My company sits on the brink because, as a federal contractor, I am having trouble getting work in the new government fiscal year that begins tomorrow because the lame butts in Congress failed to pass a budget this year! Even with massive majorities in the House and Senate the elitists in Congress ran out of town and left the government to run on a ‘Continuing Resolution” (CR).

The problem with CR’s is they freeze all spending to last year’s levels. So if a project was to start this year, or was to go from design (low level of effort) to development (peak effort) it can’t under the CR. No new work is authorized, no increases in spending are authorized. Work that should be shutting down is stuck with money it can’t use. And now we learn the Federal Government is going to replace EVERY BLOODY STREET SIGN in the nation because some bureaucrat did not like the damn FONT!

The city will change the lettering on every single street sign – at an estimated cost of about $27.5 million – because the feds don’t like the font.

Street names will change from all capital letters to a combination of upper and lower case on roads across the country thanks to the pricey federal regulation, officials said Wednesday.

There are 3 families trying to make a living from our little micro-company. Our hopes of growing as we did last year are now replaced with prayers we keep ourselves afloat each month. And these yahoos spend $27.5 million in New York City alone on this madness! We could operate for over 20 years on that kind of money. Please lord, let us throw these useless tools out and save this nation and its people.

BTW, if anyone who can afford it would be willing to send a donation to keep the site up another month or two I would appreciate it very much. I would love to be able to cover this historic election at least, before we start closing shop. Thanks in advance!

Larry Sabato is out with updated projections for the 2010 election cycle and things keeping getting worse for the Dems. In the House, Sabato has moved 10 races from ‘toss up‘ to ‘leans GOP‘ – all of them Dems. Long time incumbent: 13 term Kanjorski of PA 11 is on this list, as is long term Texas-D Chet Edwards. Sabato’s other adjustments are all to the right: 5 seats move from ‘leans dem‘ to ‘toss up‘; 2 races move from ‘likely dem‘ to ‘leans dem‘; and 4 races from ‘safe dem‘ to ‘leans dem‘. Sabato’s Crystal Ball has the GOP already picking up 47 seats and taking the house – with plenty of room for that number to keep growing!

In the Senate and Governor races he has the GOP picking up 7-8 and 8, respectively. But the picture of the House is most telling, because it indicates a broad and high tsunami wave rising across the country. It indicates that underestimating or missing the voter turnout model by even small margins could mean pollsters are just not measuring the size of the voter backlash. With all these house races turning redder and redder in every corner of the nation, it is clear that November will be an election to remember for generations to come.

Tags: 2010 Elections, Cyrstal Ball, Governor, House, Sabato, Senate

That Meg Whitman maid thing – it ain’t going to work. Everyone knows ‘illegal’ immigrants lie to work here in the US. Everyone knows the person who broke the law and her word was not Meg Whitman. And the party that defends illegal immigrants and tries to give them blanket and full amnesty is the left – not the right. The dirty trick playing out in CA is no better than the lies Alan Grayson manufactured in FL. The Dems are going dirty, and it will not reflect bad on their opponents.

In fact, what it reminds everyone most about is the strong arm, lying and bribing tactics used by Obama, Pelosi & Ried to push Obamacare through congress. After putting a comedian up to testify on a serious subject, trotting out people paid to turn on their former employers is just another fanciful show for the cameras. No one is buying this crap. So why do it?

Well, desperation is one answer. But I think the biggest reason is Democrats don’t think anyone is nearly as smart and crafty as they are! Why else would Speaker Pelosi and VP Biden make the childish claim that the Dems will still be in the majority in November (the new Congress is not seated until January of course). Only someone who thought their supporters were pure dolts would run around and make that a rallying cry. Sadly, a lot of ‘journalists’ echoed those claims as if they carried some kind of bravado and leadership!

No, it is clear the Democrats see themselves as the pinnacle of humankind and everyone else bumbling peasants too dim to understand liberal greatness. It is a very convenient way to paper over a dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance run amok. Take it from a rocket scientist with a BS in biology and a love of all things science, Pelosi, Reid and Obama are not all that sharp, even as politicians go.

Victor Hansen uncovered the real force behind the lame smear campaigns coming out in each race now:

The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn’t be enough in America because “I need a majority.”

…

In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband’s burden, “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.”

That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Folks, these people who have screwed up wasting over $3 trillion dollars baling out CEOs on wall street and power players on K-Street (while leaving Main Street to suffer) think you will be fooled by a maid who lied to her employer and who is now lying about her employer. Who has the credibility problem here? Who is the illegal one here? Who is hanging on the arm of a slimy lawyer?

This doesn’t take a rocket scientist to unravel. The upper middle class – who are reasonably successful, capable of taking care of themselves and the driving force behind this economy – are invisible to the liberals. They have no idea we exist because these liberals don’t work for a living. They don’t build businesses or lead groups of workers or launch products or perform valuable services for others. They don’t make a living by producing or helping, they read and theorize all day long in tenured positions in colleges and universities. Never growing up, never being on their own having to survive on their own. This is what the Obama administration is filled with – armchair experts with no hands-on experience.

They don’t understand why those who have succeeded, who grew beyond college and school and went into the world to make a living the hard way, are not impressed with their failures or their egos any more. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …

That ain’t going to happen!

Tags: 2010 Elections, Alan Grayson, Liberals, Meg Whitman, Middle Class

Progressive rhetoric and vision is so tired, lame and fanciful it is amazing the movement has any support outside kindergarten. I was listening last night to the latest, desperate spin from the flailing Democrats and it was all about how the tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year is for multinational CEOs and ignores the average Americans.

Talk about being out of touch with America. First off, multinational CEOs make a helluva lot more than $250K, none make under $1 million a year. The problem with the latest Democrat lie is the fact that no one who makes $251,000 a year is a multinational CEO. The bulk of those people are upper middle class people, just now attaining their rewards from a life of hard work and dedication. Most of those people are like me, trying to get a small business off the ground while the Democrat extended recession destroy years of previous work and progress. This is the army of people trying to build this generation’s version of the American dream, and the Democrats are throwing mud at our efforts and our successes!

All this may just be salary envy on the part of the inept members of Congress, who not only voted themselves a huge raise during the recession but also only make $170,000 a year.

In the simple mind of the progressive left there are millions of poor people and a few multinational fat cats, and in between there is only the do-good left. As usual, it is a self centered and delusional world view. The strongest, brightest and best of the middle class are at or reaching for that $250K per year mark. They are NOT greedy, uncaring, ‘screw the poor’ types. It is insulting to claim small business people are evil and uncaring. The fact we work to cover not just ourselves but to make sure everyone working for us is financially secure should never be misrepresented or ignored.

When the Democrats wake up from their little Walter Mitty delusions about being the savior of humanity they might look around and find a lot of Americans work hard each day doing their part in making this country a better place. It is not just the left, the poor and the multinational CEOs roaming this Earth.

Which brings me to Tony Blankley’s great article on where this lost swath of America now resides politically.

Not long after the tea party sprang into being in the spring of 2009, America’s elites started vilifying the movement. In an article worthy of a class-action libel suit, The New York Review of Books depicted the first march on Washington as a parade of bigots.

Ex-president Jimmy Carter spit venom at tea partiers by saying they resented an African-American president — a baseless charge of racism willingly echoed by the media.

When they weren’t being defamed as racists, tea party supporters were described as irrational, enraged, seething, and livid. Constituents at town hall meetings who rejected the superficial Democratic Party talking points and demanded answers instead of political spin were portrayed as mobs on the verge of riot.

…

The answer was given to us in a remarkably prescient book, Christopher Lasch’s “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” posthumously published in 1995. The noted historian, whose intellectual journey carried him from the left in the ’60s to the populist right by the ’90s, would have been giddy over the tea party.

Lasch believed the only hope for American democracy lay in a revival of the middle class, particularly what were once known as middle-class virtues. The book title is an explicit ironic commentary on Jose Ortega y Gasset’s 1932 (first English translation) classic: “The Revolt of the Masses.”

Those of us who have gone out and experienced the Tea Party rallies know first hand that this is the great silent majority Ronald Reagan was able to tap into. It is middle class America, who are also very much centrist and not hyper partisan. It is why the Glenn Beck rally on the mall was more large community or church picnic than a raucous political mob. Most Tea Party participants are for the first time entering the political debate, engaging in where their country is headed.

This awakening of the governed to be active in deciding how to be governed should be welcomed. Unless you are an elitist know-it-all who wants to manipulate the governed through big government, but never let them be empowered to make decisions. Then I can see how the awakening of the middle class can cause anger and panic. The bosses are here and they are shaking things up and doing it themselves. No more elitist speakers for the middle class, they are here in person.

Finally, the irony of ironies here is that the Democrats and DC elites have been focused on saving the Wall Street fat cats. They bailed out Insurance bigwigs, financial bigwigs, Chrysler, GM and mortgages giants. They blew trillions on CEOs, and now they will barely lift a finger for the upper middle class. Do the Dems really think we don’t see this?

Addendum: Whoever this Lasch guy was who wrote that book in the early 1990’s, he was incredibly prescient:

Lasch described the emergence of elites who “…control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. Middle-class values, Lasch warned, would be hollowed out by a value-neutral educational system preaching multiculturalism. Their replacement would be narcissistic values based on self-gratification and worshipful of fame and celebrity as the ultimate values in a world devoid of deeper meaning. Sound familiar, Paris Hilton?

Against this relativistic tide, Lasch found the middle class’s antiquated values — hard work, family, faith, community — a possible bulwark.

…

If Lasch were alive, he could write a new book, “The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Rebirth of Democracy.” Among its observations might be this: The Obama presidency is both the high watermark, and the beginning of the end, for elite multicultural materialism in America.

If you wanted a laundry list of what middle America despises about the new ‘value’ system being imposed by bureaucrats, this is it. Celebrity verses achievement. Facade over tangible results. Feel good over accomplishment. Geez, LJStrata and I have been fighting this mindless crap for decades while raising our kids. The guy definitely nailed it.

If there is a poster child for what is wrong with DC and the elitist BS the nation has had to tolerate it is Alan Grayson (D) of FL. The man is one of those aberrations of nature. Pretty much a dunce with an ego that knows no bounds. They guy is an insult to men, Americans, humanity and living organisms.

Grayson’s latest childish stunt was to completely manufacture a false quote from his opponent by snipping a clip where Daniel Webster is recommending husbands DO NOT use a bible quote – leaving out the “DO NOT” part and making it sound like he is proposing instead they DO use it.

Then the idiot had the ignorance to go on MSNBC and pretend he was so clever and sneaky with his bold face lie. What he actually is is a dumb ass, religious bigot.

The good news about the November political tsunami heading to DC is this self-centered moron will most likely be removed from his high office of honor.

In one of the most closely watched U.S. House races in the nation, Republican Daniel Webster now holds a 7-point lead over Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson in Central Florida’s 8th Congressional District, according to a new Sunshine State News Poll.

Webster, a former state senator, leads the freshman congressman 43-36 in the survey of 559 likely voters conducted Sept. 25-27.

45% is the ‘your fired’ point for incumbents in election polling. Grayson’s 36% is in the ‘your not fit to clean the House toilets’ class of incumbents. Face it Grayson, this was the high point of your so called life. Please, move on into oblivion.

I have never seen the like of this year’s election. I knew it would be brutal for the Dems, but how brutal continues to surprise even me. Jonah Goldberg at The Corner noted this PPP set of polling numbers which best summarize this year’s elections in their opinion – and they are jaw-dropping stunners (in reverse order):

The folks who thought the economy had gotten worse who had already decided how to vote in November are going Republican by a 92-8 margin.

So if you think the economy ha gotten worse there is no contest. Not even close. No doubt and no hesitation.

Now, how many people think the economy has gotten worse:

On our last national poll 49% of respondents said the economy had gotten worse since Barack Obama became President.

49% x 92% = 45% voting GOP. If the GOP is taking 20% of the remaining 51% who do not think the economy is worse then the combined GOP vote would be 45% + 10% = 55% GOP! That is a huge and unprecedented margin, and it would easily give the GOP a shot at an 80 seat pick up in the house and control of the Senate. But as PPP notes, that does not even factor in an enthusiasm gap:

Add in the Democrats’ enthusiasm issues and you have the formula for the big GOP victory that’s likely on the way.

Let’s say, instead of the huge 2-1 advantage we have seen in enthusiasm in many polls, we give the GOP side a tiny 10% boost in turnout. That would push the Dem side down to 40% and the GOP up to 60%. I just cannot fathom what an election would look like with those numbers cooked into the mix.

Update: National Review has a good recap of “Obamacare @ 6 Months” and how all signs indicate those who opposed Obamacare were right and the supporters of Obamacare were – at best – misleading:

Two weeks ago, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to the nation’s insurers with a plainly stated threat: Either the insurers conform to the political agenda of the administration and describe the reasons for premium increases in terms acceptable to the Democratic party, or they will be shut out entirely from the government-managed insurance marketplace. What could possibly have provoked a cabinet secretary to launch such an indiscriminate broadside against an entire industry? Simple: A handful of insurers had dared to utter the truth, noting that the new law has imposed costly insurance mandates that will raise premiums for everyone. For that offense, the federal government has essentially threatened to put the truth-telling insurers out of business.

…

Recall that President Obama took more than a year to settle on Dr. Berwick as his nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and then moved in a matter of weeks to put him in place without Senate confirmation. The president tried to blame Republicans for this blatant end-run around constitutional checks and balances, even though Democrats control the Senate and could have held a hearing and a vote if they had wanted to. The truth is that Democrats didn’t want Dr. Berwick to be confirmed in the Senate. They wanted him on the job, for sure, because he is an ardent government-takeover enthusiast, and is prepared to use all of the levers at his disposal to advance that objective. The president and his Democratic allies just wanted to get Dr. Berwick in place without the public’s really noticing.

Orwell was just a tad too early in his prediction of Big Brother. Oppressive government hit the US in 2008, not 1984. Obamacare killed the Democrat Party. Lesson #2 from November. Lesson #1: government cannot stimulate ecomomic growth, that has to come from the private sector. The corollary: Big Government and out of control spending can snuff out even the world’s largest and strongest economy. – end update

Well Madam Speaker, we are clearly getting a glimpse of how Obamacare will force most Americans off their current insurance plans, even those on Medicare:

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care has notified customers that it will drop its Medicare Advantage health insurance program at the end of the year, forcing 22,000 senior citizens in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine to seek alternative supplemental coverage.

So Obama lied when he said you can keep your current coverage – big surprise there. Seniors were the ones most duped by Obama’s lofty and misleading rhetoric on health care. He has always been a big proponent of death panels through rationing. And now we see the fruits of all his bribes in the Senate to get his government take-over of health care passed.

It is no surprise democrats are an endangered species this election (and will be for many election cycles to come). They lied to America as they took from them one of their most sacred possessions – their health care coverage. Now the government is in charge of deciding who shall live and who shall be called to give the ultimate sacrifice to their fellow (younger) citizens.

Everyone knows this election is critical to the survival of this nation and its people.

If anyone doubts President Obama has not only wasted all his political capitol with the nation, but has also generated a huge wave voter anger for failing to make ‘the [unemployment] waters recede’, they only need to look at WI this week to see just how toxic the first two years of Obama, Reid and Pelosi have been to the Democrat caucus. The administration touted a rally in WI this week as the biggest political event since 2008 (ignoring all the Tea Party events and Glenn Beck’s historic gathering in DC).

When Obama steps onto a grass quad at the University of Wisconsin on Tuesday, he will deliver a newly tailored, more personalized campaign appeal aimed at ginning up enthusiasm, according to White House and senior Democratic officials. Plouffe said Obama will remind students of the work they put into his 2008 campaign and warn them that if they don’t re-engage now, “all that could be jeopardized.”

The lack of support for President Obama’s slick but vacuous messaging has made just getting a crowd to attend the event a tough challenge.

But where he drew a crowd of 17,000 at the University of Wisconsin in 2008 during the presidential race, crowds are expected to be significantly smaller this time around — so much so that the president’s campaign team, Organizing for America, is sending out RSVP requests for Tuesday’s rally, featuring musician Ben Harper.

According to The Washington Post, the students at University of Wisconsin-Madison are typical of the enthusiasm gap that Democrats recognize is eating away at their chance to keep the majority in Congress.

The stunner in all this is that the endangered Democrat incumbent Senator Russ Feingold is not even going to attend, the President and his liberal allies in DC are so toxic!

Democratic Party Chairman Timothy Kaine says he sees no slight in Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold skipping a campaign rally tonight where President Barack Obama is appearing on his behalf.

The Democrats have run out of lipstick to cover this pig of an election cycle. It is not a slight that one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate is afraid to be seen with the most liberal President in memory, after said liberal Democrat Party passed endless liberal fantasy legislature? Yeah, things are going just great for the Dems, as long as you live in complete denial.

Tags: Feingold, Obama, WI Rally

Update: As expected, Murray in WA sank back into the ‘toss up’ category at RCP because a new poll showed her only up by 1% over GOP challenger Rossi (48-47%). Murray is back under 50%, which means she is in for the fight of her political life. And with 5 weeks to go she has been slowly sinking as Rossi has gained support. Right now RCP has it 48 seats for the Dems and 46 for the GOP with 6 toss ups. If CO and IL (or NV) move to the GOP side we will see a 48-48 tie with four toss ups (NV (IL), WA, WV, CT). The GOP looks to be on track to get CT and WV. As usual, WA is coming down to be the state to win to gain control of the senate and stop Obama, Reid and Pelosi.

Update: Rasmussen has come out today with another poll showing GOP candidate John Raese up 48-46%, which would seem to indicate WV is heading to the GOP list soon – end update.

The Democrat battle front this election year has moved from GOP open seats, to Democrat Open seat,s and then to long term incumbent Democrat seats. In the beginning there was Massachusetts, and the ‘surprise’ win by Scott Brown in the special election in January to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. The special election was to be a Democrat cake walk – it turned out to be a harbinger that Democrats ignored as they went on to bribe and slime Obamacare into law. All the while leaving the economic recovery to falter. The big cats got the bailouts, Main Street got the bills for generations to come.

Then Senator Byrd passed away and another deep blue seat looked to be initially in the bag for the Democrats. Right now that WV special election looks to be a GOP pickup, the first GOP senate seat in WV in decades.

All the GOP open seats are holding steady now. Blanche Lincoln of AR was the 2nd Democrat incumbent to fall under the rising tide of voter anger, soon followed on the endangered Democrat list by Russ Feingold of WI. WA, NV, and CA all sport Democrat incumbents in trouble and barely holding on. In NV Reid has not been over 45% for weeks – which means he is cooked. CO is about to be moved out of the ‘toss up’ category, as is probably IL.

The GOP is now easily going to pick up 8 seats, but the question remains can they get 10 or more and take control of both houses of Congress. With DE apparently slipping from ‘likely GOP’ to ‘likely Dem’, the chance of taking control of the Senate seems impossible for a normal election year. But this year is anything but normal.

Today, polling by Qinnipiac is showing a late surge for the GOP challenger for the open seat left by the retiring Dodd in CT, once more put the Senate in play for the GOP according to the RCP average:

Propelled by Connecticut likely voters who say they are “angry” with government, former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate, is closing in on Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat, and now trails just 49 – 46 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

This compares to a 51 – 45 percent Blumenthal lead in a September 14 likely voter survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll, conducted by live interviewers.

This is the time in the election cycle when the final direction of the cycle starts to become apparent as the fence sitters and late deciders make their move. It has been predicted by many that this late break will only add to the already lopsided enthusiasm gap and push the GOP to staggering house and senate wins. I concur with those predictions. When you can compare two polls from the same outfit in a short span at this point in the cycle you can get whiff of these last minute breaks.

Blumenthal’s lead went from +6% to +3% (which is in the MoE of the poll) in two short weeks. If this is a steady shift towards McMahon he will be down to 45% easily by November 2 and the GOP will pick up this seat. This trend will not be isolated to deep blue CT, it is just another mark in a national trend sweeping the country.

In fact, I still think WA will sink below the tsunami of voter anger, since Murray is being bolstered by some questionable polls computed into RCP’s average. Barbara Boxer’s numbers in RCP are also skewed by a fictional poll indicating the Democrat base is fired up and ready to send their incumbent back to DC to do more nothing. Given how screwed up the CA state government is, one can legitimately question the thinking of the voters there, but the turn out model in some of those polls are laughable.

In my mind all these skewed polls showing false hope will only depress Democrat numbers on election day. If the Democrat base thinks Boxer or Murray look to eek out wins, I think they stay home and lose the election. If there is a fight to be had, they may come out. If there is no fight, their anger with DC will convince them staying home is the better option. The fight is out of the left.

So I still think the GOP takes the Senate. Look for RCP to move CO to the GOP column soon, followed later by NV and IL. The Democrat blue is being drained from election maps slowly, but steadily.

Tags: 2010 Elections, US Senate

As many on the right complain, and many on the left deny (either from delusion or collusion), the country was heading towards a socialistic model of government until the Reagan revolution took hold. And this abrupt change from a government run and mandated society towards the free flow of ideas and competition America had grown strong on, has become the nexus from which America was going to emerge and take us into the future.

The pendulum battles we have lived through from Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, W Bush and now Obama are all part and parcel of deciding which America would survive. This important history is all incredibly well documented in this article by James Bennett in the National Review [H/T RCP]:

Admirers and detractors of the United States agree on one point: This country is unusually resistant to the social consensus and set of structures broadly known as “social democracy” or “progressivism.” (Social democracy leans more toward state ownership, progressivism toward state regulation.) Various versions of such schemes have prevailed in Western Europe and Japan, and to a lesser degree in Britain, Canada, and Australia. The characteristics include a wider scope and role for the state, centralization of decision-making in a national bureaucracy, monopolization of power by a set of large institutions, including state-champion corporations and labor unions, and a wide variety of social entitlements for all citizens. This was the classic progressive economic program; since the 1960s, it has also included certain social characteristics, such as official multiculturalism.

…

And in 1976 it did appear that such an administration was at hand, with the election of James Earl Carter. When Carter gained the presidency over a wounded Republican party, he mistook his narrow victory for a mandate to continue moving along the track toward a European-style social democracy, building on Johnson’s and Nixon’s enhancements of centralized power. In this he was basically following the trajectory of Britain and Canada. Carter envisioned moving toward fully government-controlled medicine, a government-dominated energy sector enforcing strict rationing, and a federally dominated school system promoting governing-class values. In order to carry out his agenda, he created and entrenched two new cabinet bureaucracies, the Departments of Energy and of Education, and a wide variety of new pork and entitlement programs, such as the Comprehensive Education and Training Act and an expansion of the scandal-plagued Community Development Corporations.

Interestingly enough, it is easy to see why the Departments of Energy and Education are on the list of just about everyone ready to start shrinking government. Research in energy production is fine, as is making sure energy is safely provided and used. Beyond that forget about it as a federal responsibility. The only role for the Feds in education is to provide a forum for lessons learned and new ideas to be shared, and maybe a pool of emergency funds for school districts needing infrastructure help. Beyond that there is no need for DC to tell us how to raise and educate our kids.

In fact, there are 100’s of agencies or offices or programs no one needs, or even knows about. And it would not be a surprise if they all traced their roots back to Democrat Presidents and Congresses.

The point is, America is not built on the ancestry of being peasants or servants to monarchs or royalty. We don’t have a deep history of class systems where generational elites are crowned the protectors of the people, too dimwitted or scared too make even the most basic decisions. Our history is of pioneers and explorers. We thrive at the community level and put our trust in the individual. We follow the entrepreneur, not in servitude but simply by example.

The Europeans never grew out of their serfdom stage. Americans never had one. So it is no surprise America is not going to become a socialist country.

In 2010, the U turn started by Ronald Reagan will be completed, as we begin to roll back government and once again put our faith and energy behind the human individual.

Although it wasn’t fully appreciated at the time, Reagan’s replacement of Carter marked a critical point (not the first, in fact, but the first generally noticed) of a great U-turn in American politics and society.

For decades — at a minimum, since the beginning of the Progressive Era, and arguably earlier — America had been on a course toward a more centralized society, one in which individualism as it had been understood since before the Founding — a society built on independent families living on their own properties, most of them farms — was being replaced by a different vision. The progressive vision was one of citizens as employees whose existence was mediated by negotiations among large corporations, unions, and government agencies. For such subjects, “rights” were to be a designated set of entitlements granted by those organizations.

…

In parallel, a set of explicitly deregulating and decentralizing developments had emerged, including the privatization of COMSAT (begun under Nixon), the legislative deregulation of the air-transport and freight-rail industries (done under Carter), and the court-ordered demise of the regulated telephone monopoly. The resulting drastic reductions in the price of rail freight, flying, and phone service made it substantially easier to do business nationwide, and indeed worldwide, independent of location. This was an often overlooked factor in the entrepreneurial takeoff and continuing decentralization of the Reagan years.

…

In 1962, the Canadian province of Saskatchewan created a mandatory, universal government-run medical-insurance scheme, although only after a bitter battle that included a 23-day doctors’ strike. Other provinces quickly followed suit, and by 1966 Canada had formally established by federal action a comprehensive, state-controlled medical system. Meanwhile, with his huge congressional majorities elected in 1964, Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare. Many on the left thought this would soon be expanded to a general state-funded medical system. Yet no significant movement was made in that direction until the Obama administration’s legislation of this year, which still falls well short of either the British or the Canadian model. For a brief moment after the electoral triumph of the Left in 2008, it seemed as if the U-turn might be turned again. But the vociferous and widespread opposition to the Obama agenda suggests that the U-turn is part of a long-term transition and is not likely to be reversed by short-term politics.

It is interesting from time to time to look back and see how we got where we are, to better affirm the correctness of where we should be, or could be, heading. With the wave of libertarian anger building in the nation, I feel that once again this nation is on the right path. The unique path it was blessed to travel. For those who pine for more liberal or leftist societies – the world has plenty to offer. Just not here.