Quotes of the day

“The story concludes, ‘The Constitution serves the nation; the nation does not serve the Constitution.’ The connotation is that we shouldn’t be too slavish in our fidelity to the Constitution.

“Like the rest of this article, its conclusion misses the point. The Constitution serves the American people as an unbreakable constraint on those in power, dictating their duties and the limits on their authority. The Constitution serves We the People by requiring every government official to take an oath to obey its every word.

“The picture art at the outset of Time’s story shows the Constitution cut in dozens of narrow vertical strips. Clearly it had been run through a paper shredder.

“Evidently this is wishful thinking for some on the far left. The only problem is that it’s false. Interest in the Constitution is resurgent, and that renewed interest is the key to America’s renewal in our third century.”

***

“Any discussion of invoking the Constitution’s 14th Amendment as a way out of the debt-limit impasse is ‘crazy talk,’ Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on ‘Fox News Sunday.’

“Some Democrats have been pointing to the 14th Amendment, which states that federal debts ‘shall not be questioned,’ as a legal argument for why President Barack Obama could continue to pay the country’s debt even if the limit is not raised…

“‘It is not acceptable for Congress and the president not to do their job and say basically the president has the authority to do this by himself,’ Cornyn said.”

***

“The great respect George Washington had accrued during the fighting of the Revolutionary War argued for making the president commander in chief of American forces. But which branch would decide when to go to war? Because members of both the House and the Senate represented the communities from which soldiers and sailors would be drawn for future conflicts, wisdom dictated that the power to make war be put in their hands.

“Keeping those two powers — declaring and waging war — separate involved an engineering feat Madison tellingly described as pitting the officeholders’ ambitions against each other.

“Obama not only acted according to original expectations in his reluctance to have his authority curtailed, but so did Congress. Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have dropped their differences for the moment and joined together to check presidential power. Instead of acting like partisans, they are trying to chart a course of action to preserve their constitutionally mandated authority.

“Madison went on to say that relying on personal ambition to maintain the separation of powers might seem to reflect on human nature, but what then, he asked, is government itself if not ‘the greatest of all reflections on human nature.’”

***

“The question is, has the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce been so loosely construed that now Congress can do anything at all, that there is nothing it cannot do.

“Let me ask the three of you. Obviously, obesity and its costs affect interstate commerce. Does Congress have the constitutional power to require obese people to sign up for Weight Watchers? If not, why not?”

Quit being a party guy, President Obama, says … Evan Thomas?

So much for being “sort of God.” In this week’s press conference, Barack Obama blamed eeeeeeeeeeevil corporate jet owners and oil companies for the federal budget deficit in an attempt to play class-warfare games to fire up the base. Former High Priest of ObamaMania Evan Thomas (who also sidelines as a Newsweek editor) became an apostate by noting that demagoguery wastes time and makes it harder to find solutions. Thomas “applaud[s] the energy,” but wonders when Obama will start presidenting instead of being a party hack:

On “Inside Washington,” host Gordon Peterson asked his panel to suggest a way to overcome the current impasse and get Congress and the White House moving on a budget deal. Thomas offered up a solution, but also expressed his frustration with Obama.

“Yeah, because it’s happened before – Obama has got to be President of the United States,” Thomas said. “He has to be two things. He has to make a public case of how bad is this, because he is not doing that. He’s not being honest about just how bad this is going to be — no, he was partisan. He was God [bleep] Democrat! He was just, you know – being a party guy. I applaud the energy but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. He has got to rise above that and then in private, in private – he’s got to make a deal.”

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer’s sentiments fell in line with Thomas’s.

“Instead of saying, as a president ought to say, is that we have a problem — it is a serious problem, it’s a growing problem, it’s a structural problem and we have to do something, he says, as in the sound bite you showed, it is a choice between helping the elderly on Medicare and corporate jets and oil tax breaks,” Krauthammer added. “That is pure demagoguery and that is not leadership.”

When acolytes start tossing criticisms instead of hosannas, I’d say we have consensus. Barack Obama … uniter?

NEA Convention 2011: A New Reality

I’m blogging all weekend long live from the National Education Association Representative Assembly in Chicago.

That’s what National Education Association Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle called the situation in which the union finds itself this year. It won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog that NEA has a $14 million budget shortfall, or that it has lost more than 39,000 active members. Pringle stated that the deficit is closer to $17 million due to increased costs to the union’s legal services program, which subsidizes each state affiliate’s attorney referral program and other litigation-based actions for individual members.

Plus, Pringle said, “We have to assume we haven’t hit bottom yet.”

What might surprise you, given NEA’s aversion to staff reductions in the public schools (to the point where California just passed a law under cover of darkness to save teachers’ jobs even without the money to pay them – a move pioneered in Detroit and Los Angeles), is that the union plans to partially cut the deficit with $4.8 million in staff reductions.

Asked how many staffers would be lost, Pringle replied, “about 20.” If anyone in the audience did the math, that’s $240,000 saved per staffer, which tells you all you need to know.

Who knew Ms. Pringle could be such a fiscal hawk? She described to the delegates present how difficult it was to make budget cuts, since each program had a constituency arguing to protect it. She declared, “I will not support an increase in dues” to close the budget gap because “our members are hurting.” And she detailed the budget committee’s work on staff costs, saying, “We’ve worked to reduce benefits.”

Indeed, Pringle’s words are coming out of the mouths of school board presidents across the country.

There were also indications that while there may be red states and blue states, the only color that matters is green.

NEA Vice President Lily Eskelsen spoke excitedly of receiving funding for NEA’s English Language Learners program from Western Union.

Pringle defended NEA’s business relationship with Bank of America, saying the union has been able to exert influence over the bank in the area of credit card rate hikes for members, and saving the union money on electronic fund transfers for dues.

Is a shutdown the Democratic plan to recapture the legislature in 2012?

On yesterday’s NARN show, Mitch Berg and I had the opportunity to speak with the two leaders of Minnesota’s legislature, Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch and House Speaker Kurt Zellers, as well as our friend and former NARN band member Rep. King Banaian. Mitch and I asked them all why the government shutdown occurred — a question none of them could quite answer. The budget comes in nine bills, and Republicans had reached substantive agreement with Dayton on six of them, were close on two more, and only had difficulties on one, tax policy. The last biennial budget spent just under $31 billion; Republicans wanted to reduce that spending, but ended up offering a budget that came in at over $34 billion for the next biennium, an increase (after adjustments) of 6% in real spending. At the end, as Dayton refused to sign any of the budget bills, Republicans offered a “lights on” bill (a version of a continuing resolution in Congress) to keep government open while they struggled to reach agreement on policy.

Dayton refused to agree to the special session that would have considered the lights-on bill — and which will need to get called eventually to resolve the government shutdown anyway. Why did Dayton refuse to negotiate in good faith? Via my friend Scott Johnson at Power Line, Katherine Kersten accuses Dayton of trying to torpedo this session in order to give his party an opportunity to win back control of the legislature in 2012:

Did Dayton intentionally try to provoke a shutdown? We can only say that if he had wanted to, he would have acted precisely as he has in recent months.

Throughout the budgetary process, Dayton refused to give legislators the details they needed to take his priorities into account in crafting their own budget bills. He refused to negotiate on individual bills until he had seen them all.

The Legislature sent its bills to Dayton six weeks before the session ended, but he frittered away the time for negotiation. He vetoed all nine bills at the end of the session, so legislators had no chance to rework them to address his concerns.

As shutdown loomed, Dayton refused to resolve small differences and sign major portions of the budget, such as K-12 education, judiciary and public safety, on which agreement was close. The Pioneer Press called this “hostage taking,” not “compromise.”

But Minnesotans need to understand the bigger picture here. Behind Dayton and out of the limelight, DFL legislators have been playing for much higher stakes than a $1.8 billion spending increase.

In recent weeks, DFL minority leaders Paul Thissen and Tom Bakk have been glued to Dayton’s side throughout budget negotiations. Why? If Dayton — with the help of DFL legislators — could parlay a shutdown into a DFL legislative takeover in 2012, the political payoff for the party would be huge.

Dayton won’t face reelection until 2014, and the public’s memory of the current fiscal train wreck will be long gone by then.

But the Legislature is up for reelection in 2012 — just around the corner. If Dayton gets egg on his face for the shutdown, DFL leaders may view it as a small price to pay, so long as irate voters can be led to spread the blame to Republicans and to transfer legislative control to the DFL next year.

A 6% biennial increase seems like a pretty good offer of good will by Republicans in this environment; we heard from a couple of callers who were unhappy that the GOP increased spending at all. One e-mailer wondered aloud how he should vote in future elections if both Republicans and the DFL were determined to continue spending increases (answer: vote for the party that increases it least, I guess). What did the GOP get for its attempt to find a middle ground with Dayton, who wanted to increase the biennial budget to $37 billion and institute higher tax rates in the state already ranked 43rd in business tax environment? An utter refusal to negotiate and a state shutdown that Dayton at one time promised not to pursue.

I’d say Kersten is on the right track here.

Video: Should law enforcement be able to track vehicles without a warrant?

They certainly can now, but the Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether law enforcement should place tracking transmitters on the vehicles of suspects without first seeking a warrant. The test case will come from an appellate court that threw out a drug-distribution conviction and life sentence, ruling that the failure to get a warrant for the device violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner in Washington DC. As MSNBC reports, though, Jones was not the only suspect to have unknowingly carried an FBI tracking device:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I’m surprised that this hasn’t happened before. With most vehicles requiring an oil change every 3,000 miles, cars get racked on a regular basis. Perhaps other law enforcement agencies do a better job of hiding the transmitter that they did with Afifi. The report doesn’t indicate what the FBI’s interest was in surreptitiously tracking the American-born college student, but they didn’t mind making their presence known to get the transmitter back.

Maybe they were tracking Afifi for a study on a federal mileage tax, eh?

The Jones case involved the police, not the FBI:

The appeals court threw out the conviction and the life-in-prison sentence for Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner in Washington, D.C., for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Police put the GPS device on Jones’ vehicle and tracked his movements for a month during their investigation. Evidence obtained as a result of using the GPS device played a key role in his conviction.

The appeals court said prolonged electronic monitoring of Jones’ vehicle amounted to an unreasonable search.

The argument that law enforcement needs no warrant to track vehicles on public roads doesn’t make a lot of sense. They can’t search the vehicles themselves without permission, a search warrant, or probable cause (which strongly suggests an emergent situation as opposed to a chronic issue) even if the vehicle is on a public road at the time. Why, then, can police or FBI use tracking devices without the same restrictions, especially for long periods of time?

Drivers might not have a right to privacy in the act of driving on public roads, but that applies mainly in the moment. For instance, if police observe someone smoking a joint or drinking Jack Daniels while driving, they have the jurisdiction to pull the car over and arrest the driver, and few if any would dispute that. That’s a far cry from the government at any level compiling a list of travels and destinations over any period of time, which really does fall into Big Brother territory. If the government has probable cause to collect that kind of information, then law enforcement has enough information to get the search warrant to start collecting that kind of data.

Poll: What was the Obamateurism of the Week?

Time once again to take a flier on the Obamateurism of the Week, and this will be another tough choice.  I’d reduce the entries, but we apparently can’t cut our way to prosperity, so we’ll have to enjoy the bounty.  But, like any cash-strapped family, we’ll save by looking for dinner specials, even if we have to speed up the birthday cake.

What was the Obamateurism of the Week (7/3)?

“But we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity.”Says he will handle federal budget "like any cash-strapped family" while Treasury Secretary says "Government is not like a family" regarding budgetsRaffle for Presidential dinner escalates to 2-1 special with BidenMistakes his daughter's age during press conferenceSix references to tax breaks for "corporate jet owners" as reason budget isn't balanced

VoteView Results
Share ThisPolldaddy.com

Previous 2011 “winners”:

• Identifies wrong soldier as non-posthumous MoH recipient
• “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM; you don’t go to a bank teller.”
• Uses restaurant as example of success of auto bailouts, closes two weeks later
• Goes for 70th round of golf on Memorial Day
• Obama botches toast to Queen Elizabeth
• “Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat“
• WH gripes that immigration debate too often uses caricatures after Obama says, “Maybe they’ll need a moat.”
• White House issues Earth Day proclamation, skips Easter
• Can’t name a mistake at townhall in which he made three in one sentence
• Accuses GOP of trying to hurt seniors after lecturing them not to demagogue on entitlement reform
• “If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know, you might want to think about a trade-in.”
• Obama accepts his transparency award in secret, no-press meeting
• “War” first changed to “kinetic military action,” then “time-limited, scope-limited military action”
• Obama telling people it would be easier to be President of China because “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”
• Obama tells group that there is a “subterranean” racially-based agenda in opposition to his presidency
• Ferry for Americans in Libya comes three days late — and with a bill for passengers
• WH says Obama not addressing Libya because of “scheduling issue“
• After saying he hadn’t followed the Wisconsin issue, says Walker’s plan “seems like more of an assault on unions.”
• Businesses have “obligation” to create jobs and “pay decent wages”
• After losing verdict on first ever federal mandate to purchase private-sector product, accuses judge of “overreach”
• Obama bogarts Newt Gingrich’s book title for his “Winning the Future” SOTU speech
• 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner holds state dinner for man who has 2010 winner under house arrest
• After telling Boehner and McConnell that “there will be plenty of time to campaign for 2012 in 2012,”announces March start to re-election bid
• “I really want to figure out a way where I can spend more time outside of Washington listening and learning and engaging the American people.”

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me atobamaisms@edmorrissey.com with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!

GFT Named Best Forex Education Provider

2011 IBTimes Trading Awards Released - GFT Named Best Forex Education Provider

Global news leader International Business Times (IBTimes.com) announced the results of the 2011 IBTimes Trading Awards in New York City on May 31, 2011.

GFT, a US-based Forex Broker, won 3 awards: Best Forex Education Provider Award, Customer Service - Excellence Award and Forex Broker Japan - Excellence Award.

This year, a total of 30 retail FX broker firms were honored from a pool of 140 brokers nominated by 6,400 traders in 82 countries in 6 languages. The IBTimes Trading Awards offer one of the most comprehensive quantitative and qualitative annual award available for the fast growing retail Forex markets.

The survey was conducted over 6 months from September 2010 and March 2011. All voting was carried out electronically via a secure, dedicated data collection website.

The IBTimes Trading Awards fall into two major sections, one that recognizes brokers through quantitative measures (or relative market shares) and one through qualitative rankings (or client satisfaction) at the continent and country level.

"We are thrilled to accept the award for Best Forex Education Provider," said Gary Tilkin, president and CEO of GFT. "At GFT, we have always considered education to be an important part of any trading plan. We know that one of the best ways we can support our customers is by providing them with access to free tools and educational resources that will help them become more informed traders. Thank you IBTimes, and for all those who voted GFT."

The full results for the 2011 IBTimes Trading Awards can be viewed at the official awards website: www.IBTimesawards.com.

About the IBTimes Trading Awards

The 2011 IBTimes Trading Awards identify their findings of the best financial service providers globally. The awards recognize excellence in the quality of the services they offer to traders and investors.

From 2010, readers of The International Business Times have been invited to vote on a range of attributes of the providers they use. The winners in each category are selected based on the votes and a judging panel of industry experts and independent research groups.

The IBTimes Trading Awards builds on the successes of last year's Awards, the 2010 FX Traders' Choice Awards. They were awarded based on the votes of IBTimes' readers collated by Forex DataSource, a Forex market research firm. The goal of the FX Traders' Choice Awards was to empower traders with reliable information and help them select reputable brokers, as traders decided the winners.

This year, the 2011 IBTimes Trading Awards continues to give public recognition to those brokers and financial service providers while increasing the scope of the awards to cover all major asset classes including Funds, ETFs, Stocks, Futures and Options. The awards also reflect The International Business Times' global identity and include votes on financial service providers from around the world that provide services in multiple languages.