complete media blackout in this regard -- and questions about whether the letter published somewhat-recently was authentic.

Well, it appears (from testimony of his mother this morning) that the Sanford Mayor personally recognized George Zimmerman for his efforts to obtain justice for that homeless man.

And where is the media who tried to turn this into a racial issue? 

Just as importantly, where is the Mayor of Sanford who gave that commendation and thus knew damn well what the history of this man was when it came to his views on race?

Further there was testimony introduced this morning that George Zimmerman has been actively mentoring black kids in Orlando despite being urged not to by his mother as a consequence of the area of the city in question where he traveled to being a known high-crime area and thus dangerous to his person.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the media intentionally attempted to present a false picture of both the incident itself and George Zimmerman personally with regard to any racial issues surrounding this event.

Oh, and the claims that Zimmerman wasn't injured?  Here's a picture taken three minutes after EMS arrived:

Update: Not only is that damage consistent with the claim that Zimmerman was having his head bashed against the concrete sidewalk but two other things came out of the interview linked above that are of great importance to the development of facts surrounding that night -- the embedded data in the image file has a time stamp off the cell tower (it was an iPhone 4s) and geotag information from the phone's GPS matches the location. There's a high probability that photograph and the tags embedded in it will be deemed admissible evidence.  Second, the person who took the picture says Zimmerman was visibly staggering, which is consistent with a low-grade concussion from the impacts to his head.

Finally the witness said that there were visible powder burns on Martin's clothing (one of the questions I had originally as their presence would be expected given Zimmerman's narrative of what happened.)

If this all holds up it's pretty clear that the legal standard of objectively reasonable fear of great bodily injury or death was met for Zimmerman, and if so the shooting was justified -- period. 

Note that there is no resort to "stand your ground" necessary to reach that conclusion.

Prediction: This case is going to go nowhere and, in my opinion, Zimmerman has an excellent lawsuit against the media outlets for libel and/or slander and perhaps even against the special prosecutor for knowingly false and malicious prosecution.

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