Open Society Institute, the grant-making arm of left-wing billionaire George Soros’s empire, supported groups advocating tighter regulation of for-profit higher education institutions...

...Steve Eisman, a money manager with Morgan Stanley who made a large sum of money short-selling subprime mortgages, has bet that for-profit colleges will lose federal subsidies...

...“CREW uncovered emails detailing the all-too-cozy dealings between supporters of the crackdown like Eisman and the Soros-backed think-tanks and the Obama education department.”

Democrat Xavier Becerra claimed that striking down Obamacare would mean that the Supreme Court was "a partisan body no different from Congress."...
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Becerra added, "We should all take some time tonight to pray a little to make sure the Supreme Court doesn't come out with another 5-4 decision which, once again, unmasks its political tendencies."

Given that the Democrats won by 5-4 instead of losing by 5-4, we can expect all these complaints about activist judging to be shelved until the next big case. But while talk of the Supreme Court's legitimacy may fade, I'd like to talk about something related: The damage that Obamacare did to the legitimacy of the other two branches of government.
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STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it's a tax increase?

OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.

Obama had to reject that notion, since otherwise Obamacare's tax increase would have represented a massive middle-class tax increase indeed, and one that violated his promise that families earning less than $250,000 a year would see no tax increases of any kind under his plan. Now the Supreme Court has basically said he lied.

Of course, that's not the only broken promise from Obamacare's passage. Obama also promised that if you liked your existing health insurance policy, you'd get to keep it -- something that quickly turned out to be false, as the changes mandated under the health care law led to severe cuts in coverage, or even cancellation of coverage, by insurers.

And if the executive branch's treatment of Obamacare was characterized by lies, the legislative branch didn't look any better. Obamacare, remember, was rammed through in the teeth of popular opposition; when the special election victory of Scott Brown meant that Democrats no longer had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the bill was squeezed through via a "reconciliation" procedure under the fiction that it was a budget bill, not substantive legislation.

Add to that the intense role of lobbyists and special interests in drafting the law, Nancy Pelosi's famous remark that we'd have to pass the bill to find out what was in it and the rampant vote-buying (remember the "Cornhusker Kickback"?), and we have a process that was dishonest, corrupt and far less legitimate than any conceivable Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare.

So, at the end of the day, the legitimacy question rests not with the Supreme Court, but with Congress and the president.

So far, the returns are not good. A Rasmussen poll last week showed only 22 percent of Americans think our present government enjoys the "consent of the governed" -- the Framers' standard for legitimacy. Given what's happened with Obamacare, the surprising thing is that the number is so high.

Now consider: If a Supreme Court that many Americans regard as illegitimate constitutes a danger to the Republic, what kind of danger is posed when the government as a whole is regarded as illegitimate?

Holmes warned police his apartment was "booby trapped", after being arrested for killing at least 12 people and injuring 50 others at the Century 16 Movie theater.

...this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

Or else democratically elected governments can be replaced by puppet austerity regimes which are free to ignore the protests of the populace when they are deprived of their promised entitlements. You can, in other words, decide to debauch the currency which underwrites the market economy, or you can dispense with democracy. Both of these possible solutions are currently being tried in the European Union, whose leaders are reduced to talking sinister gibberish in order to evade the obvious conclusion: the myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the defining political problem of the early 21st century

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