LA Times: Consumers bought cars at a steady pace in August as the automobile industry continued to help anchor the U.S. economy.
“August continues this summer’s trend of healthy growth,” said John Humphrey, senior vice president of global automotive operations at J.D. Power and Associates.
…. General Motors Co. said its U.S. sales rose 10% to 240,520 in August compared with the same month a year earlier.
Ford Motor Co. reported that sales increased 13% to 197,249 vehicles as shoppers gravitated to smaller cars.
…. Chrysler Group said its sales rose 14% to 148,472 vehicles compared with the same month a year earlier. It was the automaker’s best August sales since 2007.
LA Times: Nationwide home prices shot up 3.8% in July, making their largest year-over-year leap since 2006…. The gain marks the fifth straight rise in the gauge, part of a positive swing following a year and a half of slumps. The last time prices rose so much was in August 2006, when they jumped 4.1%.
Prices in California bounded up 4.4%. Without distressed sales – including foreclosures and short sales – national prices were up 4.3% compared with last July.
The report, coming as a glut of house-hunters clamor after a shrinking inventory, suggests that the real estate market is “clearly seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel,” said CoreLogic Chief Executive Anand Nallathambi in a statement.
12:05: President Obama departs the White House en route Joint Base Andrews
12:20: Departs Joint Base Andrews en route Portsmouth, New Hampshire
1:35: Arrives in Portsmouth
2:05: Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Oyster River High School (live coverage)
4:05: Departs Portsmouth en route Boston, Massachusetts
4:30: Arrives in Boston
5:10: Attends a campaign event (closed press)
7:35: Delivers remarks at a campaign event (live coverage)
9:25: Delivers remarks at a campaign event (private residence)
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Tuesday: The President will travel to Atlanta and Miami to attend campaign events. He will return to Washington in the evening.
Wednesday: Will meet with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed. In the evening, the President and First Lady will host a picnic for Members of Congress at the White House.
Thursday and Friday: The President will attend meetings at the White House.
****
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Peter Cohan (Telegram): When he was running for President in 2008, Barack Obama struck me as a gifted orator. But now that he’s running for re-election, it feels to me that the messaging power of his political opponents is like Hurricane Katrina blowing against a chipmunk’s squeal.
So I am confident that a piece of excellent news for drivers resulting from a little-noticed policy from Mr. Obama will get no attention at all from the media.
In April, I predicted that President Obama’s $52 million plan to increase the margin requirements and otherwise tighten the screws on oil speculators — who borrow huge sums to bet on the direction of oil without taking delivery — would cut oil prices by 10 percent. He’s beaten that prediction, and the lowered price of gasoline has added $78.4 billion to its consumers’ spending power.
Michael Tomasky: Democrats Should Come Out Swinging Against the Court – If the Supreme Court overturns the health-care law, Democrats will be tempted to sulk and feel sorry for themselves. But that’s the last thing they should do.
I expect, as I think most of us do, an unfriendly decision (from the Democratic point of view) on the health-care law. Can’t yet say how unfriendly; at the very least, an overturning of the individual mandate, and maybe more. Assuming that’s correct, the question immediately becomes how the president and the Democrats should respond. There’s very little they can do legislatively. But I’ll be watching for rhetoric, tone, even body language. And on those counts, they had damn well better dispense with the usual liberal woe-is-me hand-wringing and shoulder slumping and come out swinging.
They had better communicate to their base that they stand for something, it’s important to them, and they’re pissed. And if they do it the right way, they can make the Supreme Court an issue this fall in a way that might even persuade some swing voters that the court overstepped its bounds. I’d go so far as to say that an aggressive response can reset and reframe the whole health-care debate, once Americans have had their minds focused on this by a blatantly partisan court.
Jonathan Cohn: Do you care how the Supreme Court rules on health care reform this week? I don’t mean in the political sense. I mean in the personal sense — because the law’s fate is a very personal matter for many millions of Americans.
They’re the Americans who have diabetes and Crohn’s disease, cancer and hay fever. They’re the Americans who don’t have access to health benefits and the Americans who have access to health benefits but can’t afford to pay for them…..
The Affordable Care Act won’t help all of these people. But it will help an awful lot of them. In fact, it’s already starting to make a difference….
….. by and large, the Affordable Care Act seems to be working …. Will the Supreme Court stop this progress? … a decision to strike down even part of the law would have grave consequences — for the court’s legitimacy and, perhaps, the norms that make our constitutional system function. It’d also have grave consequences for the people whose employment, financial, or medical status renders them vulnerable — a group that may someday include you, if it doesn’t already.
E.J. Dionne: Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court may make possible something that has yet to happen: an honest and complete discussion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).
And if it throws out all or part of the law now popularly known as “Obamacare,” we will need a fearless conversation about how a conservative majority of the court has become a cog in a larger right-wing project to make progressive political and legislative victories impossible.
… Maybe now, supporters of the ACA will find their voices and point to the 30 million people the law would help to buy health insurance, how much assistance it gives businesses, how it creates a more rational health insurance market, how it helps those 26 and under stay on their parents’ health plans, how it protects those with pre-existing conditions. “Obamacare” isn’t about President Obama. It’s about beginning to bring an end to the scandal of a very rich nation leaving so many of its citizens without basic health coverage…..
…. Were the health-care law to be eviscerated, those who battled so hard on its behalf might draw at least bittersweet comfort from what could be called the Joni Mitchell Rule, named after the folk singer who instructed us that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Bloomberg: The U.S. Supreme Court should uphold a law requiring most Americans to have health insurance if the justices follow legal precedent, according to 19 of 21 constitutional law professors who ventured an opinion on the most-anticipated ruling in years.
Only eight of them predicted the court would do so.
“The precedent makes this a very easy case,” said Christina Whitman, a University of Michigan law professor. “But the oral argument indicated that the more conservative justices are striving to find a way to strike down the mandate.”
…. There was broad agreement that the ruling, barely four months before November’s presidential election, has the potential to hurt the Supreme Court’s reputation as an impartial institution.
Eighteen of the 21 professors said the court’s credibility will be damaged if the insurance requirement – which passed Congress without a single Republican vote – is ruled unconstitutional by a 5-4 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents.
Steve Benen: Earlier this year, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry was still a presidential candidate, he took aim at Mitt Romney’s controversial private-sector background. Perry told voters, “There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business.”
…. In several instances, even when Romney’s firm drove companies into bankruptcy, and even when Bain’s own investors lost, Romney made millions, thanks to fees he charged the companies has they spiraled towards collapse. Taking risks may be a key element to successful capitalism, but this Republican created a system in which risk taking wasn’t necessary.
As far as the election is concerned, Romney is telling voters this background helps prove his qualifications for the presidency. I still haven’t the foggiest idea why.
Jonathan Capehart: There was a great story in The Post yesterday that was nothing but good news for the American consumer. “Gas prices expected to fall further heading into summer” read the headline. Truth be told, the story isn’t new. Dropping pump prices have been reported on for about a month now.
Yet, what interested me most was the chart that accompanied yesterday’s story. It depicts the daily average price for regular gas over the last year, from May 2011 through May 2012. Were it a noise meter, it would also chart the volume of Republican hysteria over rising gas prices.
….. the national average gas price, which peaked at $3.91 in early April, was down to $3.64 on Memorial Day. That’s 17 cents cheaper than a year ago.
According to Politico, Republicans are still going to target the president on gas prices. But with fuel costs expected to continue their downward slide, the GOP can expect its credibility on this issue to follow suit.
Richard Adams (The Guardian): ….Last night – under the cover of darkness – the Mitt Romney campaign published what it claims to be a birth certificate for “Willard Mitt bin Romney”.
As we can plainly see, this is obviously a forgery, and Donald Trump and Sheriff Joe Arpaio need to get right on it. Here are the five key signs:
1. This is clearly not a birth certificate at all. It’s something called a “Certificate of Live Birth” – which suggests the obvious question: where is the birth certificate?
2. This is only the “short form” of the certificate and that is plainly inadequate. Why won’t Mitt Romney publish his “long form” birth certificate? What does he have to hide?
3. Notice that the “date of birth” is listed as March 12, 1947 – but the so-called “certificate” was filed on March 17, 1947. How can Mitt Romney explain this mysterious five day gap during which time he may (or may not) have been smuggled in from Canada? – the foreign country bordering on Michigan.
4. Using my computer I note that this “certificate” image is labeled: “Adobe Photoshop JPEG file”. Clear signs of a forgery?
5. “Father’s birthplace: Mexico”. Come on, do I have to paint you a picture for this one?
To be clear, none of these obvious errors, omissions and forgery are evidence that Mitt Romney was born abroad and has engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to conceal his foreign birth – we are merely asking questions. And putting words in italics for sinister effect. That’s all. Over to you, Donald.
LA Times: President Obama ruffled some feathers two years ago when he lambasted the Supreme Court for its Citizens United decision during a State of the Union speech. It was unusual for a president to criticize the justices as they sat before him.
Now, retired Justice John Paul Stevens has taken the equally unusual step of saying the president was right in challenging the court’s opinion.
Obama said the 5-4 ruling freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums on elections “reversed a century of law,” adding it would “open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
“In that succinct comment, the former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago made three important and accurate observations about the Supreme Court majority’s opinion,” Stevens said in a speech Wednesday evening. “First, it did reverse a century of law; second, it did authorize unlimited election-related expenditures by America’s most powerful interests; and, third, the logic of the opinion extends to money spent by foreign entities.”
Tuesday: The President will travel to Albany, New York for an official event on the economy. In the evening, the President will return to Washington, DC to deliver the keynote address at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies 18th Annual Gala Dinner at the Ritz Carlton.
Wednesday: The President will attend meetings at the White House. In the evening, as part of their “In Performance at the White House” series, the President and First Lady will host a concert in the East Room honoring songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who will be awarded the 2012 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The program will include performances by Sheryl Crow, Michael Feinstein, Diana Krall, Lyle Lovett, Mike Myers, Rumer, Arturo Sandoval, Sheléa and Stevie Wonder.
Thursday: The President will travel to Seattle, Washington and Los Angeles, California for campaign events. The President will remain overnight in Los Angeles, California.
Friday: The President will travel to Reno, Nevada for an official event on the economy. In the afternoon, the President will return to Washington, DC.
President Obama announces a plan to increase oversight and crackdown on manipulation in oil markets during a statement in the Rose Garden of the White House, April 17
