In a stunning move, The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday delivered President Obama a game-changing victory by upholding the Affordable Care Act, “affectionately” dubbed “Obamacare.”  The ruling reinforces Obama’s attempt to secure “affordable” health care to some 45 million Americans and its individual mandate on which the entire bill hinged, was upheld as a “tax.”  Despite the myriad experts who deemed the bill unconstitutional, somehow it passed 4-5 in the court, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts unbelievably swinging the decision in the president’s favor. The reasons behind this apparent breach remain unclear.

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(CNN) — European leaders reached a “breakthrough” deal early Friday to ease the recapitalization of struggling banks that should help draw the eurozone back from the brink of a gathering crisis.

Under the deal, European leaders agreed to create a single supervisory body to oversee the eurozone’s banks which could use the single currency area’s rescue funds, the European Financial Stability Facility or European Stability Mechanism, to aid banks directly without adding to governments’ debt.

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John Roberts is brilliant. After the dust settles people will start to see what really happened. John Roberts was not going to allow the Roberts Court to go down in history as the court that killed health care for the people. And that is exactly what the historians would have written. And he was not going to allow Democrats to cry that the court was strictly a political animal acting in a partisan way. Now neither of those things will happen and the left is doing a jig about their “win.” What Roberts did with his vote was to screw them royally. Allow me to explain.

Even though Obama continued declaring his bill was not a tax, his own attorneys argued in court that it was. All Roberts did was to accommodate them. And what that did was to piss off Ginsburg who, from the bench, noted it was commerce and didn’t like Roberts even mentioning it as a tax. But by doing what he did, he took away Congress’ ability to force anything on us as commerce. And he further put Obama in the limelight now as the perpetrator of the biggest tax increase ever in the world. How does Obama fight that? And he now also made it possible for the Senate to “unfund” the whole thing since they have the right to rescind any tax they want. That won’t even require the President’s veto.

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Italy and Spain last night threatened to block “everything” at a crisis summit to save the European Union’s single currency unless they got immediate eurozone aid to bring down their borrowing costs.”

It is entirely possible that N. C. House Speaker Thom Tillis is the most unpopular politician in Eastern North Carolina right now. And it seems to be getting worse with each passing day.

For example, in Sunday’s (6-24-12) Beaufort County Now, publisher Stan Deatherage took Tillis to task over Tillis getting Congressman Walter B. Jones to endorse “Democrat-running-as-a-Republican” Arthur Williams for the House 6 seat. Stan had previously reported on a flap at the recent GOP State Convention over a flyer that was being handed out that questioned the meddling by state GOP officials/office holders in local GOP primaries. Tillis came out of that flap looking bad when it was reported that he bullied a highly regarded GOP activist on the convention floor. That buzz is not only still around, but appears to be growing as a negative groundswell toward Tillis and other state GOP leaders.

Tillis already had two strikes against him among many GOP leaders in Eastern North Carolina as a result of his pushing a budget through with increased ferry tolls and how his redistricting committee dealt with Bill Cook and other districts Down East in the redistricting process.

A number of delegates to the Third District Convention in May were primed to pin Tillis down as he was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Convention. He did not show and did not let anyone know well enough in advance to find a suitable replacement. Similarly, Walter B. Jones did not even attend the Third District Convention, allowing his challenger Frank Palombo to steal the show. At that meeting the Chairman of the Beaufort County GOP Executive Committee gave a report from that group that had adopted a formal protest of Raleigh leaders meddling in local GOP primaries. The report got a resounding applause and reception with numerous other delegations requesting copies. But because the report was too late to be submitted as a formal resolution there was no vote on it taken.

Meanwhile, the firestorm spread. The Observer has learned that at least six other county executive committees have discussed the issue and a number of TEA Party groups have also taken up the issue.

On June 22, 2012, Brant Clifton revealed on his Daily Haymaker blog who was behind the convention flyer. Clifton also posted a report that documented that it was Tillis who was behind Walter Jones’ endorsement of Democrat-running-as-a-Republican Arthur Williams. This was confirmed by Jones’ campaign manager, Jonathan Brooks.

On June 20, Linda Harper wrote another state GOP leader, House Majority Leader Skip Stam, and “uninvited” him to speak to a Constitution Seminar meeting on July 21. The sponsor of the seminar is the conservative Citizens for Constitutional Liberties, which is the Wayne County TEA Party group.

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An unjust law is no law at all.  And the market knows that we are facing a wave of injustice…

So for every lame-stream media talking head who told you that “the US economy is decoupled from Europe now”, which is nearly all of them in the past 3 years, you can now firmly affix the label “LIAR”.  They all knew that the markets had gone from being a reasonably civil game to being a gladiatorial death-match in the wake of the 2008 crisis, but chose to deny it in public.

Why do I say this?  Because, following the announcement yesterday that Barclay’s was being fined some $453 Million for “rigging” the value of its LiBOR transactions with certain counter-parties, we have learned that Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), HSBC, UBS, and CitiGroup also participated in this massive manipulation of the market (and presumably other such manipulations, long suspected, but yet to be proven).  Everyone who follows the markets already knew that things were rigged – there was too much nano-data to deny it.  Various large “houses” had teamed up at certain times to flash-force other institutions into buying or selling at a major disadvantage.  Options, Swaps, and other “synthetic”  leveraged outlier contracts can make it very hard to tell who is against you, but the proof of the manipulation itself is painfully evident to every player on the field – at this point, any claim by a brokerage or other active party that this is “surprising” is totally incredulous.

All of the companies called out in this investigation are taking it right in the MarketCap this morning, with Barclays down 16% and RBS down 13%,  and if the market knows itself, then LLOYDS is definitely an ‘unindited co-conspirator’ because their stock is also plummeting, down 7% this morning as well.  The Chancelor of the UK stated, “Barclays and these other banks were in flagrant breach of proper market conduct”, and regulators in the UK confirmed that criminal prosecution was under consideration in the matter.

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