Illegal Immigrants Overwhelm California DMV Offices

Californians are waiting months to get an appointment with the Division of Motor Vehicles for driver's licenses and vehicle registrations. Under a new California law, illegal immigrants are now permitted to legally obtain both, and the huge surge in their numbers to do so has overwhelmed DMV offices, according to a CBS-2 Los Angeles news report.

One Californian, told he couldn't get an appointment at the Hollywood DMV before June, stood in line at the DMV office for two days in an effort to renew his driver's license before his current one expired.

[W]e found plenty of other DMV customers who had similar problems.

One driver received a letter from the DMV on Jan. 6 that advised he had to renew in person at a DMV office but had until March 8 — two months — before his current license expired. The driver went online to make an appointment, but discovered there were no appointments available within 50 miles of his home before March 8.

In fact, we found eight DMV offices, including Hollywood, Riverside, Costa Mesa, and Ventura that had nothing available before March 11, after his license would have expired.

Kudos to Millennials

Millennials have gotten their share of bad press, so it's good to see them receive a bit of praise in an article by the sage of American politics, Michael Barone. Citing statistics to buttress his case, Barone writes that "the most crime-prone age and gender cohort — 15-to-25-year-old males — are committing far fewer crimes than that cohort did in 1990."

• In the past two decades, the murder rate fell 49%, forcible rape fell 33%, robbery rate fell 48%, and aggravated assault fell 39%.
• Sexual assaults against 12-to-17-year-olds fell by more than half.
• Violent victimization of teenagers at school declined 60%.
• Binge-drinking in high school is lower than at any time since 1976, and sexual intercourse among 9th graders has declined.
• A recent Justice Department report showed the rape rate on college campuses was 0.6%.
• While unmarried parenthood has risen, teen births have been in sharp decline. The latest statistics tell us that birth rates are, unusually, up among married women and down among unmarried women.

 Barone theorizes why this trend might be happening:

I think what we are seeing is a mass changing of minds, something like the movement in Victorian England toward what historian Gertrude Himmelfarb described as “the morality that dignifies and civilizes human beings.”

My theory is that young people do what is expected of them, in two senses of the word “expected.” One is statistical expectation. Americans in 1990 expected young people, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, to commit lots of crimes. They had been doing so, after all, for 25 years. But Rudy Giuliani and others adapting his methods reduced crime dramatically, and statistical expectations rapidly changed.

The other sense of the word “expected” is moral expectation. A parent tells a boy he is expected not to shoplift, bully, rob, rape or kill. She tells a girl she is expected not to sleep around or get pregnant. The parents of the last 25 years grew up in years of high crime, high divorce and high unmarried births. Evidently they wanted — expected — something better from their own children.

Illusory "Middle Class Economics"

While the president claims his "Middle Class Economics" is working, economist Stephen Moore lists "a dirty bunch of hidden indicators pointing to an American economy that may be in a lot worse shape than Washington is telling us," especially for the middle class families.

• It's been 10 years since Americans in the middle class got a pay raise that kept pace with inflation.
• Food, energy, tuition and health care prices have been running two to three times the official inflation rate.
• Income inequality worsened in each of Obama's first four years in office, breaking all-time highs in both 2011 and 2012.
• Small business creation hasn't been this low since 2001.
• The national debt has grown by $7.3 trillion. Total debt was $11 trillion when Obama took office; today it's $18 trillion, and additional $120,000 of debt for each U.S. worker.
• The percentage of Americans under 25 who are in the workforce is at its lowest level since the early 1970s.
• Entitlement spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare is expected to nearly double in 2024 compared to 2013.

Read full article, Obama's Illusory Economic Recovery: Official Statistics Ignore the Real Hardships Families Face, by Stephen Moore

Same-Sex Marriage Alters Job-Based Benefits

"Until recently, same-sex couples could not legally marry," reports Julie Appleby of Kaiser Health News. "Now, some are finding they must wed if they want to keep their partner's job-based health insurance and other benefits."

With same-sex marriage now legal in 35 states and the District of Columbia, some employers that formerly covered domestic partners say they will require marriage licenses for workers who want those perks.

“We’re bringing our benefits in line, making them consistent with what we do for everyone else,” said Ray McConville, a spokesman for Verizon, which notified non-union employees in July that domestic partners in states where same-sex marriage is legal must wed if they want to qualify for such benefits.

Employers making the changes say that since couples now have the legal right to marry, they no longer need to provide an alternative. Such rule changes could also apply to opposite-sex partners covered under domestic partner arrangements.

“The biggest question is: Will companies get rid of benefit programs for unmarried partners?” said Todd Solomon, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago.

It is a reminder that "when marriage laws change, so do tax laws." Some same-sex advocates aren't happy with those changes.

It is legal for employers to set eligibility requirements for the benefits they offer workers and their families — although some states, such as California, bar employers from excluding same-sex partners from benefits. But some benefit consultants and advocacy groups say there are legal, financial and other reasons why couples may not want to marry.

Requiring marriage licenses is “a little bossy” and feels like “it’s not a voluntary choice at that point,” said Jennifer Pizer, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, an organization advocating for gay, lesbian and transgender people.

More at Once, Same-Sex Couples Couldn't Wed; Now, Some Employers Say They Must, PBS

Celebrating, Demanding School Choice

"More than 11,000 rallies and events focusing on school choice are planned this week across the country" to celebrate National School Choice Week (NSCW), reports Mary Lou Byrd.

Economist Milton Friedman first advanced the concept of K-12 education vouchers — a system in which education tax dollars are attached to each child and follow each child to the public or private school of his/her choice.

His rationale was simple: the American public school system is a government monopoly. As happens with all monopolies, public school performance and quality are in decline, and American children as a group are falling behind their peers in other nations.

Introduce competition in K-12 education (as most other industrialized nations have), and the U.S. will (a) erase the inequality of educational opportunity between rich and poor children (i.e., between children whose families can afford private schools and children whose families can not), and (b) vastly improve the quality of education delivered by all American schools, especially government public schools. Moreover, he asserted, competition will cause public schools to become more efficient.  It will apply much-needed brakes to out-of-control public education costs, since private schools typically deliver a higher quality education at about half the cost of public schools.



School choice experiments that began in the 1980s have proven Friedman correct in his assessment of expanded equality, equal opportunity, and cost-containment. Public school systems even began opening "public charter schools" as an alternative to the assigned neighborhood public school in hopes of keeping parents from choosing private school options. For all the right reasons, school choice has expanded in the U.S.

The Institute for Justice, one advocate of school choice that has "defended every major lawsuit filed against school choice programs by teachers' unions and other opponents," told the Washington Free Beacon this week,

School choice is on the rise like never before. There are now over 50 school-choice programs in 25 states that give parents both public and private school options, and about half of those programs have been enacted in just the past five years. ... [S]tate legislatures are increasingly heeding the demands of parents, many of whom are unsatisfied with the performance of their children's assigned public schools and want other options. 

Public opinion on this issue is with the parents.

A new poll released ahead of School Choice Week shows a majority of Americans‐69 percent—favors the concept of school choice. The poll, released by the American Federation for children, another partner of NSCW, also showed 63 percent support private school choice, 76 percent support public charter schools, and 65 percent believe choice and competition among schools improve education.

For all its expansion to date, however, school choice is still available to only a small percentage of the entire K-12 student population. While NSCW's celebration is certainly warranted for the gains that have been made, it also serves as a encouraging reminder of the work that remains to make Friedman's universal school choice vision a reality for all children in the U.S.

Prager U: Myths, Lies and Capitalism

Prager University (which isn't really a university) continues to produce some of the best short video "lessons" on the important issues of our time — videos that have garnered over 29 million views to date.

Below is their latest video lesson in economics, Myths, Lies and Capitalism. If you like what you see — as have almost 100,000 subscribers — check out their other videos in economics, political science, history, life studies, and religion/philosophy.

Common Core and the Wisdom Deficit

In a thought-provoking essay, veteran English teacher Michael Godsey writes that he doesn't teach much "wisdom" in his high school classes anymore, and he wonders who does now that the Common Core has taken hold in public schools.

Secular wisdom in the public schools seems like it should inherently spring from the literature that's shaped American culture. And while the students focus on how Whitman's "purpose shapes the content and style of his text" [in the Common Core]," they're obviously exposed to the words that describe his leaves of grass.  And that's good. But there is a noticeable deprioritization of literature, and a crumbling consensus regarding the nation's idea of classic literature. The Common Core requires only Shakespeare, which is puzzling if only for its singularity.

The Common Core's 10 so-called College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards focus heavily on technical skills and impersonal text analysis and leave little if any room for classical literature. Yet classical literature plays an important role in encouraging students to personally engage in, and examine, literary characters' life experiences and decision-making processes. Through literature, students had the opportunity to garner a certain wisdom from those life lessons and to evaluate truth and appropriately apply it to their own lives.

Admittedly, nothing abut the Common Core or any modern shifts in teaching philosophies is forbidding me from sharing deeper lessons found in Plato's cave or Orwell's Airstrip One. The fine print of the Common Core guidelines even mentions a few possible titles.

But this comes with constant pervasive language that favors objective analysis over personal engagement. Achieve the Core, for example, an organization founded by the lead writers of the standards, explicitly encourages schools to teach students to "extract" information so they can "note and assess patterns of writing" without relying on "any particular background information" or "students having other experiences or knowledge." This emphasis on what they call "text-dependent reading" contributes to a culture in which it's not normal to promote cultural wisdom or personal growth; in fact, it's almost awkward.

Godsey doesn't worry about his own children, or children of families who value classic literature and the life lessons they teach enough to pursue it at home. But he is concerned for the millions of young people who are not so fortunate and who will lose out on the shared wisdom that families once relied on their public schools to transmit.

Source: The Wisdom Deficit in Schools, Michael Godsey, The Atlantic, January 2015

Abortion Legislation, Pro-Life March in DC

On the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, tens of thousands gathered in Washington DC to March for Life from the National Mall to the steps of the Supreme Court—the largest of many marches in support of life in cities across the nation over the past weekend.

To coincide with the march, House GOP leaders had scheduled a vote on legislation, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would have banned elective abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy — the point at which unborn children can feel pain and survive premature birth.  A Quinnipiac poll on the issue in November reported 60% approval among Americans. That legislation was abruptly pulled, however, when female GOP members raised concerns about a provision in the bill that required rape victims to report the crime to law enforcement in order to qualify for an exemption.

In its place a lesser bill, "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," was passed the House in a 242-179 vote, reports the Washington Examiner.

The legislation would make it illegal for individuals to use the Affordable Care Act's insurance subsidies to buy plans that cover abortion services through the new health exchanges. Many states have already passed legislation limiting abortion coverage in exchange plans, but the measure the House approved would apply nationwide and possibly discourage insurers on the exchanges from offering abortion coverage at all.

The switch upset some who supported the stricter measure. Mollie Hemingway chastised Congress for not believing "it's competent enough to make a case against infanticide" when there is clear polling data showing broad support.

A Washington Post/ABC survey showed that 64 percent of Americans favor limiting abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy or earlier. When just women were asked, the figure jumped to 71 percent. Such measures are popular among independents and Americans of various income levels.

Quinnipiac even asked detailed questions about the bill last go-around ... Sixty percent of voters said they would support it, while 33 percent said they were opposed. Even Democrats were evenly divided (46 percent to 47 percent) on the question. We're one of just a small handful of countries, including notorious human rights violators North Korea and china, that allow late-term abortion.

Others were less critical. "While we are disappointed that the House will not be voting on the [20-week abortion ban] today, we are pleased that the House is moving forward to stop taxpayer funding of abortion," said a joint statement by the Susan B. Anthony List, the March for Life Education and Defense Fund and the Concerned women for America Legislative Action Committees.

Growing Business-Builders Essential to Growing Economy

While the president painted a deceptively rosy picture of our economy in his State of the Union address, a more reality-based assessment was delivered recently by Gallup CEO Jim Clifton in Business Journal. He argues that American leaders, having misdiagnosed the cause and effect of economic growth and job creation, are making our economic problems worse.

"This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses," asserts Clifton. "When small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they're being born, so is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it."

• Approximately 6 million businesses with one or more employees in the U.S.—the real engines of economic growth—provide jobs for more than 100 million Americans and much of the tax base for everything, from military to social safety net spending.

• Since 2008, U.S. business "deaths" (shut-downs) have outnumbered new business "births" (start-ups), and we have fallen to 12th among developed nations in terms of business start ups behind countries such as Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel and Italy.

• Fewer businesses mean declining revenues and smaller salaries to tax, followed by declining aid for the elderly and poor and declining funding for the military, for education, for infrastructure — in short, for everything.  

Citing Gallup polling data showing Americans believe the economy (59%) and federal spending and budget deficit (58%) are cause for a "great deal" of worry, Clifton argues that ordinary people seem to intuitively understand what America's leaders do not:  that businesses and entrepreneurs are the critical drivers of a strong economy.

Our leadership keeps thinking that the answer to economic growth and ultimately job creation is more innovation, and we continue to invest billions in it. But an innovation is worthless until an entrepreneur creates a business model for it and turns that innovative idea in something customers will buy. Yet current thinking tells us we're on the right track and don't need different strategies, so we continue marching down the path of national decline, believing innovation will save us.

Because we have misdiagnosed the cause and effect of economic growth, we have misdiagnosed the cause and effect of job creation. To get back on track, we need to quit pinning everything on innovation, and we need to start focusing on the almighty entrepreneurs and business builders.

Source: American Entrepreneurship: Dead or Alive?, Jim Clifton, Business Journal, January 13, 2015

Vermont Abandones Single-Payer Health System

Vermont was the only state to undertake the liberal dream of a state-wide single-payer health care system in lieu of Obamacare (as the Affordable Care Act permitted). After discovering how much it would cost, Vermont has abandoned the idea.

Designed by Jonathan Gruber, the Green Mountain Care plan enacted in 2011 (to take effect in 2017):

• abolished all private health insurance except those provided by multi-state employers;
• offered substantially higher benefits: i.e., the state would pay 94% of health costs, compared to 90% under ObamaCare's most expensive plan; and
• was to be funded entirely by tax collections, with no individual premium payments. 

But "Vermonters were stunned to discover how much their new free health care was going to cost," writes Michael Tanner in the New York Post.

•  Paying for Green Mountain Care would have required a 160% increase in state taxes by 2019, as much as $2.9 billion annually.
• The state's top income tax rate would have been raised from 8.95% to an astounding 18%. For high earners that would mean a combined federal-state income tax burden of 56%. Even lower-income Vermonters would have seen a substantial tax hike.
• Businesses would have been hit with an 11.5% state payroll tax (on top of a federal payroll tax of 15.3% to 16.2%).
• Payments to doctors and hospitals would have been cut by an estimated 16%, forcing some to leave the state and threatening the viability of local hospitals.
• And even with all of that, according to numbers released by the governor's office, the plan would be running in the red within four years.

Although "Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, announced that the state was giving up and abandoning its plans for Green Mountain Care, reports Tanner, other states are currently considering legislation similar to Vermont's, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington.

Source: Liberal Dream of Single-Payer Health Care Dies in Vermont, New York Post, January 18, 2015

WH Tax Punishes Moms Outside Labor Force

The $320 billion tax increase the president will propose tonight in his State of the Union address reveals his "tax policy as power and punishment, tax policy as vengeance" mindset, argues Ira Stoll.

...how this administration approaches tax policy not from the point of view of raising the revenues necessary to run the government, and not from the view of creating the maximum incentives for growth and innovations, but rather as a kind of zero-sum, redistributionist means of political warfare.

A few items Mr. Stoll considers particularly punishing:

• "one earner" families would pay higher taxes so that "two-earner" families could get a $500 "second earner" tax credit along with a tripled "child care" tax credit;
• high earners who have saved money in Individual Retirement Accounts all their lives would see their retirement accounts taxed retroactively; and
• families who have saved 529 college savings accounts for their children would be taxed when they withdraw the funds to pay for their children's college bills.

Calling it "Destructive Social Engineering," the editors at National Review Online write that the tax code is already heavily biased against saving and investment, and Mr. Obama's proposal would make it even worse. Moreover, his plan takes a gratuitous slap at mothers outside the paid labor force:

Most mothers, especially of small children, prefer to work part-time or drop out of the labor force for a time. Commercial child care is the least favored option for most parents. The president's plan encourages families to do what they do not wish to do and penalizes them for refusing.

 UPDATE: See also Obama Tax Hike on College Savings Plans Breaks Middle Class Tax Pledge

The "1-in-3 College Men Would Rape" Study

"No polling organization would ever be taken seriously if its sample size was 73, and neither should this 'study' on college rape," begins Mark J. Perry.

A "study" conducted by "researchers' at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University ("Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders") and published in the journal Violence and Gender claims to find that almost one in 3 college men would commit rape "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences." Oy vey, where to begin on this one? 

The study's conclusions were drawn from responses of only 73 male students, who were compensated with "extra credit for their participation" (suggesting they were all taking the same course), at a single unidentified North Dakota university.  The "margin of sampling error" for a tiny sample size of 73 is so huge as to make the results meaningless to the entire 9 million male college student population in the U.S.

Yet the conclusions fit so nicely with the Left's current campus sexual assault narrative that left-wing media shouted it out:

• Study: 1 in 3 Men Would Rape if They Wouldn't Get Caught or Face Consequences (Cosmopolitan)
• Study Finds That a Third of College Men Would Rape if They Could Get Away With It (Feministing)
•  1 in 3 College Men Admit they would Rape If We Don't Call it Rape (Jezebel)

And another liberal lie is born.

Terrorism Aided by West's Surrender to Political Correctness

In the Fox News video clip below, national security analyst KT McFarland, who is also an Institute campus speaker, discusses the changing face of terrorism and how it is being aided by Western Civilization's surrender to political correctness in failing to call terrorism what it is:

Drill, Baby, Drill Was An Effective Strategy

Liberals universally mocked when conservatives argued for more domestic drilling to increase oil and gas supplies, reduce costs to consumers, and boost the American economy. President Obama called Drill, Baby, Drill "a slogan, a gimmick, and a bumper sticker ... not a strategy."

Dependent on Middle East oil producers, Americans were paying $4 per gallon at the pump back then, and the Obama Administration refused to open federal lands for additional oil and gas drilling. So private landowners and private companies did what the federal government wouldn't do: they drilled.

Who's laughing now?

The price of a gallon of regular gasoline on Monday was $2.13 nationwide, and below $2 in 18 states.

"Of course [Obama] was wrong. We've seen oil prices fall internationally now by half since last June," said American Enterprise Institute economist Ben Zycher. "The U.S. is now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, or almost that, and the effect has been to drive prices down as we've seen."

Fox News reporter William LaJeunesse traces liberals' energy evolution ... from scoffing to claiming credit for today's low prices:

Obama's Executive Amnesty Faces Legislative, Judicial Challenges

With funding for Homeland Security set to expire February 27, the GOP-controlled House plans to insert amendments in that department's future-funding legislation designed to block Obama's executive immigration actions. The Daily Signal reports that House leaders, after considering several proposals, have agreed to a plan that would:

• prevent Obama from implementing his recent executive actions to defer deportation for up to 5 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and granting them work permits,
• bar Obama from taking similar independent action in the future,
• strip protections provided to "Dreamers" under Obama's 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and
• restore the "Secure Communities" enforcement program that Obama ended with his executive actions.

Meanwhile, 25 states have filed a lawsuit detailing the billions of dollars in costs that Obama's executive action imposes on states unless the court stops the amnesty:

More than 1,100 pages of documents submitted by Texas and two dozen other states suing to stop the amnesty detail the costs in dept, and include sworn affidavits from state officials, federal immigration officers and others arguing that the amnesty will increase illegal immigration, leaving the states with even bigger burdens. [snip]

Judge [Andrew] Hanen, who sits in Brownsville, Texas, will hear oral arguments in the case Thursday [Jan 15], with the fate of Mr. Obama's most ambitious executive action to date riding on the outcome.

The case turns on two key factors: first, whether Texas and the 24 other states that have joined the lawsuit can show they or their residents stand to suffer from the president's policies; and second, whether Mr. Obama's actions go beyond case-by-case discretion and tread on Congress' power to write laws and set policy. [snip]

Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow for constitutional studies at CATO, said the case should test just how broadly states are able to challenge federal laws on behalf of their residents. Mr. Shapiro said given gridlock and the penchant for presidents to act on their own, the case could have a huge impact.

New Study Confirms Benefits of Marriage

A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that, controlling for individual pre-marital happiness levels, "the married are still more satisfied" and happier than the single. The "well-being effects of marriage are about twice as large for those whose spouse is also their best friend." 

Moreover, researchers John Helliwell and Shawn Grover found that the "married have a less deep U-shape in life satisfaction across age groups than do the unmarried, indicating that marriage may help ease the causes of the mid-life dip in life satisfaction and that the benefits of marriage are unlikely to be short-lived." Reporting on the study, the New York Times writes

The benefits of marital friendship are most vivid during middle age, when people tend to experience a dip in life satisfaction, largely because career and family demands apply the most stress then. Those who are married, the new paper found, have much shallower dips – even in regions where marriage does not have an overall positive effect.

“The biggest benefits come in high-stress environments, and people who are married can handle midlife stress better than those who aren’t because they have a shared load and shared friendship,” Mr. Helliwell said.

Overall, the research comes to a largely optimistic conclusion. People have the capacity to increase their happiness levels and avoid falling deep into midlife crisis by finding support in long-term relationships.

Keystone Pipeline Clears 2 Hurdles

The Keystone XL Pipeline, designed to carry crude oil from Canada into the U.S. for refinement, cleared two hurdles today, one legislative and one judicial, reports the Washington Times.

• With the support of 28 Democrats, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 266-153 to approve construction of the project long stalled by the Obama Administration.  The U.S. Senate, now under Republican control, is working a companion bill through its own chamber and is expected to take an early test-vote early next week.

• Hours earlier, the Supreme Court of Nebraska upheld the project's proposed route through Nebraska, overturning a lower court earlier decision invalidating the pipeline's path. In its ruling, the high court determined that the landowners who challenged Keystone's route did not have legal standing to do so.

Liberalism in Retreat

In a thought-provoking piece published just before Christmas, academic Walter Russell Mead argues that the "Obama administration may represent 'Peak Left' in American politics" and, "as a result, what we are getting from the left these days is a mix of bewilderment and anger as it realizes that this is as good as it gets."

For liberals, these are bleak times of hollow victories (Obamacare) and tipping points that don’t tip.

Public opinion didn't move to the left after Sandy Hook (gun control), the 2014 IPCC report (climate change), Ferguson and Garner, the Senate "torture report," or the Rolling Stone campus rape story (to name a few).

In all of these cases, liberals got what, from a liberal perspective, appeared to be conclusive evidence that long cherished liberal policy ideas were as correct as liberals have always thought they were. In all of these cases the establishment media conformed to the liberal narrative, inundating the airwaves and flooding the cyberverse with the liberal line. ... [Yet] the public still doesn’t seem to accept the liberal line or draw the inferences that liberals want it to draw. It’s becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that many Americans will continue to disagree with many liberal policy prescriptions no matter what.

Liberals believed the George W. Bush administration had discredited conservatism.

The foreign policy failures of the Bush years, they believe, should have killed conservative ideology about America’s role in the world, and the financial crisis, they are certain, should have driven a stake through the heart of conservative economic doctrine. Yet: Here we are, six years into the Age of Obama, and the Tea Party is alive and Occupy is dead. The Republicans swept the midterm elections ... The liberal rout at the level of state and local politics is even more alarming.

The response by some disillusioned liberals is "to turn on Obama."

But to blame Obama for the crisis of the liberal left is unpersuasive. ... It took the unique circumstances of two wars and a financial crash to open a path to the White House for Barack Obama; absent similar circumstances, successful candidates are likely to come from his right for the foreseeable future. ... America is unlikely to go farther to the left than it went in the wake of the Iraq War and the financial crash, and while that wasn’t anywhere near enough of a shift for left-leaning Democrats, the country has already moved on.

2015: the Good and Not-So-Good Ahead

A December IBD/TIPP poll reports that Americans are upbeat on 2015 as the year begins, despite remaining split on many issues. Three areas of broad agreement, however, are the economy, immigration and Obamacare:

With the job market noticeably picking up, 62% believe there will be "significant improvement" in employment vs. just 36% saying that's unlikely.

After the border surge that saw thousands of young immigrants from Latin American cross into the U.S., setting off an often-bitter political debate, fully 59% say a new immigration law is unlikely in 2015. ... Respondents are far likelier to believe Congress will succeed in stopping President Obama's executive action granting temporary legal status to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants in America.

Meanwhile, with its fumbled website launch, rising costs and a surge of new rules, ObamaCare remains uncertain, the poll suggests. Among those who responded, 50% say that "the repeal or cutback of large parts of ObamaCare" is likely by the new Republican-led Congress, while 47% disagree.

For conservatives, reasons to be optimistic include:

• Enjoying the lowest gas prices in memory, watching a president restrained by the Supreme Court, seeing a president's policies rebuked by the electorate, a flourishing reform conservative movement, and declining abortion rates (via Jennifer Rubin);
• Obamacare is facing a serious challenge before the Supreme Court on March 4 to determine constitutionality of federal Obamacare subsidies (via Cato Institute); and
• 5 federal agencies are in the new Congress's cross hairs: Internal Revenue Service, Health and Human Services (Obamacare actions, enrollment), Department of Homeland Security (Obama's executive action on immigration), Environment Protection Agency (Obama's coal/climate change action), and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Obama's actions on regulating financial products like credit cards) (via Fiscal Times).

And a few reasons to stay engaged in the Washington policy debate:

• The Obamacare employer mandate kicks in Jan 1, 2015, which will impact the employees of companies with 100 or more workers in painful ways (via Washington Times);
• Right now, 87% of new Obamacare insurance users receive some sort of federal subsidy to reduce the premiums of Obamacare policies, but that could change dramatically after the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of those subsidies (via Washington Examiner); and
• Obama's federal agencies are poised to unleash another 2,375 new rules and regulations on American businesses in 2015, unless Congress issues resolutions of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (via Competitive Enterprise Institute).