From Gallup:

About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement’s positions and objectives into account as they address the nation’s problems. Among Republicans, 53% rate this “very important.”…

Here’s the real kicker in the poll – 72% of Independents think that it is “very” or “somewhat” important that the Republicans in Congress pay heed to the TEA Party. This shows a couple things:

1. The GOP leadership ignores the TEA Party at its deadly peril.

2. The TEA Party is not viewed by Independents as a Republican entity – it is the mainstream.

This doesn’t mean the TEA Party gets to call the shots, but it does mean that this movement of the American people must have its voice heard in all debates. Any attempt to shove it out or to cut deals with the left behind closed, Congressional doors will spark outrage and lead to GOP defeat. Once again, the GOP had better have a TEA Party in 2012, or things will get very rough.

The liberal welfare State, write large – from Zero Hedge:

Much has been said about Bernanke’s wealth effect and how it impacts a whopping 1% of the US population… Unfortunately, a little less time has been spent discussing the equal and opposite effect: that of the poverty effect. Luckily, every month we get an update on this just as useful metric. And as of November, the SNAP program had 43.6 million participants, an increase of 400k from October, and a 14% increase, or 5.3 million from a year prior.

Congratulations, Americans! We’ve bailed out the banks, devalued the currency and driven ourselves further in to bankruptcy – and in return, you get food stamps!

Is this hope, or change?

Most have probably never heard of him, but he’s worthy of our note and respect:

Frank Woodruff Buckles, Jefferson County’s most famous living citizen and the last surviving World War I doughboy, turns 110 years old Tuesday…

As the linked story goes on to note, Mr. Buckles is also a bit of a WWII veteran – being captured by the Japanese when he was working in the Philippines in WWII.

God bless this wonderful patriot.

From CNBC:

…America’s home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That’s down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998…

…Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 ’10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round)…

This is why housing will not recover any time soon – and will likely suffer further price erosion through, at least, the end of 2012. There are just too many houses available (some sources indicate that the “shadow inventory” – homes held by banks but kept of the market – may run in to the millions of units), too many people with destroyed credit, too many unemployed and too much demographic pressure against rising prices (boomers are retiring, eg, and thus not looking to buy homes). Even when it starts to recover, don’t look for anything like rapidly rising house prices. Some areas might experience a boom from time to time, but the overall trend – perhaps for a generation – will be from flat to slightly up, with dips mixed in from time to time.

The really bad news is that the banks are at their wits end on what to do – they keep “extend and pretend” on their bad home loans (those they haven’t been able to push off on the taxpayer via TARP, that is) and hoping that that the economy will turn around so massively that housing prices will recover. But they never will – certainly not in the time frame necessary to take care of the problem. Government is clueless, too; mostly because the government actually relies upon the bankers to tell them what to do. What is needed is a complete break with the past.

In July of last year I cooked up a plan to fix things, and I still haven’t come across a better idea. Boiled down, it amounts to incentivizing banks to lease out foreclosed homes – preferably to the people they are foreclosing on – for three to five years. This gets the houses off the market, provides a revenue stream to the banks, allows the housing market to stabilize, gives foreclosed-on people a chance to rebuild their credit and generally relieves the pressure of the housing crisis. Unless and until government and the banks start doing things differently, nothing will improve in this area – and the bad news is that things will have to get a lot worse before public pressure can be developed to force government/bank action.

Just a lousy situation all around, and we’re stuck in it…

John Huntsman. He was governor of Utah. No, really. Anyways, he is currently our ambassador to China. And he’s a Republican. And the word is that Obama picked him for the spot to keep him out of the 2012 field. No, seriously. And now Huntsman, very cleverly, has merely burnished his foreign policy cred in preparation for taking on Obama in 2012.

I know, I know – the really big question now looms:

Who in heck has ever heard of Jon Huntsman?

I have – but only in a very minor, who-gives-a-hoot manner. And I’m pretty tuned in to politics – this guy hasn’t been crossing my radar. If I’m not too familiar with him, then you can rely upon it that 99% of the American electorate hasn’t heard of this guy. But he’s the big threat to Obama in 2012? On what grounds?

Reading his biography, I get the sense of a man who is far too much “in” with the Ruling Class to excite TEA Party support. Sure, he’s got some of the conventional conservative GOP positions on taxes and spending – and that is just great – but as the son of a bazillionaire who has spent his whole life in the very upper class, he’s just not going to resonate with Americans whose mortgages are underwater, pay has been cut and are wondering if they’ll have a job next month.

2012 will be a strange political year, of that I’m certain. So strange, in fact, that a unknown, Mormon guy from Utah might just pull it off…but this guy goes down the list of prospects to the bottom…the man most unlikely to get the GOP nomination. Let’s see if he can pull out of that cellar and make a splash.

From Reuters:

A federal judge in Florida struck down President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare overhaul as unconstitutional on Monday in the biggest legal challenge yet to federal authority to enact the law.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called individual mandate went too far in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void,” he wrote, “This has been a difficult decision to reach and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”…

One can figure this is just a first step in the legal process, but I wonder if liberals will really want to fight this? There is a changing dynamic in America these days and while the courts are not reflective of popular movements, they are affected by their times. The paradigm of the past 80 years or so – that government has a right to interfere – is falling and if Obama and his Democrats press this issue in the courts, they might find themselves undoing great swaths of liberalism as judges suddenly re-discover the Constitution. The day of federal mandates is ending and this defeat of ObamaCare might just be the pebble which starts the avalanche.

More than likely, however, the liberals won’t see it like that – for so many years they have relied upon the courts to undo conservatism, they might not recognize that their day in court (as it were) is passing. Hubris tends to take over in dying elites and we can probably rely upon our liberals to keep marching right off the cliff.