Updates Below

News from today’s hearings on Obamacare at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) indicate Obamacare took a pounding.  CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin was especially shaken:

According to CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the arguments were “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”

“This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong,” Toobin just said on CNN.

Toobin added that that the Obama administration’s lawyer, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrelli, was unprepared for the attacks against the individual mandate.

“I don’t know why he had a bad day,” he said. “He is a good lawyer, he was a perfectly fine lawyer in the really sort of tangential argument yesterday. He was not ready for the answers for the conservative justices.”

That’s pretty bad news for Obamacare, and damn great news for America. Here’s another damning take:

Based on the questions posed to Paul Clement, the lead attorney for the state challengers to the individual mandate, it appears that the mandate is in trouble.  It is not clear whether it will be struck down, but the questions that the conservative Justices posed to Clement were not nearly as pressing as the ones they asked to Solicitor General Verrilli.  On top of that, Clement delivered a superb presentation in response to the more liberal Justices’ questions.

It looks like Team Obama was not prepared for a couple of things, including Justice Kennedy’s concerns on how Obamacare “changes the relationship between the individual and the government in a very fundamental way” – something Libertarian critics have been saying since day 1. It probably threw Verrelli off his game once he detected the tone of the room.

I have not seen this much hand wringing in quite a while, so it must have been something of a bomb shell.

Let’s hope it holds and Obamacare is thrown out (and ends this liberal, socialist madness for once and for all). Much more commentary over at Hot Air with Ed Morrissey.

Update 2: Oh wow – Verrelli admits not everyone will be required to comply with Obamacare!

However, in the Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Samuel Alito forced President Barack Obama’s solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, to admit that under Obamacare these free riders will not be eliminated despite the individual mandate.

For an elite group—including people eligible for Medicaid who don’t sign up for it and people whose health care expenses exceed 8 percent of their income—the Obamacare mandate is no mandate and the penalty is neither a penalty nor a tax because they are not required to pay it, period.

So Obamacare is not as they argue, something everyone MUST pay into in order to share the pain. Looks like that one admission could kill any reason for expanding government reach. Because once there are exceptions, the lobbyists run to Congress to expand the list of the exempted.

Update: Ouch! Some of the discussions were brutal:

USTICE SAMUEL ALITO: Do you think there is a, a market for burial services?

VERRILLI: For burial services?

JUSTICE ALITO: Yes.

VERRILLI: Yes, Justice Alito, I think there is.

JUSTICE ALITO: All right, suppose that you and I walked around downtown Washington at lunch hour and we found a couple of healthy young people and we stopped them and we said, “You know what you’re doing? You are financing your burial services right now because eventually you’re going to die, and somebody is going to have to pay for it, and if you don’t have burial insurance and you haven’t saved money for it, you’re going to shift the cost to somebody else.”

Isn’t that a very artificial way of talking about what somebody is doing?

….

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Could you help — help me with this. Assume for the moment — you may disagree. Assume for the moment that this is unprecedented, this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce. If that is so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification?

I understand that we must presume laws are constitutional, but, even so, when you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this, what we can stipulate is, I think, a unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?

Looks like Verrelli got decimated.

In the barbaric past humanity was basically operating within the constructs of Anarchy.

Anarchy, has more than one definition. In the United States, the term “anarchy” typically is meant to refer to a society without a publicly enforced government or violently enforced political authority.

Anarchistic social structures are open to misuse and abuse, as they are built upon the rule of the fittest, strongest or (too often) cruelest. We can see the vestiges of humanity’s anarchist roots in the cruelty of ancient civilizations ranging from Egypt to Greece to Rome. Anarchy is one end of the social spectrum most modern society’s know to avoid at all costs. Even a slight tilt in that direction get’s you a beat up, dirty, violent result (see NY City prior to Rudy Giuliani and his application of the broken window rule).

As we evolved toward orderly society the pendulum swung around to the other extreme – the dictatorial rule of the individual and their close band of thugs. This model ran under various themes from Egypt and her Pharaohs, through Rome and her Emperors, through Europe and their Kings, through China and more Emperors, Russia and Czars, , etc. The rule of the strongman individual culminated in its violent peak in the early 19th century when we had World Wars I and II – initiated by the strongmen of the time and legendary purveyors of death and destruction. This is the era of Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin and his Purges and Hirohito and his War Crimes. Remnants lived on in isolated areas, but they are slowly dying off (see Pol Pot in Combodia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, various war lords of Africa, and he despots of North Korea).

The nation that stood tall to end this madman government model was the United States of America, allied with other countries that had switched to (or were switching to) a model were government was minimal, had numerous checks and balances to thwart madman government, and relied on the wisdom and INDIVIDUAL efforts of its people. World War II saw the ascendency of the “We The People” model.

This decentralized government model, where people exploited their freedom of choice to create a positive direction for the whole society out of literally millions of individual ‘good’ decisions each day by the masses, was the best solution to the two extremes (Anarchy and Violent Dictatorial Rule). It produced a balance that protected the individual and their freedom, established boundaries of behavior that protected those freedoms from others, and allowed the masses to drive  the direction forward.

But somewhere after WWII and during the Cold War the minimal government model began to fall apart as a new, more screwed up model came into fashion. And that model is the progressive socialism out of control bureaucracy.

Call it the Mindless Bureaucracy. Whatever it is,  it is also a headless economic cancer. This model sinks back into the central control model of the madman leader – except the scope the madman can exert is limited to just a small piece of society – not all of it. So now we have a DC madman and his group of merry thugs running around inspecting school lunches. Another mad person running around measuring carbon foot prints. Another mad person running around checking fence heights and mailbox colors. Some mad council somewhere is determining when a toy in the hands of a fool causes injury, it is the toy’s fault. Or that the idiot with hot coffee between her legs while driving is the victim of the drive-through restaurant she ordered from.

Update: This news just hit Drudge. Basically it says pools have been temporarily saved from massive closures to avoid law suits. Liberals at work. - end update.

Or worse. Now we get the mad council of know-it alls determining who should get what medical treatments. Note how individual responsibility for their freedom of choice has been eroded to result in remove of freedom of choice by the government – who is out to protect us from our own freedom of choice. That is the cancer we are swimming in.

This mindless centralized government may actually be orchestrated and protected by a small group of wealthy political power players who endlessly fight over which side version of mad we will operate under: the juvenile delinquent and lazy mad of the left or the prudish and paranoid mad of the right. But it matters not. The headless big government model is failing.

What Americans want is the old US of A back. They want to live their lives and do what they know is right. And right now neither political party nor any of the presidential candidate has caught up with this new reality. But before I dive into where the people are versus the Political Industrial Complex (now falling behind the times), let me finish proving we are at the beginning of the end of mindless big government (i.e., progressive socialism). The signs are all about us.

First and close to home – and proving beyond a doubt neither left nor right leaning political professionals understand where we are – was the 2010 election. Obama, Reid and Pelosi had no idea they actually had to produce results to win support in the next election. They had no idea that their naive economic theories were so stupid and childish in the face of a very complex, very modern and very dynamic world. The community organizer has changed politics forever through his long laundry list of failures. That is why his party received the biggest electoral shellackings in living memory in 2010. He ushered in the end of progressive socialism.

But then the GOP in 2011 took that huge mandate and frittered it away in the budget battles. They kept raising the size of government with empty promises of future cuts. They were indistinguishable from Obama and his promise of economic success through crushing deficits, high unemployment, sky rocketing energy costs and higher taxes. The House GOP silenced and hand cuffed their 2010 insurgent members – and is now seen as being as much of the problem as the left. That is the straw that ended the enchantment with any form of big government here in the US.

Greece, Spain and Europe’s general economic woes are eye-watering evidence that bloated bureaucracies focused on minutiae and promising endless ‘free’ handouts is unsustainable and will lead, unavoidably, to financial ruin.

Right near the top of the pile is Spain, where the economy is once again back in recession, the unemployment rate is a staggering 23%, house prices are collapsing and the government is set to implement even further austerity this year.

The wasteful, useless and naive spending is starting to inflict massive pain on the people. In the EU the myth of ‘renewable energy’ is going the way of ‘shovel ready jobs’ here in the US. Watch for many more stories  like this in the coming months and years:

WIND power – more accurately wind impotence, since turbines operate at just 24 per cent of capacity – is the curse of Scotland. One of the most beautiful landscapes in Europe has been brutally ravaged, families have been driven into fuel poverty, pensioners have been presented with the lethal dilemma “heat or eat” – all to appease the neurotic prejudices of global warming fanatics.

Last week, the punitive costs of this lunacy were exposed in a report by Professor Gordon Hughes, professor of economics at Edinburgh University. He has calculated that the bill for wind energy by 2020 will cost consumers £120 billion. Yet generating the same amount of electricity from efficient gas-powered stations would cost only £13bn.

And now we see the same financial implosion on the Health Care front here in the USA:

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office hands critics of the health reform law a great new talking point: Under a worst-case scenario, the law could lead to 20 million people losing their employer-sponsored insurance in 2019.

Combined with the 6 million more not working due to Obama’s failed economic policies it will be more than 20 million without employer supplied health care in the near future. In tandem with the now rising cost of Obamacare, the result will be a total and painful mess.

So how could the GOP misstep on this clear opening? Simple – they stuck with big government solutions – just their versions.

Humanity has evolved from anarchy and survived to bury the idea of strongman/madman rule. It had for a brief time enjoyed the freedom of individual choice and responsibility, but then slipped into the doomed era of mindless big government run amok. The people are ready to dismantle the nanny state and retire her. The nag is going to the field to chew her cud sooner or later. Sooner is preferable.

To win elections today simply means to go back to America’s roots and realize taht when individual decisions rule the day, the worst damage that can be done by a bad decisions is to the individual (and sadly some around them). But when that individual is empowered as a bureaucrat in a life-long job, then those bad decision can ripple out to hurt all of us. The power behind the 2010 voting was the libertarian mindset to dismantle government and take the risk of bad individual decisions and recapture the success of millions of daily good decisions that made this country what it was in its prime.

If there is only  a choice between which big government madness will prevail (the ‘feel good’ message of the left or the ‘be proper’ message of the right) the GOP loses. Every damn time – they lose.

Why the GOP is seen as the worse of 2 evils is complex. For example, the right’s homophobic image and  promise to wage a war on porn (but of course, what is porn?) can sound good to some, but most people see just another stripe of busy-body madness in DC. In the end, the fight on sexual morals can only be waged in the home. There is no one size fits all for sex, religion and color preferences.

Do we really have to chose between the lunch police or the condom police?

Why can’t we just get back to the neighborhood police? And then live our lives the way we wish?

There is a theory about how a level of tolerance can creep into a neighborhood (or even a society) because people turn their backs on their little slice of paradise in America and then create a crime ridden, economically bankrupt mess. It is call The Broken Windows Theory:

The theory states that monitoring and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism as well as an escalation into more serious crime.

It’s not rocket science. If you maintain your neighborhood (or society) crime will be less and value will go up. If you look the other way, crime will become the norm, people will give up on order and embrace chaos, and value goes down.

While we have all cringed in horror over the Penn State-Sandusky nightmare, one reaction has been consistent – why wasn’t this stopped when uncovered?

Simply because people looked the other way. It is simply another example of The Broken Window Theory. Instead of cleaning up their organization, Penn State let an animal run lose and terrorize little boys. They looked the other way. Now look at their little slice of paradise – it’s destroyed.

So, as a society, what are we doing about our Broken Windows? Let’s see:

In 2010, BrightSource was in deep trouble. It was $1.8 billion in debt and was losing money hand over fist–a $71.6 million loss on a mere $13.5 million in revenue. A company destined to go down the drain, one would think. But no! The Obama administration bailed out BrightSource to the tune of a cool $1.4 billion in loan guarantees.

How could that possibly have happened? Well, start with the fact that the principal investor in BrightSource is VantagePoint Partners. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a Venture Partner in VantagePoint. But BrightSource had an even more valuable contact than that:

Sanjay Wagle…was one of the principals in Kennedy’s firm who raised money for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.

So Obama appointed a fundraiser with interests in BrightSource to oversee a $1.4 billion dollar loan guarantee to his investment group – dwarfing the Solyndra mess which has the same illegal and unethical stench to it. Note how the loan is much larger than the losses to date, meaning they will lose 100′s of millions more before this disaster finally crashes down.

This is how the company describes itself as an investment risk (H/T Powerline):

We expect that our net losses and our negative operating cash flows will continue for the foreseeable future, as we increase our development activities and construct solar thermal energy projects. …

Our proprietary technology has a limited history and may perform below expectations when implemented on utility-scale projects.

We use proprietary technology that has not been previously implemented on utility-scale projects of the size and complexity of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, or Ivanpah, and Ivanpah may experience technological problems that neither we nor any of the third-party independent engineers that have reviewed our projects are able to foresee.

In other words, don’t waste a dime on these folks. They have no idea if their ideas will work and so far they have only succeeded in (a) losing 100′s of millions of dollars and (b) robbing the US treasury for capitol.

This is a seriously broken window. It is the political elite raiding the taxes of hard working middle America to line their pockets, jet around the world, buy expensive toys and be completely irresponsible for their results. It is sick.

Average people in this country are struggling to pay for school, healthcare, repairs to the car, a cheap vacation, etc. And these white collar thieves are appointed by the community organizer/head thief to waste the money taxpayers earned but were not allowed to use for themselves. It is pathetic.

If there is no outrage, if we do not fix these broken windows, this generation will be known as the ones who destroyed a great nation with their greed and laziness. It is time to clean out the cesspool in DC. It is time to fix the windows, put the abusers behind bars (so they know there is a severe price to pay for this criminal behavior) and shrink government back down to its bare minimum.

I would rather see a family spend their money on a few expensive and unneeded items than see the corrupt scion of a once great American family waste that same money on dodgy green snake oil. This is what the 2012 election should be about. Dismantling Dept of Energy, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and Obamacare and all these other lame ideas that throw away hard earned money that they did not earn. All the stupid ideas proposed by big-government poseurs -who really just want to raid taxpayers because their too lazy or incompetent to create a real solution, a real business, a real service – need to be shut down.

We need bold change in DC, not tinkering on the margins, or the opposing power’s people grabbing at the same treasury for their purposes. We need change.

This has been a fascinating election cycle in one important way. All sides of the Political Industrial Complex of this nation (centered in DC, NY City and LA) have been trying to ignore the Big Elephant in the room: The American Voters and their anti-government rage.

The NY Times comes out spinning like a top today trying to find some hope for their leftist policies and any kind of deadly weaknesses in their conservative opponents (and pulease don’t try and tell me the NY Times has not gone far left over the last two decades). Buried deep into the article is this gem:

Not only do 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, but 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track and 84 percent disapprove of Congress — warnings for Democrats and Republicans alike.

Emphasis mine. Let that highlighted number just sink in a bit. Ponder it and roll it over. Because it underpins all the other numbers in this poll. Today 9 in 10 voters distrust government to solve problems, spend our money wisely, treat us equally, protect our freedoms and/or be semi-competent. 9 in 10!

And which party has the libertarian, small government, Tea Party heart and soul of this 90%? Which party is the party of big government solutions. Which party has an abysmal track record of big government failures from the mortgage implosion due to social engineering, to trickle down government stimulus that failed to stimulate, to mountains of generational debt?

Only those in deep denial would ignore the obvious here.

Now, translate that anti-government rage (the same one, albeit at lower intensity at the time, that hit the Democrats in 2010) to the 2012 presidential election and you have really only one champion running that represents this 90%. There is only one who is acknowledged to have the least experience with bungled government solutions.

It’s not the President – that’s for sure. He came out and admitted the obvious yesterday, basically sealing his fate:

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own,’” Obama told a crowd of 200 donors over lunch at the W Hotel.

And the masses cheered! The goal of the 90% is to get government back into its minimal box so it can stop screwing things up. Yes, we want to be left alone, on our own.

Long time government and political workers are blind to opportunities outside government. Being immersed in the process of the bureaucracy and extremely inexperienced in the real world, they fail to understand when change is needed or a dangerous line has been crossed. With well intentioned ignorance the slavishly follow the established process – sometimes to horrible results.

Two glaring examples of blindered, bureaucratic thinking scar the national psyche to this day.

The first example is 9-11. President Bush enacted sweeping changes to the relationships between law enforcement and national security intelligence so that we no longer turn a blind eye to terrorists that we detect outside our borders once they come inside them to kill us. It is known as the Gorelick wall, that out dated barrier that said the FBI could not be notified of external threats now in the country, and Bush tore it down to great and silly angst from the left. If not for this classic bureaucratic communications barrier, we may have stopped 9-11 from being executed.

The 2nd example is the mortgage implosion which caused the Great Recession of 2008. At that time liberal law makers in Congress ignored warning signs that the flood of incapable home purchasers they backed in an attempt to expand home ownership was eroding the foundation of a major section of our economy (the housing market). Bureaucrats and left wing congress-critters blindly let our nation’s wealth evaporate in a burst of social engineering gone wrong, which in the end wiped out the life savings of millions of people.

There are thousands of more examples of smaller proportion out there (think Solyndra), so that 90% who distrust government have good cause for their views. And moreover, they are right.

Will Mitt Romney, with is own version of government run health care and is fealty to the Church of Global Warming/Al Gore, represent these 9 in 10 voters?

Laughable, isn’t it.

Can Governor Rick Perry and his support for in-state tuition for illegals (not even out of state rates, making a middle class Virginian less welcome than a Mexican day worker to Texas) represent them? Congress Critters Bachman, Paul or Gingrich? Senator Santorum and his desire to deny access to contraceptives (talk about your government intrusion)?

No, the one person who aligns perfectly with this 90% is Herman Cain. Buried even farther down in the NY Times poll article is Herman Cain:

Republican voters remain unenthused about their options to challenge President Obama next year, as the competition intensifies among Mitt Romney, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and other contenders. The uncertainty has provided an opening for Herman Cain, who was viewed more enthusiastically by Republican primary voters than were other Republican candidates.

Be hard to know Herman Cain leads in that poll 25-21 over Romney, with Perry at something like 6%. Cain is presented as some aberration, and after thought.

This silly denial is not going to sway the 90%. The political news media is associated with the government – no matter how much the media opines over the days when they were watch dogs over, instead of mega phones for, politicians.

The more the Political Industrial Complex rejects Cain The Outsider, the more support he will garner because it will be clear to the 90% that the one guy government does not want at the helm is the one guy who wants to tame the bureaucratic beast. And who also happens to be the one guy who lives outside the box of bureaucratic thinking.

On a side note, forget the class warfare BS surrounding the CBO’s math on income distribution:

CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:

• 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
• 65 percent for the next 19 percent,
• Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
• 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.

One thing to realize is very few people live their lives in any one level of income. In 1979 I earned a living at the lowest quintile (I was 19 and working a lot of odd jobs and going to college). Today I live in the highest quintile.  Which means I have lived the American dream – as has just about everyone in the DC area and beyond. All this graph shows is my generation (entering their 50′s) is better off than my parents generation was at the same age.

The chart is all good news if you include an age factor. More lying statistics from failed bureaucrats trying to steal you hard earned money.

If a liberal tries to tell you otherwise, realize how poorly robbed the poor sap was of a decent education – and pity the fool.

Major Update: Cain is getting some awesome poll numbers out today:

In Wisconsin Cain’s at 30% to 18% for Romney …

In Nevada Romney’s at 29% to 28% for Cain …

He’s gained 21 points from late July in Nevada, when he was at 7%. And he’s gained 23 points from mid-August in Wisconsin where he was also at 7%. It’s the Tea Party that continues to drive Cain’s support. He’s up 37-19 on Romney with those voters in Nevada …

H/T Stop the ACLU, who also links to a new Cain ad

- end update

As the DC Political Industrial Complex continues its efforts to anoint Romney to take on Obama in 2012, the voters are going down a completely different path:

Businessman Herman Cain is now atop the field of Republican White House hopefuls, squeaking past former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the latest CBS News/New York Times poll.

Cain garnered 25 percent support of Republican primary voters in the poll released on Tuesday, compared to Romney’s 21 percent.

Cain refuses to fade away because voters are not interested in Romney – who simply Obama-lite. I refer to Mitt as “Robamaney” – given how close he is to Obama’s positions on a range of key issues.

Take government run health care. As long as Robamaney defends RomneyCare, there is little hope he would champion the complete repeal of Obamacare. Given he is the anointed establishment candidate, we are more likely to find him trimming on the margins of Obamacare and negotiating away our freedom to chose our own health care. Until he agrees RomneyCare should go, there is little doubt he will fold when taking on Obamacare.

And then there is how close Robamaney is to Obama on global warming – the largest attempt to fleece the people ever concocted:

John Holdren, now President Obama’s assistant for science and technology, once advised GOP presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on environmental policy. . . .

On Jan. 1, 2006, Massachusetts became the first state to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants, something the Obama administration is trying to do to all states through the Environmental Protection Agency’s draconian job-killing regulations and mandates.

Romney is right in line with Obama and the left on the nonsense of global warming (a real phenomena that has happened before modern civilization in the Roman and Medieval Periods, and thus is not driven by human activities – let alone CO2 which rises in response to warming). Robamaney would tax our energy to the point our economy has no hope of recovery.

On just these two issues they demonstrate the new fronts for encroachment of big government into every nook and corner of our lives (health and energy). And on these two issues he difference between Obama and Robamaney are meaningless. They are both big government solution types.

Herman Cain, on the other hand, is a free market solution type. He is for exposing the cost (his 9-9-9 plan) and intrusion of government. He has a libertarian message of limited, quiet, on-the-side-line government. He best represents the 2010 tsunami voter, as can be seen by the Cain versus Romney numbers for the Tea Party vote (back to the CBS News link at top):

Cain’s support surged among voters who identified with the conservative Tea Party wing of the Republican party, rising to 32 percent …

Romney’s Tea Party support has held steady in October, at 18 percent …

The Tea Party vote is the libertarian, limited government voting bloc that decimated the Dems in 2010. While the term “tea party” may be declining in support, the 2010 political wave it was associated with is still out there, biding time until they can address the root cause of their angst – Obama’s liberal policies.

2010 WAS a referendum on Obama’s big government incompetence. The Democrats – the party of big government solutions – took a beating like none seen in living memory. It is why Obama is doomed to be a one term wonder and Romney has no prayer of garnering support.

And for those who naively think the abortion issue is going to apply the brakes to the Libertarian wave – forget about it.

As I noted yesterday, trading left wing, oppressive, centralized control in DC for a right wing version is just not going to fly. Very few people are going to sit out an election because, after four more years, abortion will still be a legal abomination (when performed for personal convenience) that must be considered in times of serious and complex medical situations. And those difficult medical decision must stay with the family – not government and not doctors (trust me, doctors also reach for the procedure too quick at times).

So what happens if far right voters can’t get over their abortion views central to this election? Plenty of small government independents are there to fill the void if they sit out again. The liberals have gone all in and will probably represent 35-40% of the voters when supporting Obama. The rest will be more centrist voters and will swamp the left – with or without the far right.

This is not an abortion election. This is an economic election and a limited government election. It has been that way since 2009. The anti-government tide is still out there (check out all the special elections and the failure of the left in Wisconsin). So no government mandate is going to fly.

Update: Ed Morrissey also notes this shocker poll:

The big story is the durability of Cain, at least thus far.  He’s running one of the most unconventional campaigns in recent memory — or at least one of the more successful unconventional campaigns.  As I said yesterday, Cain is drawing from a deep well of goodwill among Republican voters who love his biography and his sunny, no-nonsense approach to politics.  Voters can relate to Cain, and unless he seriously collapses, he’s not likely to lose that affection.

That connection to the voters in my mind goes beyond his biography and optimism – though that is a big part of it. He is still the only true outsider running, and all the rest keep talking about tinkering around the margins and lots of bogus promises. Stuff we have heard for decades. Cain is different.

Update: Cain Surges ahead in FL 34-28 over Romney. What I think people did not expect was how Palin’s departure from the race would completely up end the standings. Because if you are a Palin supporter, you were never going to go for Romney. - end update

The Tea Party movement – that libertarian spark that ignited in 2009 and devastated Democrat politicians up and down the political levels (local, state, federal) in elections ever since – is alive and strong. No matter what you want to call it, if the term “Tea Party” is out, the prime focus of the voter discontent is not. They want an end to big government, and now they have set their sights on the GOP establishment by rejecting all the establishment-preferred candidates for one Herman Cain.

I listened to Laura Ingraham yesterday – a clear Romneyite – attempt to convince her listeners that there is still a reason to consider Romney and look past his Romneycare. He speaks fluid policy wonk. And as another radio conservative voice tried to explain later in the day (Jeff Kunher) he has perfect hair, good looks and an air about him. The man was clearly smitten.

Yeah, Romeny has the air of a well rehearsed and bland talking politician. When his mouth moves all I hear now is the ‘wah, wah, wah, wah’ from Charlie Brown’s TV shows when adults speak. Even Bill O’Reilly got on the bandwagon last night and declared Romney the new GOP nominee. Both he and Ingraham tried to say there was no reason to even listen to more debates – the race is over.

I am an old DC hand from a political family (grandfather was in the US Cogress and then finished his career in the Department of Justice). I am not naive to the ways of DC and the federal beast. But even I am disturbed at the number of supposed independent voices who came out and shilled for Romney while trying to paint Cain as another short-lived fad. The GOP political industrial complex exposed itself yesterday by taking part in a concerted propaganda push to explain to those poor dumb voters out there Cain is not supposed to be the nominee.

This week’s talking points appear to be get used to the inevitable selection of Romney, he’s the only one who can beat Obama.

Which is pure BS. Obama is so wounded politically polls now show voters want anyone but Obama:

Election 2012: Generic Republican 47%, Obama 41%

In Virginia both Romney and Cain are in a tie with Obama for the 2012 presidential election:

The Quinnipiac University Poll of Virginia released Tuesday shows Romney and Cain at 21 percent apiece among Republican voters, while Perry sits at 11 percent–less than half the support he registered in the same poll a month ago.

…

In the general election contest, President Obama is within the margin of error in matchups with Romney and Cain

Worst of all, Obama is now polling in the death zone for incumbents – low 40′s. And many of these polls are simply adults. Which all adds up to one conclusion – Obama right now would lose an election and lose big. To just about anyone.

While the GOP establishment attempts to fire back at Cain with Romney’s inevitability, the voters have something else in mind. Romney is so similar to Obama I have come to calling him Robamaney, since they both prefer government solutions, especially to health care.

Two polls demonstrate that Cain has taken the Tea Party, Independents and GOP voters by storm. First is from PPP showing Cain blowing Romeny out:

Yesterday PPP released numbers showing Herman Cain leading Mitt Romney 30-22 in Iowa and our monthly look at the national picture finds the exact same numbers.  Cain is up 30-22 on Romney …

Cain also vaulted into the lead in the latest NBC/WSJ poll:

Drawn by Mr. Cain’s blunt, folksy style in recent debates, 27% of Republican primary voters picked him as their first choice for the nomination, a jump of 22 percentage points from six weeks ago.

Mr. Romney held firm in second place at 23%, his same share as in a Journal poll in late August, …

Romney remains stuck with the same low 20% he always polls at – a hint to those not paying attention in DC and NYC. An observation Allahpundit also makes today. Neither of these polls were taken after the recent debate, so I guess it is possible Romney enchanted a few new folks. But I doubt it.

Cain is not a politician – as I noted yesterday with a similar thought from Rush Limbaugh:

Herman Cain doesn’t have a whole lot of baggage. Romney has Romneycare. Rick Perry has immigration as a problem. Herman Cain’s problem is, he’s not a politician. He’s not an establishment Republican.

Remember, this is a libertarian movement to dismantle government, not cycle through another stupid round of government-centric solutions. Romney’s 59 point policy plan is EXACTLY what is wrong with our nation’s political leaders. They won’t lead us away from incompetent big government. America does not want to go the way of Europe with the all intrusive nanny-state.

Cain has learned how America gets things done outside the government. All the rest of the GOP pack are members of the problem which ails us. And Romney is one of the worst of the bunch. RomneyCare was a horrible idea with horrible results:

The Massachusetts plan was supposed to accomplish two things-achieve universal health insurance coverage while controlling costs. … In reality, the plan has done neither.

Read the hole article because Romney still defends his version of Obamacare, ignoring the down side and stating he has more children insured than anyone else. Nice goal, but I ain’t paying for other people’s problems. Not while the government wastes money on scheming green companies and idiotic regulations. The libertarian Tea Party movement wants someone who uses government as a last resort, not the only option. And that kind of approach applies to Cain and is the antithesis of Romney.

America’s voters know this. So do the Democrats, and soon the GOP establishment will be rudely awakened to the fact as well. We don’t want to replace left wing busy bodies with right wing ones. Just dismantle the beast down to its the necessary core and let Main Street work its way out of this without bureaucrats telling us what, how and when to do it. This nation survived 200+ years that way, and it will survive the next 200 only if we do something about runaway big government.

It looks like not only is the GOP field of Presidential contenders settled, so too is the likely GOP nominee and next POTUS. Herman Cain continues to grow in strength because of what he is not – a cautious career politician. Last night I saw both the liberal media establishment AND the GOP political establishment try and prop up Romney. It will not work.

This cycle it is anyone but Robamaney.

Herman Cain is really turning into a political force. As Rush Limbuagh noted, he is the anti-DC candidate:

Herman Cain doesn’t have a whole lot of baggage. Romney has Romneycare. Rick Perry has immigration as a problem. Herman Cain’s problem is, he’s not a politician. He’s not an establishment Republican.

Perry has flamed out. Romney is too similar to Obama. Gingrich, Bachman, Paul and Santorum are DC pols and Huntsman … He’s just weird.

Cain is the real deal. His 9-9-9 plan has a lot of draw. It does make everyone pay their fair share (a current Obama mantra). It removes all the special interest tax loop holes that irritate the middle class because you have to be filthy rich to exploit them.. It requires everyone to have skin in the game – a fair complaint from the right. It reduces the cost of compliance in terms of taxes (which means a lot of tax professionals will be looking for work – there is always a down side). I would trade all my deductions for a flat rate. The kicker is, the ENTIRE existing tax code has to go.

But more than that – Cain is not cautious and worried about what will pass a fickled Congress. And I predict his election will be so one sided he won’t have to worry about that.

The Democrats are facing their worst nightmare. First and most obvious (and most irrelevant) is there is no race card to play. But that is just part of it. The Democrats have survived on owning most of the African American vote. GOP winners usually only garner at most 12%. Cain could split the African American community right down the middle, finally breaking the strange hold of Democrat preferred victim-hood. Cain represent African American success – being an equal and being a winner too.

If the Democrats lose their hold on that voting block, elections will never be the same. They cannot survive without owning the African American vote.

So in Cain we have another cathartic candidate in terms of race relations, one who is also a successful business man at a time when creating jobs and growing the economy is priority number 1 (which means he knows a helluva lot more about this than the Community Organizers does), and a man with a simple populist plan that would actually work (unlike Obamacare). The best part he is also DC outsider. Where’s the negative?

Note to Cain: You will need a lot of insider help to slay the Bureaucracy (hint, hint) and you need to find folks willing to do that instead of save it. You need people who know how to get pass the spin, waffling, excuse making and use the rules to force a cultural change. It can be done. Some of us do it for a living.

I woke up today realizing voters don’t have to settle for something less than they want (like Romney, Christie or Perry). We have a good option in Cain. So my feeling is, its Herman Time! in 2012.

Update: As if we need anymore evidence, it seems Herman Cain now has a huge lead in Iowa:

Herman Cain has become the first choice of Republican voters in Iowa: he now leads the pack there with 30% to 22% for Mitt Romney, 10% for Ron Paul, 9% for Rick Perry, 8% each for Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, 5% for Rick Santorum, and 1% each for Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson.

Update: Listening to Romney-ite Laura Ingraham this morning I realized how well Cain did. She spent over an hour trying to convince herself (1) she was not behind a single candidate and (b) Cain eclipsed Romney who is now in deep trouble. Ingraham’s struggle to not tip her hand and try to remain unbiased was humorous – and a complete failure. Her listeners seem to be more like me, thankful someone has finally arrived to push Robamaney out of the lead spot and remind the GOP establishment the Libertarian wave from 2010 is still out there and just as strong.

The concept of being competent (versus incompetent) has been lost on career politicians and bureaucrats. To them competence is optional (or maybe even coincidental). All that matters is power – i.e., how many people do your bidding, how much money are you controlling (note I did not say managing well). In the bloated federal bureaucracy power is all consuming, results mean nothing. Therefore a measure of a person is not their competence (as seen in the quality of their results and measure of success). It is simply how much power they get to mess around with.

Just look at the man-made Global Warming nonsense, for example:

He [Lord Turner] was quite good on the uncertainties in the science, going through the a series of scientific steps emphasising that we knew little about this one, this one was very unclear, there were huge uncertainties in this area and so on. He went on to describe how, based on this uncertain science, he and his colleagues had formulated a global plan for reducing greenhouse gases. This struck me as a little foolish, not to say rather hubristic.

And this is from a warming alarmist! It does not matter how shaky or uncertain the actual data is – all that counts is somehow green messiahs get their hands on as much power as possible.

However, while the concept of competence is all but forgotten in DC, the federal bureaucracy, the UN and all other halls of governing gone mad – it is still the standard measuring stick everywhere else. If you take your car to the shop for repairs, and the repairs fail, you don’t go back for more poor service. If you go to a doctor to get healed and instead become sicker, you don’t continue to go back for more poor treatments. If you buy food and it is rotten and foul, you don’t keep shopping at the rot shop.

No, once a product or service is deemed defective all trust is gone and people no longer look to that brand for anything else. Nothing.

And so, after the liberals in DC failed to fix the economy with their stimulus bill, while Obamacare raises the price of health care many times above wage increases, while government programs continue to fail at all levels, America has decided the government is no longer competent.

Proof 1:

Seventy-seven percent [77%] of people questioned say they trust the federal government only some of the time, and an additional eight percent [8%] volunteer that they never trust the government to do what’s right. [Total 85%]

Proof 2:

President Obama faces head winds from independents, an important voting bloc for re-election in 2012. Many of them think well of him personally [74%], but they are disenchanted. They don’t like his policies [64%], and they see him as inexperienced.

Proof 3:

A majority (57%) of Americans believe the federal government today has too much power.

Half of Americans say there is too much government regulation of business and industry, by one percentage point the highest in Gallup’s history of asking this question, dating to 1993.

There is a sea change in politics crystallizing in the electorate. One in opposition to big-government and government based solutions. It is no wonder that Democrats are now playing with the idea of suspending democracy, because they cannot face the fact their approach to society is being rejected by the masses in ever growing numbers. But that is the way of all failures – they are never intentional, and there are always die hard types who slip into deep denial and never accept their failure.

The party of big government is seriously on the wrong side of history, primarily because they failed miserably on so many fronts I cannot think of a single real, measurable success the left has had in over  decade. The numbers of poor have not been lowered, the number on food stamps has increased, the number unemployed has increased, the number of foreclosures and shuttered business is still rising.

They have increased their fundraising levels, and in 2008 held the most seats of power. But that did nothing for America, and Americans know it.

One thing Obama and the Democrats cannot blame on President Bush is the cost and quality of health care. There may be confusion on who brought about the economic implosion (accept amongst those of us who know it was the loosening of mortgage requirements by liberals which collapsed the loan reselling). But there is no doubt whose name is now attached to health care.

President Obama.

And even though health care costs are more dynamic than any government program can control, President Obama and the Democrats made promises to America when they crammed their socialist nonsense down our throats against our wishes. As many have noted, the spark that ignited the voter backlash against the left that we have seen since the fall of 2009 was Obamacare.

As with the Democrats’ Keynesian nonsense with the stimulus bill and its promises of a better economy, Obamacare’s promise of lowered health care has turned out to be another false hope no one can believe in anymore:

The cost of health insurance has surged in the US this year, according to a survey of employers, dealing a blow to claims by the Obama administration that healthcare legislation introduced last year would curb costs.Insurance premiums for family health benefits in 2011 jumped 9 per cent from a year ago to $15,073, according to a study released on Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That represented a sharp acceleration from 2010, when premiums rose by a modest 3 per cent, and easily outpaced a 2 per cent rise in wages.

Wages have shrunk during the prolonged recession, but Obamacare has increased costs so much that the net result is much, much worse for families. If a 3% rise in 2010 outpaced earnings, then the current 9% rise is killing America’s family budgets. Is it any wonder?

First off, Obamacare expands coverage to those who cannot afford it – which means everyone else pays more to fill the gap. Then, Obamacare adds lots of procedures as standard, making it impossible to tailor plans to meet budgets. A myriad of new regulations are adding significant paperwork overhead and, finally, taxes were levied on elements of the health care and medical market to raise money.

What fools did not think adding people, eliminating tailored and slimmed down plans, adding taxes and adding regulatory overhead was going to reduce costs! Come on people – stop day dreaming.

And this is all with massive waivers in place for a few thousand companies representing tens of thousands of employees. Waivers set to end soon.

Obamacare’s costs are not something Dems can spin or point blame away from. Along with everything else going on, Obama’s naive reliance on foolish liberal fantasies about big-government solutions has produced his current political situation.

What this means is right now, based on the data of a respected Democratic pollster, Democrats would — if the election were held today — suffer a wipeout that makes what happened to them in 2010 look like a walk in the park. And things are likely to get worse, not better, as the months roll on.

He was so smitten by liberal policies that it never dawned on him that if they all failed – which they have – he and the left would be marked as failure in perpetuity.

It is interesting how the seeds of today’s political outlook were sown back in February 2009. President Obama and the liberal media never once grasped the inherent danger in Obama;s dramatic skill at over promising. He became the messiah of the desperate or stubborn (those who refuse to adjust their world view as humanity seasons and matures). When he promised the waters would recede due to his coming to office, you knew this administration had all the characteristics of a coming disaster.

Back in the very beginning of 2009 the liberals (Obama, Pelosi and Reid) announced to the country they had the magic elixir to solve all our problems. They claimed (like all good snake oil hucksters) that the Keynesian approach of trickle down government would turn the tide against the harsh competition (and its only harsh if you refuse to give it a good hard try) of the free market. Now there would be fairness (in other words lots of hand outs) across the land. As one poor sap claimed, Obama would now pay her mortgage.

Rule of life number 1: If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. The more expansive the hype, the more likely the hype is compensating for some serious (and known) short falls. Hype is meant to divert and turn off the inquisitive and cynical thought processes by replacing them with fantasies and dreams. And ‘Ol Obama was a gifted siren when it came to those who thought it unfair they had to work hard, get good grades and operate within reasonable social bounds to earn a good life.

Back in 2009, when the stimulus bill arrived with all the loaded nonsense of impossible promises (as if it were the new 10 Commandments come from on high) I noted the liberal bill had fatal flaws. There is no such thing as a shovel-ready job in government. Any new project takes years to get started, the bloated bureaucracy is so laden with check boxes, committees and paperwork.

Therefore, the Stimulus bill was doomed to never match up to the over reaching rhetoric that surrounded it. Promises, promises, promises. Fairness, good jobs, teachers blissfully teaching kids, a filet Mignon in every kitchen, every night. None of it would come to pass – the government is just too damn slow and incompetent these days.

2.5 years later my predictions all came true. Months up months of awaiting the golden eggs promised by the federal golden goose only produced hurt, bitterness and embarrassment at being duped by a silver tongued snake oil  peddler. The result: Obama now fades into the dustbin of history, another victim of failed left wing, socialist screw ups.

One day, humanity will grow up enough to realize government is the worst, coldest, least caring monopoly humankind ever conceived. Which is why our founding fathers took greater lengths to weaken and divide it than strengthen it. They knew government was the one institution that had the power to corrupt absolutely, given humanity’s bottomless ego of “knowing all”. Our ability to have confidence is also one of our most dangerous failings. Confidence turns to arrogance when it is really a false confidence covering up insecurity.

Look at racists, religious fanatics, sexists and the Nazis with the Jews.  All proclaim a superiority over their hated rivals, fed by a deep insecurity in relation to their rivals. Class warfare from liberals is no different – they create arrogance to cover insecurity between the haves and have nots. Sadly, that means the miscreants and middle America.

But America has long been comfortable in its skin. Our grass roots are deep. Main Street is our heart, not Wall Street or Pennsylvania Ave in DC. As I noted the other day, anarchists and socialists cannot get a hold here because we have the experience of individual freedom and socialism’s bloody failures. Only a few ignoramuses still follow that siren song.

Obama has come out with proposals that now cement his fate through 2012. He has proposed another round of sure-to-fail stimulus. Harry Reid wants to have a hissy fit and shut down government until he gets his way. And Pelosi has been thankfully marched off the political stage so we don’t need to be inflicted any more by her “Baghdad Bob” schtick. The wheels of progress grind slowly on. And America now looks any place but left.

Has America really given up on Obama? Absolutely, if this poll is really the harbinger it seems to be:

Look out President Barack Obama. Even Sarah Palin’s gaining on you.

A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that Obama looks increasingly vulnerable in next year’s election, with a majority of voters believing he’ll lose to any Republican, a solid plurality saying they’ll definitely vote against him and most potential Republican challengers gaining on him.

…

After trailing Obama by more than 20 percentage points in polls all year, the new national survey, taken Sept. 13-14, found Palin trailing the president by just 5 points, 49-44 percent. The key reason: She now leads Obama among independents, a sharp turnaround.

Obama now can only plan his exit strategy, there is no winning strategy out there. The Dems need to plan for another long trip into the political minority. Will the left exit maturely and gracefully, setting the stage for an earlier possible return to the main stage? Or will they go in the same petulant manner they governed – setting their sentence in political oblivion to be one of many, many years to come?

So far they have been choosing door number 2 – the petulant path out. I have little expectation they are capable of losing with grace (given the fact they run from legislative responsibilities as their first reaction to looming losing a vote). But America is now looking to a new morning. And a lot of credibility has been burned up on the left, for the hapless news media, for the political pundits, and for big-government more than all the rest. We may finally begin to see positive change.

Update: Hot Air is getting a lot of commentary on this poll. I just don’t think people were ready to stick a fork in Obama, but no one should be surprised the backlash that began in the 2009 elections, flowed through unabated to the 2010 elections, and showed consistent results in the 2011 elections we have seen (WI, NY, NV) should be a glaring set of data points the 2012 is when the backlash will peak – not subside.

Click Image For More Obama Misery Tour Fun

I have never seen a political collapse like the one we are seeing consume President Obama and the Democrats right now. Even the debacle of 2010 is beginning to pale in comparison to what is happening in the headlines. When Reverend Wright said America’s chickens were coming home to roost – he was not kidding! Sadly they are all liberal chickens packing a lot of crap.

The mortgage recession that pummeled the nation in 2008 was clearly caused by crazy liberal economic schemes enacted years before that loosened lending requirements to the point anyone could pretend they could afford a home. The result: now almost everyone in a home is much poorer, so I guess that can be a ‘mission accomplished’ for the left.

But in 2009, the liberals went into overdrive  so much that it worsened the economic wreckage of their mortgage scheme.

First came a stimulus bill which only stimulated mountains of generational debt. Not satisfied with destroying the wealth and savings of mid-life workers and senior citizens from the mortgage mess, the left now has destroyed the FUTURE life earnings of our children and grand children. All the while, the stalled and stressed liberal economy (struggling under mountains of new liberal regulation and government run health care) can’t employ our youngest workers trying to start their careers. Here is the new symbol of the Obama Economy:

We are so poor we can’t even help fend off the economic collapse in the EU – all we can do is watch it happen. We are tapped out across all the generations now. We have moved well beyond home owners.

Check out this weekend’s whopper headlines for all the signals of destruction. First, the left has latched onto fantasy (and unproven) statistics to shutdown a good portion of our power generation capacity:

Over the next 18 months, the Environmental Protection Agency will finalize a flurry of new rules to curb pollution from coal-fired power plants. Mercury, smog, ozone, greenhouse gases, water intake, coal ash—it’s all getting regulated.

Emphasis mine. There has been no global warming in the past 15 years, and all the science now shows CO2 levels are not driving warming, but actually are a natural response to warming. Yet these tools in DC – with high school level math and a greed for tax money that can’t be satiated – are going to make Americans suffer even more for their fantasy ideology:

The regulations, they say, will cost utilities up to $129 billion and force them to retire one-fifth of coal capacity. Given that coal provides 45 percent of the country’s power, that means higher electric bills, more blackouts and fewer jobs.

And look at the crap the DC buffoons peddle on the witless, math-challenged media to rationalize this mess:

… the EPA estimates that an air-transport rule to clamp down on smog-causing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide would help prevent 21,000 cases of bronchitis and 23,000 heart attacks, and save 36,000 lives. That’s, at the high end, $290 billion in health benefits, compared with $2.8 billion per year in costs (according to the EPA) by 2014.

What a crock. I would wager one look at the analysis behind these bogus numbers would uncover a 3rd grade level of thinking. I have seen government reports like this and they are always pure science fiction at a child’s level. This is what happens when bureaucrats are let lose with a spreadsheet and an agenda. There will be no NO health impacts from these extra energy costs. The amount of sulfur and nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere is tiny – and not all man-made.  This is made up BS.

But why stop there? Once government got into the car business with Government Motors, we find the service is worse and there is little recourse when union workmanship fails. Remember, this is now a union run enterprise in partnership with government bureaucrats. The GM flagship electric car is in trouble, just like the rest of the government – no surprise here. Wait until these groups team up to save your life on the operating table.

And what about Obamacare – the fantasy which liberals wrecked themselves trying to get into place?  It seems to be so toxic – quality wise and economically – that thousands of left wing special interests have been given three year wavers from its pain. The rest of us of course get to suffer from the brilliance of the left.

Of all I have read and heard about the crumbling of Obama and left wing economics, this has to be the best summary:

We’re almost three years into this administration, and there’s never been a plan. And that’s what everybody feels. And the president didn’t lead. He waited. The quintessential image, sadly, of an administration that I supported and hoped for much better, is the president waiting by the phone to hear what Congress calls to tell him. It doesn’t work in this country that way. It’s not a matter that it’s August. It’s a matter that it’s August 2011. So we’ve been drifting for a very long time. And we’ve been drifting down. And we had a short-term plan that failed. A short-term stimulus that was supposed to get the economy back on track, but it failed. And now we have nothing behind it. And we have no agreements, and we have no leadership. And, frankly, I do think it’s pretty odd the president’s on vacation right now. Normally I wouldn’t care about such things, but the world markets are in deep crisis. It’s no joke. This isn’t just an up-and-down little blip. This is a very serious situation.”

No, it is not a joke. Liberal nonsense has been playing out in painful reality now for 3 years and the damage it has caused is mind boggling. The only hope we have is the damage can be corrected in 2013. Any left wing case who thinks these changes are permanent is crazy. With the mountain of evidence rising on how bad all these whacky ideas have turned out to be, removing them will be seen as salvation.

Now, if only the GOP can resist trying to replace them – that will be the key. We need to shrink government, not fix it.

Addendum: Forgot one of those chickens. As the nation reals from test score cheating scandals across the nation, the Obama answer to the problem is not to go after the teachers and administrators who falsified children’s results to garner income, but to just throw the kids under the bus all together and stop even pretending they are learning a damn thing!

State and local education officials have been begging the federal government for relief from student testing mandates in the federal No Child Left Behind law, but school starts soon and Congress still hasn’t answered the call.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he will announce a new waiver system Monday to give schools a break.

Any school that wants to avoid being exposed as unable to educate can now get a note from President Obama, excusing them from doing what we pay them to do. Moronic.

Update: Judge that tipped ruling was Clinton appointee. Sweet Justice - end update

Just got word from DJStrata that the 11th Court of Appeals has decided against Obamacare:

An appeals court ruled Friday that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law requiring Americans to buy healthcare insurance or face a penalty was unconstitutional, a blow to the White House.

The Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also ruled that the rest of the wide-ranging law could remain in effect.

The legality of the so-called individual mandate, a cornerstone of the 2010 healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration has defended the provision as constitutional.

The case stems from a challenge by 26 U.S. states which had argued the individual mandate, set to go into effect in 2014, was unconstitutional because Congress could not force Americans to buy health insurance or face the prospect of a penalty.

Well, it looks like all those crony exemptions to Obamacare were unnecessary after all – since they entire fiasco falls with the individual mandate. And note this is a majority of states challenging DC’s over reach. My bet is if Obama does not get elected in 2012 the nation will be able to dump this liberal albatross and avoid the same health care debacle we see in the UK and Canada. That alone should add a lot of momentum against a 2nd term for Obama, since much of the political backlash we have seen was sparked (if not fueled) by Obamacare.

Not surprisingly the USPS has discovered that government run enterprises are too expensive to survive on their own:

The financially strapped U.S. Postal Service is proposing to cut its workforce by 20 percent and to withdraw from the federal health and retirement plans because it believes it could provide benefits at a lower cost.

Good lord, even the government can’t afford Obamacare!  So why does anyone with two brain cells to rub together think America’s economic engine – the small business – can afford this nonsense? Let me those still struggling out there a hint: no one can afford the gold plated fantasies  liberals dream up in their TV-Land view of the perfect human society.

So in place of an in depth analysis of the ‘news’ of the day, I decided a Fly By was in order. First order of business – hope everyone had a good Father’s Day. Mine was, as usual, packed with sports for the kids. We did a 3.5 hour swim meet and three all-star soccer games over the weekend (barely missing out on a 4th). But not to worry, I also got a quick breakfast in bed as well as a 14 mile and 21 mile bike ride in.

All in all, a great Father’s Day.

But now to the less fun stuff. While there is a lot of hand-wringing on the right about holding to the War Powers Act, I am all for enforcing it – especially since every GOP President has followed its guidance since Ronald Reagan. Moreover, we do need to expose NATO as a paper tiger, so people understand “NATO” is just another acronym which means putting US military personnel in harms way. So I am 100% behind defunding the Libyan War effort. Especially given the fact President Obama ignored legal advice from his own administration. Advice that supports the position the UN and US acted illegally and outside their charters and rules.

Update: Hugh Hewitt notes that it is time for administration lawyers to decide whether they represent the interest of a wayward and ego maniacal President or the United States of America. I know where their oath of office points. - end update

On a more positive note, I have to hand it to Texas Governor Perry for his straight talk, and how to win the middle of America in 2012:

“We need to stop apologizing for celebrating life,” the Republican Texas governor bellowed at the Republican Leadership Conference in a finger-pointing, finger-wagging and, at times, bombastic, speech.

“Stop apologizing” for wanting to stem the tide of the “entitlement mindset,” he boasted.

“Our opponents on the left are never going to like us, so let’s stop trying to curry favor with them,” he said, before imploring the crowd to “stand up. Let’s speak with pride about our values. Let’s stop this American downward spiral.”

Not surprisingly, this will work for the centrist voters. You can honestly be pro life, but also realize their are limits on what can be legislated. To win the pro-life debate means to trust Americans to learn and appreciate life – not to brow beat them with laws.

But moreover, on the economic side of things Obama, Reid and Pelosi have been berating anyone and everyone who does not agree with their far left liberal policies. We are evil if we don’t see Obamacare as anything but a economic disaster that will gut out health care system. We are evil if we want to save Medicare from bankruptcy and provide a new, modern and sustainable version for the future generation (under 55). We are evil if we determine the government is bloated, wasteful, corrupt and inept.

All the berating the left does against common sense alternatives – especially from the Libertarian core of Tea Party – actually bleeds over to the centrists who agree in principle. It is time to not only stop cowering, it is long past time to stop insulting and complaining about centrists who would be more than happy to dump the Dems for a moderate conservative approach. And I don’t mean lefties talking conservative, I mean reasonable sized steps in the conservative direction.

There is no need to cower down because we find common ground right of center, and way short of the right fringe. The right needs to realize the country desires neither a leftward or rightward activist government.

In an article for The Daily Telegraph, Andrew Lansley says the core values of the NHS are under threat as never before from a “financial crisis” that will see annual health spending double to £230 billion a year without urgent reform.

While insisting he would never privatise the NHS, Mr Lansley warns that its future as a universal service, available to all and free at the point of use will be at risk “within years” if radical change is blocked.

Sounds eerily familiar to the financial diagnosis for Medicare – the crumbling foundation underpinning Obamacare. The pathetic and sad truth is that, despite the politician’s claim to contrary, the salvation of NHS lies on the shoulder of private health care providers in the UK (where all people with money actually get their health care).

the Health Secretary’s article will be seen as a clear reaffirmation of his belief in the reforms, which would abolish two tiers of NHS management and allow GP-led consortia to decide whether to buy treatment from local state-run hospitals or private providers.

Is anyone going to believe treatment will be most cost effective from the management and bureaucracy heavy NHS hospitals – or the free market driven private providers? The guy can pretend all day long salvation is not coming from the free market, but without the option to save costs outside the NHS there would be no salvation.

Remember, the UK is 1/5th the size of the US population, yet it is going to see it’s annual costs run at $377 230 billion. If the UK were the size of the US, that would translate into $1.88 1.15 trillion, for a program with lines months long in which people have been known to die from delayed treatment. When will people realize paying premium dollar for substandard service is not a sound judgement, in any fantasy world.