This week, the punditocracy had no Republican primary contest to distract their attention ("The upcoming primary/caucus in some state I've never traveled through because it's a flyover state could be the crucial turning point in the entire race... details at 11:00..."), and so the political pontificators and prognosticators had nothing else to talk about (one would think) except the serious business before the Supreme Court this week -- Obamacare.

After watching this media performance all week, I am left wondering whether Obamacare includes any treatments for groupthink (also known as "Herd Mentality Syndrome"). The subset of media mavens known as the "court-watchers" received prominence this week, because the anchors and various assorted politicos aren't required to understand legal issues (unlike the "good hair" requirement, for instance). These court-watchers decided to have some fun (that's the most charitable read I can come up with), and sent the rest of the media on a rollercoaster ride of gargantuan proportions.

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[This is going to be one of those short columns which rambles around and doesn't really go anywhere. Just to warn everyone in advance.]

The topic of the week in the political world has been President Obama's signature health care reform law, officially the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Early on, most folks realized that "PPACA" wasn't really the best thing to call it (although some still do use this term, pronounced "puh-pack-ah"). In general, Democrats stink at this whole "name a bill so its initials spell something" game on Capitol Hill. If this had been a Republican idea, my guess is it would have been called something like the "REAGAN IS AWESOME Act," or something equally clever (no, I'm not going to take the time to figure out something that spells that, but if you've a mind to, or to suggest an equally-plausible Republican name, feel free to do so in the comments). Getting back to the Democratic law, however, most Democrats have taken to shortening the name to just the "Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" -- up until very recently. I haven't heard anyone attempt to pronounce ACA yet (ack-ah? ass-ah?), instead just the initials are used. But while "Ay Cee Ay" is better than "puh-pack-ah" it still doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Of course, I am being deliberately obtuse here. Early on, before the law even passed (I am not interested enough in that factoid to check whether it is true, I should mention), Republican opponents labeled it "Obamacare." Or, sometimes, "ObamaCare." Before we get to that, though, we have to run through a quick history, which is mostly accurate (but not obsessively so), of the use of "-care" to name these things.

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For the past three days, the political world has been largely focused on the Supreme Court, and the arguments over whether President Obama's signature legislative achievement is constitutional or not. At the heart of the argument is the "individual mandate," a section of the law which would require Americans to pay more money on their income taxes if they could afford health insurance but chose not to purchase it from a private company.

In the 2008 presidential election campaign, Barack Obama disagreed with Hillary Clinton on this issue. Clinton was for the individual mandate, Obama was not. Once he got elected and started wheeling and dealing with the insurance industry, however, Obama agreed to include the individual mandate in the law now universally known as "Obamacare."

While we're all waiting for the verdict from the Supreme Court, I thought it would be worthwhile to dig into the actual origins of the concept of the individual mandate. Now, the idea itself may have been around for much longer than the documentation I could find online, but the real political push behind the idea seems to have started in 1989, from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation.

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Since the subject is pretty much the only thing people in the political world are talking about today, I thought it would be a good time to re-run the following column, which originally appeared here September 21, 2010. You might also find interesting another article I wrote, on Mitt Romney and the politics of health care in April of 2011, since it was fairly prescient as to the arc of Romney's campaigning on the issue. I offer up both in case anyone needs a break from Supreme Court transcripts today.

Howard Dean is (as he is often wont to do) making all kinds of sense on healthcare reform today. His idea is to jettison the "individual mandate" part of the healthcare reform law passed this year. And he's right, on both political and practical grounds.

The individual mandate is the least-liked part of healthcare reform. It really has no natural constituency other than insurance companies. There was no call from the public to include this in the final law (as there was with the "public option," in comparison). The Left wasn't in favor of it, and it causes apoplexy over on the Right. President Obama did not campaign on the individual mandate (although Hillary Clinton did, I should point out), so he obviously didn't think it was all that important (or all that good an idea, take your choice) before he got elected. Since the mandate appeared, very few people have bothered defending it in public. Its appearance in the debate was obviously a direct result of demands from the health insurance industry, who will be the obvious beneficiary of the plan.

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The Republican primary race this election year was planned in advance to be more competitive and less of a "coronation" of whichever candidate emerged as the early frontrunner. Republicans had looked at the 2008 Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and concluded it would serve as a good model for their own next primary season. Two major changes were instituted by the party to further this goal: stretching the primary schedule out, so it wasn't so front-loaded; and making the earlier states award their delegates proportionally, instead of awarding all of them to the winner (even if he or she won by only one vote). Both of these innovative modifications to party rules were meant to make the race "more competitive" and, hence, more exciting to the viewers at home. During the 2012 race as it has run so far, most political pundits (myself included, in all honesty), have repeatedly pointed to these two changes as the reason the race has been so drawn out. But while we pundits may have been right about the schedule, looking at the actual data on proportionality shows something very counterintuitive: awarding proportional delegates has actually made the race less competitive, not more.

Of course, this depends on how you define the terms "more competitive" and "less competitive," but the upshot is that if all the states which have so far voted had been "winner take all" (or "winner takes all," depending on your grammatical predilection) then Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would be in an even closer race than they are now. To put this bluntly: if there were no proportional delegates at all, Rick Santorum would be doing a lot better.

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That title is a hoary old doctor joke, and the punchline is, of course, "...but the patient died on the table."

Two years ago, Joe Biden was famously quoted for saying to Barack Obama upon the occasion of health care reform legislation finally passing: "This is a big [expletive deleted] deal." In the past week or so, the White House has rolled out a big media push to support Obama's signature legislation. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the subject of whether the law, as written, passes constitutional muster or not.

We'll get to all of that in a moment, but we have some Republican primary prognostication to quickly take care of first.

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Mitt Romney's campaign has entered a sketchy phase. Or, more precisely, an etchy-sketchy phase.

OK, enough with the cheap jokes, as there certainly is no shortage of poking fun at Romney today, so we'll just move right along. What happened, in case you haven't heard, was that a senior Romney campaign official was caught in a "Washington gaffe" (defined as: accidentally admitting the truth in a political setting). His full quote, after being asked about whether Romney was being pushed too far to the right by his primary campaign opponents to appeal to moderates in the general election:

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.

This is conventional wisdom in American politics, in actual fact. All candidates (of both parties) tack to the fringes for the primary campaign, and then pivot and tack back to the center for the general election campaign. But it's one of those things you're not supposed to admit out loud, especially not while being interviewed on the air.

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Two hundred and forty-five years ago this week, celebrations of a political nature were held throughout the American colonies. The occasion, in 1767, was the first anniversary of the repeal of the hated Stamp Act. While not unique as a reason for celebration or as a piece of enduring American politics, it was likely this was the first time Americans celebrated such a thing together -- as Americans, in other words, celebrating a purely American victory.

The Stamp Act itself wasn't even all that unique, as Americans had to cope with a number of attempts by the British Parliament to tax the colonies to retire their war debt from the French and Indian Wars. The Stamp Act wasn't even the first of these attempts -- the Molasses Act (or Sugar Act) passed in 1764, a year before the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act, however, was a new tax (a molasses tax had been around for over thirty years), which taxed pretty much everything printed on paper, including newspapers, pamphlets, university diplomas, deeds, passports, and every other printed matter you can imagine, including even "every pack of playing cards, and all dice."

Historians today mark the Stamp Act as the spark which lit the fire of the American Revolution. But if the British Parliament had just ended their attempts at levying taxes on their colonies with the Stamp Act's repeal on March 18, 1766, the Revolution might never have gotten off the ground -- and we might today still celebrate the Stamp Act repeal while at the same time honoring the Queen of England's Diamond Jubilee as loyal subjects of the Commonwealth. However, Parliament continued to pass harsher and harsher laws to deal with the upstart colonies, and Act after Act (Townshend, Intolerable, Tea...) mostly served to enrage Americans even further.

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Once again, it's primary day! Woo hoo!

Well, OK, that was kind of snarky. Just barely over the halfway point, it's to be expected that predicting the outcomes of the Republican nominating contests has gotten less fun and more of a chore than anything else, so we'll keep things mercifully short today.

First, a quick review of how things stand. Mitt Romney unsurprisingly swept Puerto Rico, after Rick Santorum visited the island and informed them -- incorrectly -- that there was a constitutional requirement that they adopt English as their official language before they could become a state. Statehood is an enormous issue in Puerto Rico, and Rick pretty much buried any hopes he held of picking up a few delegates by this one offhanded remark.

I called this correctly last Friday, which slightly improved my overall tally of making accurate predictions this year.

Total correct 2012 primary picks so far: 36 for 55 -- 65%.

Today's contest is a big one, with 69 delegates up for grabs. However, the state of Illinois is a pretty easy one to call, as Mitt Romney's been out in front in the polling in recent days, at times opening up a double-digit lead over Rick Santorum. Illinois has more urban and suburban voters than the past few states, which also plays to Romney's strengths. Santorum might have had a chance here, because Illinois is smack in the middle of the contiguous block of states he's so far picked up in the Plains and Midwest, but so far in the more urban of the Midwestern states (Ohio and Michigan) Romney has managed to eke out victories. Illinois is also a fairly expensive state to campaign in, giving Romney's far-better campaign organization and his far-deeper campaign chest a decided edge.

I'm betting that there won't be any surprises or upsets tonight, and that Mitt Romney will walk away with a clean win, and also pick up the lion's share of the delegates. Rick Santorum will place comfortably in second, with Newt Gingrich far behind him in third, edging out Ron Paul.

Those are my picks, what are yours?

[Previous states' picks:]
[IA] [NH] [SC] [FL] [NV] [CO, MN, and MO] [ME] [AZ and MI] [WA] [Super Tuesday: AK, GA, ID, MA, ND, OH, OK, TN, VT, and VA] [Guam, KS, Virgin Islands, Northern Marianas] [Puerto Rico]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

When those of a certain age hear the term "rare earth," what immediately springs to mind is a 1970s band of the same name, whose biggest hit was a song called "Get Ready." The song was catchy, but the lyrics ("Well tweedley-dee and tweedley-dum/Look out baby, 'cause here I come") weren't exactly profound. The chorus repeated the "Get ready, 'cause here I come" phrase quite a few times. But it had a solid beat, and you could dance to it... as they said back then.

An entirely different kind of rare earth is in the news these days: the kind that actually comes out of the ground. A whole group of elements (which aren't actually all that rare) are classified as "rare earth" minerals. Their importance in the modern world is growing by leaps and bounds, because they are a key component of most high-tech devices (such as cell phones, computers, and electric car batteries). Even more critically, they are a key component of high-tech military hardware such as night-vision goggles, guided missiles, and Aegis warships.

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