The ball's in your court--not mine. 

That's what Chief Justice John Roberts seems to be saying to the country in the landmark decision he wrote upholding most of Obamacare.

"It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choice," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

Nor does the Supreme Court rule on the wisdom of public policy. "Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation's elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if people disagree with them," he added.

Republicans are ready to take him up on that offer and are busy using the unfavorable decision to turn out more voters in the fall, even though they have little hope of getting rid of Obamacare now.

You might want to sit down for this one--welfare recipients might not be spending their handouts on nutritious meals and infant formula. I know, big surprise. One wonders what you can buy at a 7-Eleven with the "now accepting WIC cards" poster that could possibly be good for you.

However, progressives keep telling us that welfare is essential to keep people from starving in the streets, etc. etc., even though the biggest health problems facing the "poor" are obesity and diabetes.  Their zeal for these social programs certainly couldn't have to do with their love for wealth redistribution or a cynical attempt to buy votes with taxpayer dollars, could it...

Not even the beneficiaries of progressive largesse are convinced that they need it.

How out of control is it? Taxpayers spend $80 billion on the SNAP program to benefit 21 million households, or over $300 per month per household--just to make sure they don't starve. That's an entire month's grocery bill for a family of four, courtesy of those of you who pay taxes.

If the household has an infant or pregnant mother, throw in another $70/month with WIC to buy formula and diapers.

Throw in another $500 a month with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ("temporary" in this case meaning 5 years, or $30,000), and you're raking in nearly a thousand dollars a month for doing nothing!  Of course, this doesn't count Medicaid enrollment, which pays your medical bills, housing help, unemployment, disability, or state and local assistance.

If someone played his cards right, he'd make, who knows, $40K a year for doing nothing but filling out paperwork for government programs?

It's comes as no shock to learn that these programs aren't helping people stay off the streets so much as its paying for their cell phone bills and big-screen TVs.

But don't feel bad for the government--they don't even care where the money is going, or they know and they're hiding it. According to a Washington Times article from this week.

To put the waste in perspective, the United States spends about 70% of what it spends on defense on welfare programs each year, which may only succeed in training people how to be irresponsible. 

To clear-thinking people, the nation's epidemic of obese children has an obvious cause--bad parenting. No amount of government intervention nor hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars can change that, but Michelle Obama and progressives will try. A recently published UCLA study shows just how misguided they are.

Santa Paula, Oxnard, and Port Hueneme had some of the highest weights of obesity in the state. The Star wrote an insightful article on why this might be the case, and how government programs to addres the problem are failing.

People can choose to blame weight issues among children in Ventura County on school cafeterias. They can criticize cities for providing too few parks. They can wag a finger at the convenience store a half-block from a Boys & Girls Club in Port Hueneme or the Jack in the Box beyond that.

But Jimmy Lambaren, a machine operator who likes to cook and insists his 12-year-old son works out regularly, thinks they need a mirror.

"It's the parents' fault," he said outside the Boys & Girls Club, remembering a recent trip to a fast-food joint where he refused to eat. "It was jam-packed. I said, 'These are people who don't like to cook a decent meal.' "

Jimmy Lambaren has more common sense than the First Lady and progressives who support throwing money at the problem.

Elementary schools in parts of Oxnard and Port Hueneme have salad bars. Hueneme High School in Oxnard offers water-only vending machines and a state-of-the-art weight training room. County public health officials are building a healthful-eating, active -living program funded by a $480,000 annual grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, it's becoming more and more clear that healthy eating habits can only be set by parents.

Leaders of some programs worry about funding during the state budget crisis. Others worry about what happens outside their doors.

"We can only control what they do for six hours," said Joy Epstein, principal at Sunkist Elementary School in Port Hueneme. "It's outside factors."

Steffanie Elliott, a mother of two from Port Hueneme, rejects the argument that parents can't find fresh fruits and vegetables. They can but they don't.

All parents can find healthy food, can afford healthy food (and if they can't, they need to rearrange some priorities like their cell phone plans) and only they can give their kids healthy food to eat. Government nanny state programs are a waste of money, ineffective, and lets it intrude into our lives.

Tom McClintock represented a major part of Ventura County in various roles from 1982 to 2008. I don't think anybody would describe him as wild or crazy. In fact, most people say the opposite. The Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters wrote that McClintock has "consistently been one of the very few legislators who has been right about what California is experiencing." The Wall Street Journal said he was "about the only man in California who has consistently projected correctly the magnitude of the budget crises of the 1990s." The OC Register noted he's "consistently been among the most accurate forecasters of the effects of state tax and spending policies." The Washington Post calls him, "one of California's most prominent conservative politicians since the 1980s."

He "graduated", so to speak, from the minor leagues of budget messes of Sacramento to the major leagues of national debt crises when he was elected to Congress in 2008. Not one to compromise on his conservative principles, McClintock--a Tea Party leader--fit right in with the Republican wave that swept into Congress in 2010.

With many freshmen Congressmen last year, Rep. McClintock voted against raising the debt limit, which he called, "the biggest explosion of debt in American history."

In an editorial called, "No experience necessary to write U.S. laws," the Star implied that such congressmen are "confrontational, hyperpartisan zealots who don't feel they have to learn anything because they know with total certitude what they know" and they "came close to driving the national into technical default" as "we revert to a nation of dirt roads."

Since McClintock is a leading figure of those "zealots" (The Hill refers to him as a "leader of GOP budget hawks"), agrees with them ideologically and votes with them, then he must be just as guilty as those Republicans the Star editorialized against.

He too, must be a hyperpartisan zealot who doesn't feel he has to learn anything--he who was reelected multiple times by the same people who are currently serviced by the Ventura County Star. He who is noted by multiple major publications as being a public budget expert. He who voted the same way Americans wanted their congressmen to vote by a 2-to-1 margin.

And if he's granted an exception--i.e. ok fine, they're all crazy but Tom McClintock--then one has to wonder that maybe freshmen GOP congressmen know more than we give them credit for if McClintock is one of their leaders and they vote the same as him and think the way he does.

It could just be--just maybe--that they (along with many other experts that follow the government debt problem) see it as a huge problem and are trying their best to slam the brakes on overspending before it's too late, even if it means getting called less-than-flattering names by respected publications.

The Star recently editorialized that teen jobs "are shriveling in the summer sun," and offered several explanations for why this is the case before concluding that teens wasting summers away without working is undesirable. I agree.

The main causes of teen unemployment, as I see it, have to do with progressive policies instead of some unforeseen force at work.

First, and probably most important as far as teen unemployment is concerned, is that progressives keep raising the minimum wage in a misguided attempt to help poor people. Progressives fool themselves into thinking they can set a minimum wage, when in reality it can't be changed from zero. In other words, employers won't hire someone at $8 an hour if a person's labor is only worth $6 an hour.

The group whose labor is worth the least is inexperienced students looking for a summer jobs. They might be happy to work at $6 an hour so they can build enough experience to someday make $8, then $10, then $15, then $50. But they can't take the first step up the ladder of success because progressives have raised it five feet off the ground to try to lift up poor people.

Ironically, their attempt to help has the opposite effect, especially for minorities who have not benefited from a good education.

Two prominent black conservative economists make this point better than I. Thomas Sowell says, "The real minimum wage is zero: unemployment." And Walter Williams, writes, "Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it."

Conservatives will also point out that some blacks, other minorities, lower and middle class whites, as well as teenagers face competition from rampant illegal immigration. A job in the fast food industry, traditionally a rite of passage for American teenagers, became dominated by people who spoke English as a second language during the recent waves of illegal immigration.

All is not lost for teenagers, however. The Star wrote about a correlation between how much money a teenager's parents make and the teenager's prospect for summer employment.

But these are teenagers from relatively well-off families and they are also the most likely to find summer employment. Last summer, 44 percent of white teenagers who come from families with income between $100,000 and $150,000 found work.

Those who need the work the most, both for the money and the experience, fare the worst: Only 14 percent of black teens from families making less than $40,000 found work last summer.

We can again thank progressivism for that. Through guilt, liberals have been so eager to give tax dollars to minorities, but are undermining family cohesiveness. Traditionally, a father's role is to bring home money, pay for the electricity, discipline kids when they get out of line, and serve as role model. When Uncle Sam becomes the breadwinner in the family, there is no need for a father anymore. No father means no discipline, no training, no role models. It means broken homes, especially when progressives give perverse financial incentives to women to become single moms and not marry the fathers. Why lose out on all those benefits? The result is higher poverty, higher crime rates, and children who are less prepared to enter the workforce than their counterparts in other families where Uncle Sam isn't the head of household.

Ironically, the progressive's response to the rather sensible arguments I've laid out in this post will be to disregard it, repeat the cry over teen unemployment, and advocate for more progressive policies to fix it. Good luck with that.

Texas is experimenting with a controversial 85 mph speed limit on a 41-mile stretch of road between Austin and San Antonio. That's music to my ears, especially considering I just got back from a nearly 6,000 mile road trip across the western United States.

The best drive of the trip for me was through an experimental 80 mph area. No, I didn't lose control of the vehicle, fly off the road, or travel back in time to 1955. I just made good time.

The worst parts of the drive were in stretches where you had to slow down to 55 mph in construction zones--which are ALL over the country thanks to Porkulus spending. In the sparsely populated area of  South Dakota where my family reunion was being held, a new highway is being built. I have limited experience in the area, but I've never encountered traffic congestion there and the population is shrinking if anything.

Almost from the time you leave California (and Nevada), and all the way thru the Midwest, there are religious signs, pro-life signs, and my favorite--a giant billboard in Kansas that called President Obama a "wanna-be Marxist dictator." That wouldn't last 10 seconds in California. We stayed with some ex-Californians in Kansas, and they showed me a video they took of a huge patriotic celebratory festival with tens of thousands of people, fireworks, and singing, in which the whole region seemed to be in attendance. I asked if that was the last Fourth of July--no, it was Memorial Day!

Paradoxically, my family from California is Republican and my relatives in Minnesota and South Dakota are Democrats. Maybe it's because we Californians see what unfettered progressivism does to a state, sort of how Cuban immigrants are among the strongest conservatives because they lived in Marxist regime. However, I couldn't disagree with anything my Democratic relatives said politically. They are tough on crime, pro-military, individualists, gun owners, and small business owners. They even have a rule to serve the taxpayers first at meals--you people are Democrats??

None of it makes sense to me, because the modern Democratic Party stands for everything they hate--free handouts, egghead theories trumping common sense, anti-police and military activism, and BS political maneuvers. But since they view the Republican Party as the party of the rich bankers and Democrats are for the little guy and the farmer, they vote Democrat.

But things have changed in the last two decades or so. The Republican Party--or at least the right-wing of the GOP--stands for the little guy in the form of the Tea Party movement, which shares many values with my Democratic relatives. In my view, the reigning faction of the Democratic Party stands for the financially, educationally, or racially elite that look down at the Midwest in disdain as "flyover country." 

Thirty years ago, I'd probably be a Democrat as well, if that's when it really did stand for the little guy. But times have changed and the roles of parties have as well. Democrats abused the trust middle-class people placed in it, and it's on full display in places like California where years of progressive policies have ruined the state. I previously wrote about the palpable sense of oppression you feel when crossing back into California from Arizona, where I fired automatic weapons and off-roaded where I wanted. It was legal in Arizona and would have landed me in jail in California. Not surprisingly, the first traffic delay I encountered on my lengthy road trip was on the way back and literally at the California/Nevada border where construction was occurring. The last 4 hours of driving lasted nearly 7 hours, which didn't endear me to the Golden State.

Twenty years ago, there wasn't that much of an ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats, according to an ongoing Pew poll. Now, that gap is of record size and it centers around the size and scope of government. From CNN:

The biggest increase in political polarization came in "government scope and performance" - the gap in 1987 between Democrats and Republicans on that issue was 6 points; in 2012 the gap is 33 points.

To be sure, the bulk of my posts is on this very subject. Every day there is some new encroachment into our freedom by the government, whether it be small--like Bloomberg's soda ban--or big, like Obamacare.

The reason there is so much material is that government is bigger and more intrusive than ever before, and it's seemingly growing at an exponential rate with President Obama and other elite progressives at the helm.

The gap is ever-widening, and left unchecked will one day will threaten the unity of the country if the economic binds that tie us together are ever broken. The Pew poll is the first indication that people are dividing into teams to play the game of the next century.