[Many more wonderful New Year graphics can be found here]

Welcome to 2011 and 1/1/11 – one of those rare dates you get to use only once a century. As the date reflects we have a rare opportunity this year to pick a new path for the country. The liberals will continue to pretend they are they saviors of humankind (it’s their greatest character flaw and why they believe so much in controlling others). One historic shellacking is not going to wake them up from their delusions.

And the DC-NY-LA political punditry class will continue to believe they are the only ones who can unravel the desires and requirements of We The People.

But the new crop of politicians heading to DC, especially in the House, have a brief opportunity to establish new libertarian priorities and chart a different course than we have seen in decades. Dramatic cuts to spending will be tolerated as long as they come with sound rationales (not lame sound bites you might hear out of elementary school or staged PR stunts). Most cuts will not pass, they will be stymied by the old guard in the Senate and the far left administration. This is to be expected and nurtured.

We want to rally the people to a new path of minimal government intervention and meddling, matched with more personal freedoms and responsibility. It is this second part that will be a tough sell, and cannot be sold by replacing left wing government diktats with right wing government diktats. Tolerance will be the underpinning of confidence, not domination.

I foresee plenty of hearings on why CO2 has never been proven to be driving the world’s climate, why all the data collected and mashed to date is incapable of measuring a global temperature, let alone sub-degree changes over a century. We have an opportunity to reacquaint America to the idea of solid math, full result reporting and the complexity of nature so vast no CRU or GISS with a handful of overblown PhDs could grasp. I foresee outsiders coming in and a debate royal on the entire theory of man-made, CO2-driven warming. It will provide time to suspend the EPAs madness and force the left to start acting like mature scientists.

I foresee similar hearings and debates on health care ramifications, spending, defense, mortgages, social security, etc. We don’t need a bunch of new legislation – we need to suspend the madness and figure out what is worth saving and what has to go. We need to provide the people ideas to implement in 2012 (much of which will be the repeal of decades of government bureaucracy, waste and greed). The resulting priorities will need to be so endearing and enticing to a broad and central core of America that the sweep that began in 2010 is continued and expanded in 2012.

We need less of the slogans and vague candidates we saw in 2010. We definitely want more outsiders runnig for office (which was the endearing quality that led many fresh faces to their primary victories). We need to recruit ordinary, simple people with families and careers to come help fix Washington once the last of the liberal dead-enders are booted. We need a tolerant and flexible position to begin the debate and build and up-swell of support. We don’t need know-it-alls.

How to fail: bash the moderates in the middle. Lose the middle and they go back to the Democrats. How to fail: demand quick action as opposed to a multi-year plan to rally broad support. How to fail: act as arrogant and ignorant as the left did the last two years.

We either are going to see simple people of good will trying to fix the mess without rigid ideology, or we will see another swing of the ideological pendulum that will leave Obama in the White House and our government slowly strangling this nation into defeat.