While we rightly focus on the 2014 primaries and upcoming midterm elections, let's take a break and look in on the field for the 2016 presidential race.

Party-endorsed Ohio Republican Party (ORP) State Central Committee candidates are being promoted with inadvertently hilarious ORP flyers asserting, "It Takes a STRONG Republican Party to Stand Up to Obamacare."

There is an old philosophical puzzle that asks the following: If you begin to replace the parts of your car, one by one, until no original parts remain, is it still the same car? If not, at what point did the change occur?

Democracy and Power 104: Future Debt Burden A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill. —Hans F. Sennholz

In the early months of the open enrollment period for the insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), nobody in the Obama administration seemed to know how many people had actually signed up for the subsidized insurance plans being offered. This left a lot of experts and members of Congress curious given that the exchanges, after all, were Internet-based and must have had some sort of electronic record of usage and purchases. As bad as the technical problems were during the initial roll out of the ObamaCare exchanges, there was simply no way that these websites were built without a mechanism that tracked or could be used to track enrollment. Yet the administration remained persistent that they had no such data.

Democracy and Power 105: The Politician seeks power To some people, government appears as a vast reservoir of power which inspires them to dream of what use might be made of it. They have favorite projects of various dimensions which they sincerely believe are for the benefit of mankind. They are thus disposed to recognize government—an instrument of passion, the art of politics to inflame and direct desire. - Michael Oakeshott – English political philosopher 1901-1990

Democracy and Power 115: Other Power Players The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. - Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78

Some important thoughts on ObamaCare's latest enrollment claim: