There are now three main contenders for the Republican nomination: Romney, Romney, and Romney.

My reading is still that Ron Paul will win in Iowa. I see Romney finishing second. Even with the worst case scenario of finishing behind Paul and Santorum, Romney is on his way to being perceived as the inevitable nominee after the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary. With Gingrich’s collapse, there is no credible candidate left who can effectively challenge him for the remainder of the primary season.

This doesn’t mean that all the others are going to quit the race or that he’ll have sufficient committed delegates to clinch the nomination after Super Tuesday on March 6. But the lead that he’s going to have after the month of January will just grow and grow. No one else is going to come close.

Thus, Willard Mitt Romney with a dedicated following of only approximately 25% of the Republican electorate will cruise to the nomination.

For a while it looked as though Gingrich was going to mount a serious challenge to Romney. However, his poll numbers and general acceptance have just fallen off a cliff in a two to three week period. My reading is that Gingrich will still win South Carolina by a narrow margin. However, there just aren’t enough southern primaries to give him a credible chance. Failing to get on the ballot in Virginia effectively ended his run.

Gingrich’s candidacy has had some striking similarities to that of the late great Herman Cain. Like Cain, it would seem that Gingrich initially took to the campaign trail to improve his personal financial bottom line. For a long time, it was more or less an extended book tour. After almost every campaign stop, he would put out the wares of his publishing business and sign books.

Also like Cain, Gingrich saw the primary process as an opportunity for performance art. Only Gingrich’s art was intellectual performance art. The debates were his stage. Gingrich also was doing a one man show with Newt playing the role of Ronald Reagan. As part of his preparation for the debates, he spent a considerable amount of time studying videos of Reagan’s debate performances.

As discussed in Part I, it’s my reading that Gingrich doesn’t really want to win the nomination. His heart’s desire is to remain a private citizen so he can continue with his lucrative roles as political guru and stealth lobbyist.

One particular quotation gives this away. At a dinner party he said the following: “The longer I have thought about the very real possibility that I might have to serve, the more I realize that we have to clean up the Congress as well as the executive branch.”

What kind of serious politician speaks in terms of the possibility of having to serve? It sounds like a worst case scenario.

Also, of course, Gingrich has not done many of the organizational things that are required to win a campaign such as effective fund raising and making sure he is on all the ballots. This is due in no small part to the fact that his campaign manager and campaign staff has consisted, until very late in the process, of pretty much Newt by himself.

Nor has he has effectively waged any effective counterattack to the barrage of negative propaganda that have been coming his way from the other candidates since he took the nominal lead in the race. This would be inconsistent with his role of playing Ronald Reagan.

What we’re seeing in the 2012 campaign is an unprecedented and unexpected fragmentation of the conservative movement. There are establishment conservative candidates, Romney and Huntsman, a social conservative, Rick Santorum, a libertarian conservative, Ron Paul, and various candidates with some claim to Tea Party connections: Perry, Bachmann, and Gingrich.

Whatever credibility the narrative of the Tea Party once had, it seems to have to run its course. Although some of the fiscal responsibility tenets of the Tea Party have been integrated into both the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s clearly a movement with declining popular appeal.

One major reason for this decline is the fact that the Tea Party Republican congressional members that came into power in 2010 have not generated any significant changes that the average citizen can see as benefiting them.

What we have seen is congressional gridlock and brinkmanship around all financial and budget issues to the point where Congress has been dysfunctional to an unprecedented degree.

Moreover, the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement introduces a new narrative centered around the frustrations of people of middle income and below. In the last three decades, the wealthiest people have been making huge gains in income and overall prosperity while almost everyone else has been stuck in a situation of stagnant income or declining prosperity.

The outcome of the 2012 elections will be a pivotal moment in American history. It’s conceivable that the Republicans could hold on to the House, win a majority in the Senate and also the presidency. This would then bring in an era of domination by the far right of the political spectrum.

However, my reading is that this scenario is not to be. What I see is a Democratic wave in 2012 that leads to a near balance of Republicans and Democrats in the House, a loss of only one seat by the Democrats in the Senate, and a reelection of President Obama by a substantial margin.

To achieve this result, the Democrats are going to have to overcome some significant handicaps. In the Senate they have to defend 23 seats including the two independents that caucus with them. The Republicans only have to defend 10 seats.

2010 was a census year and Republican dominated state legislatures have had the opportunity to redraw congressional districts to their advantage.

Moreover, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of political campaigns as long as this is not being directly coordinated by the candidates.

This gives some advantage to the Republicans. For, if as I see it, the financial welfare of the middle class becomes a dominate theme in the elections, the Republicans and their financial backers will go all out to protect the interests of the wealthiest from their deep pockets and less scrupulous political mentality.

Lastly, the 2010 Republican wave that gave Republicans control of many state legislatures resulted in laws in several states that have the effect of reducing voting by such tactics as requiring photo ids, limiting early voting, and making voter registration more difficult.

In spite of these handicaps, it is my reading that the Democrats are going to have a very successful year in 2012. With respect to the presidential race, it’s going to come down to who do you trust. The more cynical version of this same theme will be voting for the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know.

Since economic themes are first in people’s minds, this becomes the issue of who do you trust to improve the economic situation of the country and to do something to provide hope for those who are struggling to maintain personal economic equilibrium.

We’ve seen a little bit of this wave late in the year when the issue of extending the Social Security payroll tax cut came before Congress. The Tea Party Republican house members were eventually forced to accept a Senate compromise. The Republicans didn’t want to look like they were just the party of the rich. Obama’s approval rating started to creep up.

The 2012 campaign, like all presidential campaigns, will come down to a war of competing narratives. Whichever narrative wins the hearts and the minds of the people is going to determine the winner. Since the presidential candidate becomes the symbol and spokesman for the whole party effort, how he is perceived has a significant ripple effect down through the House and Senate races.

One thing that unites the Republican electorate is the desire to replace President Obama. With the memory of the 2010 Senate races in mind, electability is seen on a par with ideological conformity.

In the 2010 Senate campaign, the Republicans could easily have elected three more Republicans to the Senate. However, nomination of extreme tea party partisans, Sharon Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, and Ken Buck in Colorado, allowed long shot Democratic candidates to win those seats.

Republicans are going to soon embrace Romney in spite of the ambiguity of where he stands on many issues. Mitt has been a blue to red chameleon changing colors depending on which audience he is addressing. Because he was governor of Massachusetts, a very blue state, the perception is that he will appeal to moderates and Democrats more than most of the other Republican candidates.

But who is Mitt really? What we see is Mr. Slick, the archetypal salesman, virtually flawless in his presentation but with questionable substance and sincerity. Romney has run his campaign with the plan of avoiding mistakes and he has not made many. Yet we still don’t know what he really believes or what his real agenda is for the country.

Romney’s Mormon faith gives us some indications. Romney is not just a nominal Mormon. He has been a Mormon missionary and a bishop in his church. My reading is that he is every bit as socially conservative as Rich Santorum.

The most immediate impact this would have on his presidency would be the appointment of socially conservative justices to the Supreme Court in the Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas mold.

However, Romney’s Mormon faith is a substantial handicap for his winning a presidential race. A significant portion of Americans are prejudiced against Mormons on religious grounds. They don’t see Mormons as proper Christians. They say they would never vote for a Mormon.

Although many independent, nonpartisan voters might vote for Romney irrespective of his religious affiliation, this gain is partly offset by religious conservative folks who will not support him just because he is a Mormon. If only five percent of religious conservatives stayed home rather than voting for Romney, this would be a big dent in what should be his most reliable voter base.

If who do you trust is really the decisive question of 2012, Romney has a big challenge to establish that trust. In the first place, Romney, at least so far in his campaign for president, has given almost no one-on-one interviews. Access to Mitt has been in public debates or other forums where Romney can control the political environment to his advantage.

Secondly, Romney is someone with a very secretive nature. I know of no evidence that Romney is corrupt in any overt way. Yet he often acts as if he had something to hide. When he left the governorship of Massachusetts, he orchestrated a complete wipe out of all electronic records of his time as governor. All the hard drives of all of the computers went out the door with his aides.

Moreover, bucking recent precedents of candidates for president, he has steadfastly refused to disclose his income returns. He has also refused to disclose the names of his biggest financial operatives, the so-called bundlers who collect money from others.

For 2012, we want our president to be someone who is intelligent, knowledgeable, and a good manager. Romney qualifies well on all of these counts. But, with the economy the overriding issue in the campaign, we want someone we can trust to make the economy better for everyone.

It would seem that this is Romney’s strong suit since he has a background as a successful businessman. But what kind of business has Romney been up to? For much of his business career, Romney has worked for Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm. There he was responsible for buying and selling companies.

If we look at the number of jobs that he was responsible for creating in his business life, we have to also look at the number of people who lost their jobs when their companies went liquidated.

As an investment banker, Romney has been a rich person working for the interests of other rich people. It’s difficult to imagine how he is going to establish credibility as a friend of the middle class.

If, as I read it, the economic concerns of the middle class become the dominate theme of the 2012 elections, then Romney is certainly got a challenging task to sell himself as the person who fix the economy for everyone.

I will be giving a fuller economic forecast for 2012 in a future blog. The following political forecast will be premised on the view that the economic picture in 2012 will not be very different from what we see in the fall of 2011. We will have avoided the doomsday scenarios of economic collapse predicted by various disaster prophets.

Yet, the United States will still be caught up in what could well be called the Whimp Recovery of slow growth and high unemployment. Things will be slightly better than now, but the threat of a global economic meltdown to another global recession or worse will have been averted.

Assuming then that we will have relative economic stability in 2012, what can we look forward to in the 2012 elections?

With respect to my previous forecasts of what is coming in 2012 on the political front, I must say that I’m grateful that we are no longer in the age when a failed prophecy had fatal consequences for the prognosticator. This is indeed a hazardous time for anyone trying to see how the future will unfold. Welcome to the 2012 time frame.

One counterintuitive forecast I made after the 2010 elections does seem to be on track. I predicted that the 2012 election would see a relative Democratic wave.

My prediction is that the Democrats will lose at most one seat in the Senate, gain about twenty-five seats in the House of Representations, and that Barack Obama will be reelected in 2012. I see the Senate remaining almost the same as it is now. The House will see an increase in Democrats with many of the Tea Party freshmen Republicans members losing reelection. This will leave the House almost evenly divided. I see Obama winning relatively easily in 2012, although not with the super margin that he had in 2008.

My big pratfall on the 2012 elections from before was the prediction that Sarah Palin would be the Republican nominee. My thinking was that the Tea Party would be the element in the Republican Party that determined the nominee. I was wrong on both counts.

Sarah Palin decided that she had more to gain by remaining on the sidelines. I underestimated her narcissism. Being a public servant was never her strong suit. I wonder how she feels now that the GOP electorate is engaged in a desperate search for a Romney alternative.

After the 2010 elections, I thought that the Republicans would do another Christine O’Donnell or Sharon Angle type move and nominate some extreme Tea Party person like Sarah that would have no realistic chance of winning the independent, nonpartisan voters and hence no real chance in the election.

Well, Barack is not going to have this kind of a cake walk to reelection. My intuitive assessment is that Romney is going to be the nominee. Of the current eight major candidates, he is, by far, the most electable.

Anyone who has been following the Republican primary process has been treated to a political reality show with drama to rival the most soap operatic major network reality shows. Historians will look back on our time with stern warnings about what happens to a civilization when news degenerates into entertainment appealing to the lowest common denominator of viewer interest.

I see two contrary trends in the current GOP nomination cycle. On the one hand, there is seduction by performance art and, on the other, a very surprising, genuine desire to have a candidate equipped for the challenges of our age.

In our visually dominated electronic age, style as well as content matters for a candidate for president. Style has always mattered in presidential contests. The winner must be someone who can embody our archetypal expectations of a national leader. Physical attractiveness, relative youth and vitality, height, posture, bearing, and various nonverbal quirks go a long way to determining the winner.

Entertainers and actors, then, have an advantage over the rest of the field since their craft is presentation. It’s no accident then that the icon of Republican presidential politics is Ronald Reagan, the former actor, also known as the Great Communicator. He easily prevailed over his Democratic opponents even though he was slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s late in his presidential tenure.

Applying a style standard to the current GOP field, we can understand why Michele Bachmann has been having such a hard time making an impression on prospective GOP voters. You would think that Bachmann would be up in the first tier of contenders since she is the most clearly identified Tea Party candidate.

But, sorry Michele. At five feet, two inches, you’re just too short to meet our expectations of who our president should be. Putting her on the stage next to the much taller other candidates in the GOP debates makes her look like the dwarf of the bunch.

Also, Michele’s speaking style comes across as that of a lawyer. Actually she has been a lawyer. We’ve been spoiled by that political entertainer, Sarah Palin, to expect more engagement of our feelings and emotions from a female GOP candidate.

Herman Cain’s candidacy, on the other hand, pushes the envelope of how far style alone can carry a candidate. As radio show host, Herman has a background as a professional political entertainer. He’s promoted himself as the unconventional candidate. During his ascendancy in the polls, he presented himself as an engaging, confident personality with one bold new economic idea.

At one point, it looked like he might be a viable alternative to Romney. One blogger gushed “Is Herman Cain the next Ronald Reagan?” (Charles W. Dunn)

But Herman’s candidacy has been a fraud from the beginning. My reading is that Cain entered the presidential field to milk the occasion for all the notice and attention he could get in order to further his personal fame and fortune.

Rachael Maddow has put forth the intriguing premise that Herman Cain’s candidacy is a kind of performance art. She’s got a strong case. If you look at some of the early Cain political ads, you would be hard pressed to see how they differ from a Saturday Night Live satire on political candidates.

In one ad, Cain’s campaign manager, Herman Block literally blows smoke at the viewer. Another ad named ‘Yellow Flowers’ degenerates into total farce.

If you wonder if Herman is having a laugh at our expense, all you need do is look at the source of some of his quotations. Often these are put forward with a straight face.

In one of the first GOP debates, the candidates were given one minute to make a closing statement. Herman said, “A poet once said, ‘Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line.’” The problem here is that the “poet” he’s referring to is the pop singer Donna Summer and this quote is from the theme song from Pokémon: the Movie.

When he said, “we need a leader not a reader,” this is a quote from one of the characters in the Simpson movie.

Confronted with his connection with the Koch brothers, Cain said he was proud of the connection and that he was “a brother of another mother.” This is a quote from a Jackie Chan movie.

We don’t know to what extent Herman’s performance art is a conscious strategy and to what extent it’s just him having fun with politics. At any rate, it goes a long way to discrediting the whole Republican field. For when a jokester is number one in the political polls as Cain has been, what does this say about the Republican electorate or the GOP presidential platform?

The exposure that the GOP candidates are having in debates and other venues is good for the democratic process because candidates like Cain, who are in it for their own personal gain, are sooner or later unmasked when more detail questions are asked about their views and opinions.

Candidates who really don’t want to be president are going to suffer from a severe case of foot in mouth disease. So, Herman Cain has made egregious political gaffes such as his statement that he was concerned that China might be developing a nuclear weapon.

My take is that this is the unconscious of the candidate protecting them from being taken too seriously. When it looks like they might actually be the nominee, there is the tendency to do something which discredits them before it is too late.

Rich Perry was once the darling of the GOP voters and the solution to the prevailing dissatisfaction with Romney as the nominee. He has both strong Tea Party bona fides and an appealing, earthy, Western style. Moreover, he came into the race with a big bankroll of political donations.

Unfortunately for Perry, his brain and his speaking ability proved not to be on the same team. Perry was simply not able to present himself as someone who could effectively carry on a political dialogue without a specific script. His “Oops” moment where he forgot which of three federal agencies he was going to eliminate was simply the latest of many apparent lapses of cognitive function.

My reading is that Perry has some serious organic brain problem. His cognitive ability is clearly in decline. He got some condition like early Alzheimer’s or something similar. The fact that he refused to debate at all during his latest campaign for governor in 2010 should have been a red flag for his prospective supporters.

In any case, there is no way to recover from the impression that he’s made that he does not having a fully working brain.

If you look at the GOP nomination race as Romney, the establishment Republicans against various anti-establishment and Tea Party types, Romney has had the good fortune of not having to go head to head with anyone to date because the leaders in the Anybody but Romney field have all either self-destructed or proved ineffectual in gaining voter support.

There is Ron Paul, of course. My reading is that Paul will win the Iowa Caucuses. But, in spite of his being the most ideologically consistent candidate in the field, his candidacy has two fatal problems. Ron looks too old and frail to be president. He lacks good posture. These are fatal style issues. Also, his libertarian political philosophy is too extreme even for Tea Party Republicans to fully embrace.

Rich Santorum and Jon Huntsman have been unable to generate any voter interest and are mired in the 5 percent or less level in the polls.

But wait. There is one other candidate in Romney’s path, Newt Gingrich. At this writing, Gingrich is even leading in the polls. He might even be someone that Romney has to take on directly rather than ignoring as he has pretty much all of the other candidates.

I find encouragement in the political process with Newt’s new political lease on life. From a partisan Democratic point of view, Newt as a serious candidate is good news because he is much less electable than Romney.

Leaving that consideration aside, I think it shows some legitimate concern on the part of Republican voters for having someone as president who actually has some workable ideas of how they could make things different and solve problems.

It’s a rare political season in the United States when a philosophical and professorial personality is taken seriously as a presidential candidate. When political intelligence suddenly seems more important than style, we’re in a new political era.

Two factors though have promoted Newt to prominence in the current race that may be irrelevant to the substance trumps style thesis. Firstly, Newt has benefitted from Herman Cain’s political buffoonery. Herman Cain takes apparent pride in being uninformed. It’s part of his performance art of being the anti-candidate candidate.

Newt, as a student of history, and with seemingly impressive knowledge of political realities both foreign and domestic, looks great by comparison.

Secondly, Newt is the absolute last ditch defense against Romney. Anyone is going to look good if the alternative is a perceived worst case scenario.

However, Gingrich’s current popularity among Republican voters will not take him to the nomination. My reading is Newt didn’t enter the Republican primary race to be the next president. Like Herman Cain, he entered it for personal gain. He’s selling books, DVDs, and his ideas.

He’s much more comfortable being the commentator on the sidelines. He’s sees himself as a philosopher of politics. He has no genuine desire to be the focus of the political storm.

Evidence for Gingrich’s lack of commitment to winning the nomination is not hard to find. His campaign manager and most of his staff quit the campaign in June due a perceived lack of interest on Newt’s part in doing what was required to be a serious candidate.

Newt has always had a bad case of foot in mouth disease due in no small part to his philosophical self-image which sees provocation as part of his proper role. Yet, just at the point where he’s number one in the polls, he says things which are blatantly politically self-sabotaging.

In the last debate, for example, he went out of his way to outline a relatively moderate position on immigration that would allow illegal immigrants who had been here for quite a while and were established in their communities to remain in the country. Perry had been castigated for a similarly reasonable position on immigration.

One wonders why he’s giving his opponents the very bullets they need to shoot him in the head.

On another occasion, Newt said “child labor laws are truly stupid.” This is part of his social engineering program to put students to work as janitors in their schools. I wonder what constituency he’s trying to win over with that one?

Also, Gingrich failed to put himself on the Missouri ballot. He just didn’t meet the deadline or pay the fee for the February 7 primary. Even though the Missouri primary is a beauty contest with the actual delegates decided later by caucus, it doesn’t win him any friends in Missouri by negligently leaving himself off the ballot.

Even in Gingrich doesn’t implode like the other recent Romney’s alternatives, the longer he’s in the spotlight, the more skeletons are going to come out the closet. For Gingrich has a sociopathic personality structure. Partly this means that there is a huge gap between the ethics and moral standards he professes and the moral standards that he actually employs in his personal behavior.

Perhaps voters will overlook his marital infidelities and his reprimand for ethics violations while serving in the House. But it’s hard to understand how Newt can be forgiven for prostituting the office of the Speaker of the House since he left Congress. He has sold his power and influence to the highest bidder.

Although he’s never been registered as an official lobbyist, it’s clear that he has leveraged his former position of influence to enrich himself. One of his clients was Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. He advised them in 1999 and again in 2006 and was paid at least 1.6 million for his consulting.

As Freddie is one of the perpetrators of the housing bubble which lead to the world wide Great Recession starting in late 2007, it’s reasonable to conclude that having Gingrich as president would be putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

Of course, it would be an egregious error to confuse the Republican electorate with the Occupy Wall Street crowd so inside and backroom financial dealing might not be a disqualifier for them. Yet the apparent consistency of a candidate still matters. And, in this regard, Gingrich is running a neck and neck race with Herman Cain for liar of the year.

If Gingrich ever became president, his sobriquet would not be the Great Communicator. It would be the Great Prevaricator. For Gingrich, lying is as natural and effortless as breathing. He tells outrageous lies in public venues and then spins the public outcry with masterful manipulation skills.

So, he claimed that his role at Freddie Mac was that of historian and that he was only paid $300,000 for work that lasted only hours. That story lacks credible for even for the most diehard political partisan.

In the last GOP debate, he advocated a reasonable and moderate position on immigration where immigrants who had been in this country for a long while and had a good community standing would be allowed to remain. Then he says this is not amnesty. Forgiving people their illegal status would fit any reasonable person’s definition of what amnesty is. He just saying here that black is white.

In his long political career, Gingrich has an amazing trail of different positions he’s taken on various key issues. In this respect, he runs a close second to Romney in ideological inconsistency.

At one point, he became the target of the wrath of John Birch Society as the most dangerous politician around because he had advocated rewriting the Constitution.

So, if Gingrich has all of these flaws, why is he so popular among Republican voters? I believe it’s because Gingrich is one part social conservative and one part right wing social engineer. Gingrich has a lot of ideas about changing the ways things work in the country. This appeals to voters who intuitively resonant with the sense that we’ve got to do something different to meet the challenges of our age.

From the conservative point of view, we’ve got to maintain our core values while getting out ahead of the changes needed to make our society and country sustainable in the uncertain future of the 2012 time.

And, as mentioned before, Gingrich is the last man standing between Romney and the nomination.

My reading is that the Republican aversion to Romney goes way beyond the religious prejudice about his Mormon faith, although that is certainly an element. The problem with Romney is that he is untrustworthy.

His ideological migrations from one extreme to the other on many different issues are legendary. We’re always left with the question, What does Romney really believe in and stand for?

It might look as though Romney is winning every battle but losing the war. Certainly he was the superior debater in almost all of the many GOP debates. Yet, his voter popularity has stayed mired in the twenty percentage range.

There is something in his style that puts people off. This goes beyond being arrogant and disdainful of his competition. Gingrich is even more arrogant and certainly more egocentric and self-aggrandizing.

However, Romney’s body language and manner of speech connotes inauthenticity and shiftiness. You can contrast his style with Perry’s to see the difference. When Perry’s brain is working, he communicates conviction and sincerity.

Yet, my prophecy is that Romney will be the nominee of the party to run against Obama. This intuition seems to be on target even with Cain’s upcoming abandonment of the race due to the latest disclosure of marital infidelity. With Cain out of the picture, the vote will be less divided among various anti-Romney candidates.

One critical factor in Romney’s eventual victory is proportional voting. Unlike previous primary contests, the GOP in the 2012 primary race are making allowances for candidates to win delegates proportional to the votes they get. This prolongs the nomination contest and makes it more of a marathon than a sprint.

This configuration favors Romney, who has a well-oiled political machine in place in every contested state. Gingrich is too far behind Romney in both financial donations and organization to be able to match Romney’s staying power. And, in spite of what it may appear, in his heart of hearts, Newt doesn’t even want to be the nominee.

It’s easy to discount the significance of calendar dates. Just last year we had 10.10.10, for example. But we know that 11.11.11 has a special meaning.

It underlines the indisputable fact that we’re living in a special and unprecedented time in human history.

It’s easy to lose sight of the unique features of our historical time. The 2012 time frame we are living through is a process that started some years in the past and will extent some years into the future. The theme is rapid change.

Sometime in the future, in the 2020s and later, we’ll have the luxury of looking back on the years before and after the 2012 date and reflecting on the role this time period has played in the transformation of human culture. But, now we’re caught up in it and it’s a day to day challenge to stay focused and grounded. Human civilization is in existential crisis and, often, so are we are individuals.

Things that repeat themselves three times enroll our attention and cause us to ask if there is a special meaning to them. Synchronistic moments, where an unusual coincidence happens at three separate times, marshal our attention to ask about the meaning and purpose of what might otherwise seem to be random events.

Because we are meaning generating creatures, whenever we reflect deeply on the meaning of anything, we make genuine discoveries. This is not simply because we have a wonderfully creative faculty of imagination. The universe and the human world we live in are rife with meaning. We live in an interconnected web of significations. When you reflect on anything, you uncover this meaningful interrelatedness.

11 repeated three times invokes the Archetype of New Beginnings. Many aspects of our culture are in transition and there is the possibility of creating some new and promising. We can choose transformation in the existential crisis of our culture.

Our anxiety is sourced in the understanding that things could go in the other direction. The original 11.11.11 was a constructed moment in 1918. After the horrible destruction of the First World War, a decision was made to end the conflict on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The hope was that the Great War would be the war to end all wars. Unfortunately, there was a different outcome.

Now, we stand again on a cusp of history and we are at choice about the type of future we will manifest.

The mundane decisions that we make in their everyday lives have enormous impact on the outcome of the 2012 time. The world is more interconnected than ever before and what anyone does affects everyone throughout the world. As we move into the 2012 time, this interconnectedness becomes more intense.

We need to move from anxiety about the future into being more grounded in the present moment. Speaking from painful personal experience, it’s almost impossible to predict all of the twists and turns of the road into the future. For example, look at the difficulty in forecasting what is happening in the GOP presidential race.

Being effective and fully functional in our chaotic present time frame will be a measure of how present we can be.

Here are four guidelines to staying present: strive to be grounded and centered, love yourself unconditionally, ask for Guidance from the Higher Self at every point of uncertainty and decision, and compassionately witness what is happening in the energetic field.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face in the 2012 time is getting too speeded up and sabotaging ourselves with action ahead of perception. The pace of everything is increasing, yet we need to stay grounded and centered.

What works for me is to catch myself in the act of getting too far ahead of myself. Then I take a deep breath and remind myself to come back into my body. A visualization of a grounding chord going down in the earth is also helpful. My declaration is “I stand in the ungroundedness and strive from Grace.”

Because of the relative chaos of the 2012 time, effectiveness and efficiency are often elusive qualities. Then we witness things taking longer than we think we should and, for sure, longer than they used to. There is so much in the energetic field, it’s difficult to concentrate and stay focused on the task at hand.

If we succumb to the inner critic and start being too harsh with ourselves, then our personality is no longer a unified team working towards a clearly defined goal. We’re at war with ourselves and vulnerable to falling into a negative spiral.

Loving ourselves is a choice we can make to love and accept ourselves no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the judgments we have about how foolish or unskillful we are in the moment. We are always free to choice our attitude towards our situation.

When you’re in the struggle to love yourself, go for appreciation of something you have done recently. Loving yourself unconditionally can start with being specific about what you like about yourself in action and behavior. I start with reviewing my recent past and reflecting on everything I need to acknowledge myself for.

The 2012 time frame beings in more confusion and uncertainty about every decision. So, we need to access the guidance of the Higher Self in these crucial and mundane moments.

Assume that you have the capacity to access a source of wisdom, love, and guidance greater than what you have in your current conscious inventory. Then with respect to the uncertainty or decision before you, simply ask: “What’s important in this moment?” Wait patiently for the Higher Self to respond with specific guidance.

The last guideline is to compassionately witness what is happening in the energetic field. The energetic field is what’s happening in our individual process as a product of both internal and external sources of stimulation and activation. Energetic field awareness is like going for an internal weather report. It’s about awareness of emotions and feelings in the present moment and then trying to understand the sources of these perturbations.

Because we’re living a chaotic time of greater inflow of influences from both seen and unseen sources, you won’t be able to identify all the reasons you’re feeling the way you are.

That’s where the compassionate witness comes into play. Just witness what is happening in our energetic field and don’t lose self-compassion in the confusion. Understanding will have to come later. However, with the help of the Higher Self, you can get real time help with what’s important in the moment. Then put your heart and soul into living congruently with your best guess of what that is.

According to Camping, at exactly 6 pm local time on May 21, there will be the mother of all earthquakes. The saved will then be transported directly to heaven in an experience known as Rapture. However, this will be only three percent of the population.

The unsaved will undergo a five month period of chaos, destruction, and devastation ending on October 21, 2011. At that point, not only the earth, but the entire universe will be destroyed.

Camping arrived at his prophecy by a numerological interpretation of Biblical passages. He took a passage in Genesis that said in seven days rain would come to mean the end of the world. Genesis 7:4 “Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth.” This was combined with another passage that said every year equals a thousand years. 2 Peter 3:8 “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”

Then starting from his date of the flood, 4990 B.C., he added 7,000 years to get to 2011. His calculation of May 21 is more involved, but this gives an idea of how he arrived at the 2011 apocalypse scenario.

Should we take Harold at his word here? Definitely not. This is the same man who wrote a self-published book that predicted the world would end in September, 1994.

Moreover, his chronology is more than a little suspect. He’s got 11,013 B.C. as the date of creation so the world is only 13,000 years old in his universe.

What’s the significance of this prediction? Does anyone take Camping seriously? Unfortunately, the extent of his influence is an indicator of the cognitive chaos of the 2012 time frame. Family Radio has 66 radio stations broadcasting in 60 languages. The nonprofit organization took in $100 million dollars over the past seven years.

They have put up 5,000 billboards about the May 21 prophecy around the world. Many of their believers have quit their jobs and given away their property in anticipation of the Rapture. In one case a Staten Island man, Robert Fitzpatrick, put up his entire life savings, $140,000, to pay for May 21 warning signs in subway cars and bus shelters.

On May 22 when the earthquake doesn’t come and the would be raptured are still on Earth, the glimmer of credibility will have faded from Camping’s prediction. For it will no longer be something that could be true.

Sadly, most of the true believers will still not be deterred. Camping will just recalculate and put his doom prediction further into the future. He will be in a somewhat awkward position on May 22. If he’s not raptured by then, either he’s not one of the saved or the Rapture didn’t occur as predicted.

To the extent that Camping is successful in getting his message out, he makes Christianity look like a doomsday cult. I think that’s unfair to Christianity as a whole. But, notwithstanding the impact that his soon to be failed prophecy will have on religious believers, it’s also significant disinformation for the nonreligious majority.

In some ways, the impact of his prophecy is similar to the National Enquirer’s treatment of the UFO phenomenon. The National Enquirer takes some false report or even a true encounter and exaggerates it to the point where it becomes an object of ridicule. Thus, it becomes a channel of disinformation which serves the official cover-up of the UFO reality.

Similarly, the May 21 Day of Judgment failed prophecy will have the effect of reducing the credibility for 2012 forecasts. We have, after all, been subjected to a lot of fear hype around the future with Y2K being one of the latest discredited, disinformation moments.

If we take December 21, 2012 as an apocalyptic Judgment Day scenario, we’re going to be experiencing the same kind of disillusionment on December 22, 2012 that will happen for those who hold the May 21 date as true prophecy.

Some are taking an interpretation of the Mayan calendar’s end date of December 21, 2012 and making this into a prediction of the end of the world. This is similar to what Camping is doing with his Biblical chronologies.

And yet if you subtract the Christian mythology, there is still some reflection of truth in Camping’s 2011 end of the world perspective and even in his fall, 2011 time frame. For the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Let me be clear. My reading is that nothing extraordinary is going to happen on Saturday, May 21. I don’t see a big earthquake and certainly nothing like Rapture. On October 21, 2011, I don’t foresee the destruction of the earth.

But, because of the rapid changes that are happening in our culture, we’re soon going to be living in a different kind of world. In fact, it’s already underway. 2012 is best understood as a time frame that starts approximately in 2008 and runs to at least 2016.

The end of the world means here the end of what’s familiar to us, not the physical destruction of the earth or the end of life on our planet.

There is some ironic significance to Camping’s predictions for our 2012 time frame. The extent to which we even wonder if he’s onto something we don’t know ourselves shows how vulnerable we are to anyone who comes to us with confident certainty about the future.

In this time of universal existential crisis, it’s easy to be influenced by true believers even when they have no factual or credible basis for their claims. This shows we are indeed in a time of big challenges to our reality perspectives. We’re all potential suckers for anyone who claims to have certainty about the future.

There are twin dangers to Camping’s doomsday scenario. On the one hand, we can get drawn into belief about some tall tale about the future without looking at the factual basis and without investigating the credibility of the source. On the other hand, we can dismiss all prophecies of the future as being just fantasy.

In each case, we’re no longer using our critical thinking faculty. We’ve stopped looking for evidence. We’re just settling into the comfort of believing what we want to believe.

With respect to specific dates in the calendar, it’s best to look at these as symbols rather than indicators of specific, literal events. Then 2012 can be seen as a time frame (2008-2016) that is a designation of a significant change in human culture.

Calendar dates can serve to attract our attention to a range of time. These serve us, if there is something happening in that time range that we need to pay heed to. They don’t serve us to the extent that nothing of significance is in the works. 2012 is an example of a calendar date that helps us and Y2K illustrates one that didn’t serve any useful purpose.

Although I don’t believe the Mayans were much in the prophecy business, their end of calendar date of December 21, 2012 has been useful to the extent that it awakens our awareness to the challenge of the significant changes that are underway.

Camping’s attention to 2011 has some symbolic merit even though the Rapture and the destruction of the world is not at hand. For I see something truly transformative for our culture happening in the fall of this year. This is alien disclosure. You can look at my previous blogs for more perspective on this topic.

A serious nuclear incident at the Fukushima nuclear complex followed the natural disaster when the main power and backup power systems that cooled the reactors failed. There was partial meltdown of the nuclear fuel in three reactors. Hydrogen explosions, fires, and depletion of water in cooling tanks for spent fuel resulted in the release of significant amounts of radioactivity into the environment.

The incident has been officially rated as five out of seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale. However, while well short of the seven rating of the 1985 Chernobyl nuclear accident, the events at Fukushima are closer to the six scale of “serious accident” than the five scale of “accident with wider consequences.”

The Three Mile Accident in the United States in 1979 is a good reference point for the five rating. The Japanese disaster is certainly more serious than that event. When all the consequences are fully understood, it will be the third most serious nuclear accident ever.

The consequences of these events for people in Japan are starkly evident. Water and power can be restored and homeless people will eventually find permanent shelter. Japan’s economy has taken a huge hit, but it will rebound in a relatively short time frame. However, lost lives cannot be replaced nor can communities be easily reconstructed when everything has been reduced to rubble that was not completely swept away.

The radiation dangers from the nuclear accidents will have some long term impact on the health of people in Japan. The full consequences will not be known for several years. In the meantime, some of the nuclear reactors will have to be buried in some kind of permanent containment as was done at Chernobyl. The area around the reactors for some miles will remain uninhabitable until a major cleanup of contaminated soil and water can be completed.

My reading is that the radiation leaks from Fukushima will have a negligible effect on the United States. But even if this is so, what sort of lesson or warning should be taken from the Japanese nuclear accident? Are we looking at a future where Americans will have to confront the same fears of nuclear contamination the Japanese are currently facing?

When I look at our future through the clairvoyant lens, I don’t see any nuclear explosion in the United States such as might result from a terrorist attack or rouge nation state attack. Nor do I see any dirty bomb events where radiological material is spread through combination with a conventional explosive.

However, no current fission powered nuclear power plant is accident proof. We could certainly make current nuclear reactors less prone to accidents than they now are. For example, no reactors in the United States are built to withstand an earthquake in the 9.0 range. But, they would then be much more expensive to build and maintain. Even at the current safety standards, it costs upwards of five billion dollars to build to a single plant.

If we continue to build nuclear power plants around the world, it’s inevitable that more nuclear accidents will occur. If there is any silver lining to the black cloud of terrible news from Japan, perhaps it is just the realization that fission nuclear reactors are not a workable solution to our long term energy needs as a replacement of fossil fuels.

I don’t see the United States or the world backing off from nuclear energy in the short term. At least a seed of genuine doubt has been sown that will spout later. We have to learn to see outside of the box of both nuclear and fossil fuel energy for our future.

With respect to earthquakes and tsunamis: Is California next? Is the Japanese earthquake and tsunami a sign that the destructive earth changes of a catastrophic 2012 scenario are beginning to happen?

Anxieties about our physical world in this 2012 time frame are both understandable and justified. Our earth, Gaia, is a living organism and all the physical aspects of our planet are in a state of continual flux, although sometimes at an extremely slow rate. For example, there are 20,000 earthquakes per year on Earth, about 50 per day.

The 2012 time frame heightens our awareness of our physical vulnerability to earth changes. The expectation is that major modifications are coming. The form of their changes and their long term impact are uncertain.

This awareness of our vulnerability to physical changes on the planet can be an opening to break out of the dysfunctional relationship that human beings and human civilization have to physical nature. Our dysfunctional relationship to nature has different facets. One of these is what could be called the Titanic Fallacy.

On April 14, 1912, on its maiden voyage, the RMS Titanic collided with an ice berg and sank with the loss of 1517 lives out of 2227 people on board. There were only enough life boats for about half the people. The ship was considered unsinkable because of a design with watertight compartments.

The supposedly unsinkable ship never made it through even one crossing of the Atlantic. What we see here is overconfidence in current technology, on the one hand, and disregard of the scale of the challenges that nature can present us with, on the other.

In our present day, we see the same fallacy come into play with the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans where the city’s levees were not prepared for a Level 5 hurricane. The Japanese nuclear industry was not prepared at Fukushima for a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.

Many more examples could be given of communities that are built right on the beach, next to rivers subject to flooding, on hillsides prone to mudslides, on earthquake faults, or in the shadow of active volcanoes. There is a short sighted perspective in human civilization that fails to take into account what could happen in a few years and which mostly certainly will happen eventually.

In some cases, it’s an issue of denial about what could happen as when houses are built directly on the beach and right next to an active volcano. In many cases, though, it’s simply that not enough lifeboats have been put on the ship. Then structures are built over earthquake faults but with shoddy construction that can’t withstand earthquakes. Communities are built next to rivers that lack flood walls or adequate levees.

This short sightedness is really a shortfall in spiritual intelligence, i.e., the ability to perceive what’s important in a bigger perspective beyond short-term self-interests. In the best case scenario, the 2012 time will be a catalyst to bring about a significant improvement in the baseline spiritual intelligence of the human species.

One of the things we can do to facilitate this transformation of collective consciousness is to support political action that can put some more lifeboats on the Titanic. This will mean supporting lawmakers who champion environmental concerns, politicians that have an environmental conscience.

In the United States, and in most of the rest of the world, the political system is geared to gratification of immediate and short-term interests. Gearing up for potential disasters is at the bottom of the priority list.

This short sightedness puts our civilization on a path to ecological suicide, ecocide. For in addition to discounting the scale of potential natural disasters, we’re in a dysfunctional relationship with nature through our denial of the ecological impact of our civilization on the biosphere.

Unlike natural disasters, our ecological impact is something that is well within our control. This is where we need to put our focus. For, as I have discussed in earlier blogs, the 2012 time is not about catastrophic earth changes. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami is not the beginning of a catastrophic 2012 scenario. It’s another earthquake, one of 20,000 we can expect this year.

Although the number of earthquakes seems to be increasing, if you look at the data for earthquakes in past decades, the biggest earthquakes, of magnitude 8.0 and above, have not increased significantly. Moreover, the increase in the raw numbers from past decades is a result of a big increase in the number of reporting stations and does not reflect an increase in seismic activity.

There has not been a significant increase in natural disasters in the last few years that resulted from earthquakes and volcanoes. What we have seen is an increase in weather extremes. These are due in large part to the global warming effect.

There have been rumors on the internet of an imminent earthquake on the West Coast of the United States. Geologist Jim Berkland, credited with predicting the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, said that earthquake vulnerability was very high for the West Coast for the time frame March 19 to March 26.

We will have a major earthquake in California at some time in the future. My reading is that this event will not happen right away and not this week. For the West Coast, I see the next major earthquake, of magnitude 7.0 and above, in 2014, in Southern California.

The vulnerability and anxiety we experience after the Japanese disasters are enhanced by the growing sense of interconnectedness we have in our world. We live in a field of collective consciousness that we will perceive more directly as we proceed along the 2012 time track.

This means that whatever has happened in a remote part of the world will be sensed as if it had happened relatively close by. We’re more deeply and directly affected by whatever is happening in the world.

Because of this enhanced field of collective consciousness, there is some foreknowledge that comes into the margins of our awareness before a big disturbance like the Japan earthquake and tsunami. This is experienced as a week of negative energetic weather.

By energetic weather I mean the net resultant of all the subtle vibrational influences that impact human beings. It’s something in addition to whatever interpersonal or intrapersonal drama we have going on. We experience it as an emotional atmosphere and vibrational intensity. (See my earlier blogs on this topic).

So the week before the March 11 disaster day was marked by several days in a row where things felt awful without any particular reason. At this writing, March 22nd, the energetic weather is relatively clear. Thus, we can be confident that the predictions of a big earthquake in California around the end of March are not accurate, in spite of the special circumstances of a super full moon and equinoctial tides.

In summary, we should take the Japan disasters as a warning and a sign to do what we can to put ourselves into a better relationship with nature. Although the Japanese events don’t signal the start of a series of dramatic and catastrophic earth changes in an apocalyptic 2012 scenario, they do underline our vulnerability to natural disasters.

In the public sphere, we need to encourage political action that makes policy to address longer term environmental issues a higher priority.

On the individual level, we would be well served to build our own lifeboat. This means making a natural disaster supply kit for your home. At a minimum, this should entail having emergency food and water to cope with a scenario where the power and water were cut off for a week’s time.

It doesn’t have to be a once-in-a-hundred-year kind of natural disaster that we are preparing for like California’s expected super earthquake, the Big One. A tree could fall on your power lines. Short term power outages are all too frequent in the absence of a major disaster.

Once you have your personal disaster supply kit stocked, you can let go of worry about natural disasters. When you’ve done what you can to personally take care of yourself and your family, excess anxiety about what is coming down the road in the physical world is no longer needed.

There is currently upheaval, revolution, and chaos in North Africa and Middle Eastern countries. With Gaddafi’s imminent fall in Libya, this will make three long term autocrats who have been kicked out of power. We want to know how far the revolutionary wave will go in 2011 and how many more regimes will fall. Also, what type of governance will replace the fallen dictators?

The worst case scenario, Islamic radicals and fundamentalists taking over in Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, is not going to happen. It will be months and even years before the outcome of the people’s revolution is fully manifested.

What I see happening relatively quickly are some really positive steps towards human rights and democracy. However, they will still fall short of addressing the full extent of the people’s unhappiness with their governments. In particular, the economic plight of the people will not be redressed in the short run.

In the longer run, a year or two down the road, I see the countries mentioned above experiencing an economic turnaround as the governments becomes more responsive to the needs of the people.

I’m not seeing a lot of total regime change in the rest of the region in the near future. Much depends on how the revolution turns out in the three pilot countries that overthrew their dictators. If, as I predict, there is a significant improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people in the long run, this will fuel another revolutionary wave in a year or two.

In the meantime, I see a lot of countries with autocratic governments trying to head off the wave by making some concessions on human rights and more representative government. Also, as in Saudi Arabia, some governments are trying to provide direct economic support.

The crisis in Libya has impacted world oil prices. My reading is that this will be a short term blip on the economic world picture. Gaddafi will be deposed before the middle of March and then there will be a quick return to full oil production in Libya. In the meantime, Saudi Arabia is going to make up the shortfall on the world market with increased production.

The Great Recession will finally be at an end around the middle of 2011. I see a strong economic surge in the United States and the rest of the world for 2011. The stock market will continue strong throughout the year ending at about 14,500. Unfortunately unemployment will also remain relatively high. At the end of the year, I see unemployment at about 8 percent.

On the political front in the United States, we’re heading into a season of political gridlock with a Democratic president and Senate and a Republican House of Representatives with 87 freshman Republican members. The 112th Congress will go down in history as the least productive Congress ever in terms of important new legislation that is passed.

The Congress will have to deal with budget and debt ceiling issues. This is where the game of political chicken will come into play. In the 2010 elections, the Republicans rode a wave of popular support for instituting fiscal reforms of government.

However, delivering on these promises presents a challenging political landscape for them to navigate. They cannot really play their trump card and refuse to raise the debt ceiling or shut down the government by refusing to pass a budget. Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s failed 1995 strategy of government shutdown, they risk losing popular support if they go to this extreme.

The alternative is compromising with Obama and the Democrats. If they do this, then they risk being seen as hypocrites and individuals of weak principle. This makes establishment Republicans more vulnerable to the take no prisoners attitude of the Tea Party in subsequent elections.

My forecast is that they will continue to kick the can down the road with short term measures which put off the final decisions. It seems they have already done this with a two week continuing resolution to keep the government funded past March 4.

All of this endless bickering makes Obama look good by comparison since he is perceived as someone who can reach out to the Republicans and make compromises as he did on the extension of the Bush era tax cuts to the wealthiest for two years.

As the economic situation improves in the United States and the world, the focus on deficit and debt will become less of a front burner concern for ordinary Americans. Moreover, the fiscal measures so important to the Republicans will result in reduced government services and benefits to the average citizen. This will fuel a Democratic wave in the 2012 elections.

I see some really interesting technological breakthroughs happening in 2011. There will be new energy innovations offering the promise of a world not dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. Alien disclosure plays a role in this because it demonstrates the feasibility of new energy sources. The aliens did not get to our shores by conventional energetic means.

Also some alien technology derived from crashed alien spacecraft has been in the closet for many years and can now come into play.

I see a whole spectrum of new energy technologies coming into being in 2011. I do not see cold fusion as being one of them. However, I do see one form of new energy using water as the raw material and splitting off the hydrogen and the oxygen.

On the biological frontier in 2011, I see the cloning of a human being. Also I see progress in stem cell research that offers the prospect of being able to reprogram adult stem cells to regenerate organs.

On the computer front, there will be a technology breakthrough that uses light to store and transmit information.

Stay tuned for a really exciting 2011.

On January 8, 2011, six people were killed and thirteen wounded in Arizona by a mentally ill individual. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and survived.

The individual arrested at the scene, Jared Lee Loughner, apparently planned the shooting as an assassination of his local congresswoman. It appears that he is not affiliated with any organized political group, party, or terrorist organization.

There have been some striking short term political consequences of this event. Some of the shine has faded from the Tea Party’s rising star. The Tea Party has never overtly advocated violence in pursuit of their political objectives. Yet, they have become the symbol and focal point of politically directed anger.

At the heart of the Tea Party movement is this metaphor: politics is total war. Most politicians would resonate to some degree with the statement that politics is war. But, in total war, there is mobilization of all resources to combat a demonized enemy.

Total war is a zero sum game where there is either total victory or annihilation of the way of life of the loser. There is no possibility of accommodation or compromise with the enemy.

Supporting this metaphor, we’ve seen a lot of gun symbolism from Tea Party people. Sarah Palin signature phrase is “don’t retreat, reload.” Moreover, she put gun site targets over a map of Democratic districts she felt were key to Republican and Tea Party ascendency in the 2010 elections. Gifford’s Arizona district was one of these.

One of the really encouraging developments has been a bipartisan recognition of the need to tone down inflammatory political rhetoric in the US Congress. The goal is to encourage more civility and respect between Republicans and Democrats.

Having Republicans and Democrats sit together at the State of the Union address might seem like a mere symbolic gesture, but it is quite significant. I see this as a shift in collective consciousness away from the politics as total war metaphor.

Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are unrepentant in the face of the Arizona events. But now they are less likely to be seen as the inevitable wave of the future of American politics. The Tea Party is on the path to become a relatively marginalized de facto third party in American politics. They will be the anti-government party taking the stance that Republicans and Democrats are almost indistinguishable.

With respect to the nation as a whole, the Tea Party has reached its high water mark in the 2010 election. Both Obama and main stream Republicans have co-opted their fiscal responsibility mandate. I see a fracture between the libertarian wing and the social conservative wing of the Tea Party movement that further weakens its influence.

However within the ranks of the Republican Party, Tea Party influence will continue to be strong through the 2012 election. And, although Sarah Palin’s bandwagon may have broken a wheel, it will be back on the road well before the 2012 nomination process. My reading is that Sarah Palin will still win the Republican nomination. She has appeal for social conservatives as well as Tea Party folks. She is not just a Tea Party candidate.

At this point, Mitt Romney is the only Republican candidate between Palin and the nomination. However, Romney has two serious strikes against him. He championed health care reform in Massachusetts when he was governor and he also supported TARP, the Bush financial initiative that bailed out the banks.

If the mainstream Republican establishment had a consensus candidate to rally behind, they could beat Palin. But they don’t, and it’s difficult to envision one emerging at this relatively late date.

Although human rights and genuine democracy are not as big an issue in the United States as other countries, the people’s revolution is coming to our country as well. We see it happening in Wisconsin and other states where the new conservative political order is attempting to use budget deficit issues as a pretext to effectively destroy unions and implement a socially conservative agenda.

The Republicans and Tea People candidates did well in the 2010 election with their promises of fiscal responsibility and business friendly policies. However, they were deliberately vague on how they were going to manage the arithmetic of cutting deficits, not raising taxes, and still maintaining basic social services people have come to rely on.

Now that they have to govern, the focus shifts to the loss of benefits. The basis for a Democratic wave in the 2012 election, as I predicted in a previous blog, becomes clear.

The right-wing punditocracy, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, have all come forth with statements in opposition to the people’s revolution in African and Middle Eastern countries and against the protests in Wisconsin. They have positioned themselves squarely on the wrong side of history.

The other big event in 2011 has been the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. In both countries the long time autocratic leader was deposed. The actions of a single individual were the spark that started this conflagration of protest.

On December 17, vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, aged 26, set himself on fire after his unlicensed vegetable cart and goods were confiscated and he experienced abusive treatment from the police and authorities. His death on January 4 set off the people’s revolution.

The reform wave that is sweeping over countries in Africa and the Middle East is sourced in both economic as well as political discontent. People want some relief from economic oppression as well as basic human rights and democracy. The perception is that the long ruling autocratic political establishments are corrupt while the ordinary people are suffering economic decline and their needs are not being addressed.

We’re witnessing the transformation of collective consciousness on a global scale. There are protests and unrest in Libya, Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, and Iran. My reading is that Muammar Gaddafi is going to be deposed as leader of Libya.

The consequences of this event are even more ground shaking than what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. If someone as strongly entrenched as Gaddafi can be thrown onto the ash heap of history, who is next?

I see autocratic regimes trying to get ahead of the wave of protests by instituting political reforms that give their people more democratic freedoms. This is already happening in Jordan, for example.

Some countries are trying to suppress dissent by turning out their military and security forces in large numbers to attack unarmed protesters. This is the Tiananmen Square strategy which China used to brutally quell a popular uprising in 1989. Libya is doing this using aircraft, tanks, and mercenaries imported by other African nations to massacre their people.

Iran is using a similar approach with their Basij militia force. Bahrain’s security forces have also fired live rounds at protesters. Whether the regimes are using police, military, or reactionary militias to attack their people, this strategy will not be successful in the long run.

There has been a shift in collective consciousness that makes it less acceptable for a government to turn guns on its own people. Libya’s regime has signed its own death warrant with its brutal response to protest. Significant portions of their military and governmental apparatus are not going to go along with wholesale slaughter of the protestors. Their defection will crumble the regime within days.

I don’t see Iran’s current leadership falling in the immediate future. But, it will not survive for very long. Within a three year window, I see Iran’s religious oligarchy being replaced by a government which respects human rights and gives their people genuine democracy.

My forecast is the same for China. My reading is that communism will collapse in China within a three year time span. This means that North Korea will also fall. The North Korean government will not survive without Chinese support. Within the same three year window, I see unification on the Korean peninsula.

I see the people’s revolutionary wave as a very hopeful indicator of a good news outcome for the 2012 time on the world political frontier. Formerly autocratic governments are giving way and this opens the door for basic human rights and the opportunity for democracy.

Moreover, threats of armed conflict from rouge states like North Korea and Iran are greatly diminished in the short run and disappear altogether within the three year window. We are soon going to be living in a less paranoid, less dangerous, and more humane world.

However, the well-founded reasons to hope for a better world have to be tempered with an understanding of the challenges inherent in the people’s revolution. The transition from decades long dictatorship to genuine democracy is a bumpy and chaotic road. The countries that are kicking their dictators to the curb have no tradition of democracy and virtually no political parties.

Given a democratic option, some countries will choose fundamentalist Islamic governments. This has already happened in the Gaza Strip and would have happened in Algeria if the military had not intervened and stifled a free vote.

Moreover, many countries currently have a de facto dictator that manages to come into control through democratic processes. Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan is one example and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran is another. A formerly free and fair election was succeeded by a rigged one.

So we can expect some countries to slip back into being ruled by autocratic regimes.

Nonetheless, the cosmic egg has been cracked. Once people get a taste of human rights and democratic freedoms to choose their own leaders, the world is forever changed for the better.

However, there will be relatively little action to address our ecological dilemmas on behalf of the world community of nations. The Creeping Apocalypse we face will continue to creep along. A big factor here is the new conservative Republican majority in the United States House of Representatives. There is no chance that progressive energy legislation can be passed in this session of Congress.

Moreover, the Republican Party is moving towards an official position of denial of climate change and other ecological issues. Their view on climate change is that it is either not happening at all or, if it is happening, it is due to circumstances unrelated to human activity.

Other nations are going to take the world lead in ecologically sustainable culture innovations. China will be one of them.

As I mentioned in Part I, there is a discernable growth in spiritual intelligence for the people of the planet as a whole. This growth leads to more ecological awareness and helps us to see past our nation state concerns to global challenges. But is spiritual growth happening fast enough and will it make the difference we need to stave off the negative future that is the threat of the Creeping Apocalypse?

My reading is we’re not likely to avoid the negative future left entirely to our own devices. We need some kind of shock to awaken us to global awareness. I see this shock coming in the form of alien disclosure.

In my forecast of world events for 2011, there are two main issues to be discussed: alien disclosure and everything else. 2011 is the year of alien disclosure.

In speaking of alien disclosure, we’re not talking about some kind of science fiction scenario of sudden and dramatic alien invasion. Disclosure is about acknowledgment and direct hard evidence of alien presence already on planet Earth that extends backs into our past for many years. We’re talking about putting into perspective the history of alien involvement.

Recently there have been many predictions of imminent alien disclosure which have proved to be premature. September, 2009, and November, 2009 have been mentioned. I predicted alien disclosure for November, 2010.

The expectation was that President Obama would be the one to open the world to the fact that we are not the only advanced sentient species on our block. Obama has done a lot to relieve the culture of unnecessary secrecy in government. The problem, however, is that Obama is not the keeper of the secrets. In fact, he isn’t even fully briefed on this issue.

President Nixon was the last United States President to be kept fully in the loop with regard to alien presence on earth. President Carter asked his CIA director, then George H. Bush, to brief him on this issue. Carter was denied access.

There is a secret entity within the military/intelligence community which controls this information. Their reluctance to come forward is understandable since it would reveal the extent of a secret executive agency within our government. This secret body routinely makes decisions that affect national security without consulting the president.

There will be political hell to pay for disclosure. Moreover, once the government’s black ops successful sixty year cover-up effort to hide the truth of alien presence is fully revealed, conspiracy theorists of all stripes will come into their full glory.

If the government has hidden the truth about UFOs from us, what else have they covered up? Unanswered questions about 911 will be on the top of the list for reexamination.

It was overly optimistic to believe that President Obama would simply open the secret vaults of hidden UFO information within the United States for all to see. As perverse as it sounds, the truth is that the president doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to be privy to the full story of UFOs and the United States military/intelligence complex.

Yet because Obama is in communication with other world leaders and especially the leaders of Russia and China, he is, in fact, knowledgeable that the UFO mystery is a real phenomenon based on authentic evidence.

Moreover, 21 countries have now declassified at least some of their UFO files. These are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Vatican City.

Thus, there is a lot of evidence readily available for anyone who wants to look deeper in the UFO enigma.

Obama could open the box in the United States with a single statement. However, it’s understandable why he has not done so. It would be a great distraction from other presidential priorities such as the economic crisis.

He could take the lead in disclosure by simply calling for serious scientific study of what is the most compelling issue in human history. What would happen, for example, if some news person asked Obama directly about the possibility of aliens already on earth in a press conference?

If you doubt the extent of the cosmic cover-up about alien presence, consider how public opinion has been shaped even in the face of massive evidence of extraordinary phenomena affecting our planet. In spite of hundreds of thousands of reports of unexplained flying craft around the world, the majority of the US public has been sold on the idea that UFOs are complete and total fantasy.

This has been the result of an active disinformation campaign from psychological warfare units within the military/intelligence complex. They have succeeded in reducing the UFO issue to ridicule.

My reading is that President Obama will not take the lead in alien disclosure. Moreover, as already discussed above, he’s not in a position to directly present evidence himself to this effect.

But I do see the president having to respond to disclosure once there is sufficient information presented to bring questions about aliens currently on earth into serious consideration.

Outside the United States, there is currently a big movement towards disclosure. The 21 countries listed above include both China and Russia. That is really significant since each of these nations undoubtedly have some interest in UFOs for reverse engineering military applications.

The standpoint of the Vatican on aliens is another sign that alien disclosure may be close at hand. In May 2008, the Vatican made an official statement that belief in extraterrestrial life was fully consistent with Catholic faith. In early November of 2009, the Vatican hosted a six day conference on astrobiology, the study of the possibility and existence of extraterrestrial life.

It seems like the Church feels alien disclosure is imminent and they want to get ahead of the curve to prevent the disclosure of alien visitation from undermining religious faith.

My reading is that the Church also has some direct evidence of alien life in the form of remains of dead aliens that they have had for quite some time in their vaults.

For alien disclosure to occur, we’re going to need more than just videos of flashing lights in the sky or even witness reports of direct alien encounters. We’ll need to see crashed alien space craft and alien bodies presented by the same military/intelligence complex that has been hiding the information from us.

Whatever security apparatus has been in charge of official secrecy around UFOs must have been, at least at one time, a group with international links. The United States has been in charge of retrieval of crashed alien craft in most of the world. But whatever happened in China and the Soviet Union would have been outside their control.

That China and Russia are now declassifying some of their UFO files is an indication that this international cooperation is starting to crack. My reading is that Russia and China are holding up full disclosure waiting for the United States to take the lead.

I see the loose thread that unravels the whole sweater coming from within the ranks of the secret keepers in the military/intelligence complex. It will be a deliberate leak from inside the secrecy apparatus. There are complex motivations behind this.

Twelve members of a group called Majestic 12 were called together by President Truman and were initially in charge of the secrecy and cover-up of UFO related information. This followed on the heels of the alien crash at Roswell in 1947.

Although no longer called Majestic 12, there is still a group in charge of keeping UFO information secret. This group has been divided between those members who believe it is time for disclosure and those who want to maintain the status quo.

My reading is that it is going to be a strange alliance between elements of differing partisan political views that ultimately leads to disclosure.

On the political left, there are some members who believe, as do I, that disclosure is needed to move the world forward and give us a new global consciousness. If disclosure were to be followed up in time by direct communication with the alien visitors, this could give us valuable perspective on planetary challenges like climate change.

Moreover, alien technology may be available to help with new forms of energy which don’t contribute to global warming.

Technologies that have been back engineered from crashed alien craft could be integrated into our world economies. Even without alien technology, the fact that aliens have been able to come here from far away will open up new possibilities for energy research.

It would open new perspectives on what’s possible and help break us out of fossil fuel dependence. After disclosure, it is more likely our government will fund research into these new energy technologies. Some feasibility will have already been demonstrated.

From the political right, disclosure can serve two goals. The verification that aliens are already in our space can serve to create a new threat to our national security. This can justify new military expenditures such as a star wars program to defend against possible hostile aliens.

It gets harder to justify the amount of national treasure we spend on defense in the absence of direct outside threats. With the fall of the Soviet Union, communism is no longer the threat. International terrorism came into play to fill the gap and was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the continuing war in Afghanistan.

However, terrorism is on the decline and talk about the war on terrorism has diminished appeal. Two rouge states with nuclear ambitions, Iran and North Korea, are filling the space currently. But neither of them will prove to be a credible long term threat. What I see is that they will eventually negotiate away their nuclear threat capability for economic sanctions relief.

The second goal that disclosure serves is to embarrass the president and disrupt the momentum towards his reelection in 2012. With a current fifty-three percent approval rating, it looks unlikely that any Republican challenger has much of a realistic chance to defeat Obama in 2012 as things stand now. Questions about aliens can serve to distract attention away from any positive agenda Obama might want to promote.

Disclosure brings with it a new tide of distrust of government. Questions will be asked of Obama with respect to what did he know and when did he know it. And, most importantly, why didn’t he tell us before now?

If it turns out that Obama knew the basics of alien presence but didn’t push for opening the UFO black ops division to Congressional oversight or public scrutiny, then he’s liable to a charge of negligence in his presidential responsibilities.

My reading is that alien disclosure will come about through a kind of WikiLeaks event, not from an unprovoked presidential announcement. My revised forecast for this event is September, 2011.

Some of the current 2012 predictions claim that the more severe changes to our Earth and civilization will happen before December 21, 2012. It’s important to determine whether there is a realistic basis for concern. What exactly should we be concerned about?

Although 2012 has been hyped into a disaster scenario where humanity or civilization comes to a sudden and abrupt end, this doesn’t mean that 2012 is just an unfounded fear fantasy.

Calendar dates have mesmerizing symbolic power. There was wide spread panic in many European quarters just before the date 1000 A.D. The year 2000 saw another wave of unfounded fear centered in part around the Y2K computer adjustments.

2012 become the new focal point when it was pointed out December 21, 2012 marked the end of a great cycle of the Mayan calendar. The 2012 date resonates in people’s awareness because there is an intuitive understanding that the world as we know it is coming to end.

Great change is happening and the rate of change is noticeably increasing. However, there is no credible evidence from any scientific source that I’m aware of that this change means the Earth will no longer sustain human life or that civilization will catastrophically collapse on or about December 21, 2012.

There is just no science to back up these apocalyptic predictions. Whatever astronomical configurations are happening such as alignment with the galactic center or precession of the equinoxes are recurrent events. They have happened many times before without catastrophic impact on life on earth.

There is some buzz about solar activity and its effect on life on earth. Certainly life on earth is totally dependent on a relatively stable energetic output from the sun. And the current cycle of sun spots is due to peak in late 2012. Our electric grid system is vulnerable to a perfect storm level electromagnetic pulse from the sun such as occurred in 1859 and 1921.

Efforts are underway in Congress to fund a project to build surge protectors for our transformers. From the clairvoyant perspective, I don’t see the perfect solar storm happening in the next year or so. I don’t any see any solar anomalies of any kind on the immediate horizon that would have catastrophic effects on our civilization.

So far as earth changes go, I see something happening 10,000 years into the future and another event 100,000 years into the future. I trust we’ll have the technology by that time to anticipate and adapt to these major earth changes. What I see clairvoyantly is the physical earth being here to support our life and civilization for at least 10,000 years.

In the meantime, whatever space weather anomalies come our way will be events to which we can relatively easily adapt.

Yet, as I said before, life as we know it is coming to end. The 2012 anxieties we feel do have some basis in fact. To understand this basis, we have to reframe 2012 from a singular event in time and look at 2012 as a period in human history, as change happening over a span of years.

Then the 2012 phenomenon is already underway and it will extend well beyond the December 21, 2012 end date. My reading is that 2012 is a series of events starting about 2008 and extending to at least 2018.

The 2012 phenomenon is really about a transformation of collective consciousness and ecological challenges. We truly are at the cusp of human history, a time that marks a before and an after. But it’s not catastrophic earth changes that we face. It’s a change in our culture and civilization.

The transformation of collectiveness consciousness is having the effect of producing a net increase in the spiritual intelligence of humanity considered as a whole. Human beings world-wide are becoming more tolerant and accepting of differences and more supportive of equality, justice, and democracy than ever before in human history. The amount of armed conflict, terrorism, and crime is also decreasing.

Of course, this is not uniformly true throughout the world. There are plenty of places, people, and institutions where there is a contraction of consciousness. There is major resistance from elements of society who want change to be arrested and even reversed.

Thus, we live in a polarized world where we can see plenty of evidence for humanity spiritually coming of age or, conversely, humankind engaging in all manner of deplorable conduct.

This polarization amounts to a kind of identity crisis for humanity. We’re living in a time where there is a tremendous potential for the expansion of consciousness and yet many choose to live in denial or otherwise sabotage the possibility of a fuller awareness.

Part of the dilemma of the 2012 time frame is centered on this question of who will we choose to be. Will we manifest our fuller potential or retreat into some kind of survivalist contraction that refuses to look beyond our own pressing immediate needs?

Yet our civilization will not flower and manifest the positive story of the 2012 time if economic concerns overwhelm us. This brings us to the reality based threat about the 2012 time frame. Simply put, our civilization as concurrently configured is not ecologically sustainable. We’re living in a time of creeping apocalypse.

This means we are now relating to each other and to the resources of the planet in ways that make it increasingly likely that, unless major changes are undertaken, the quality of life will be catastrophically eroded.

Our challenges are not surprising or hidden issues: overpopulation, pollution, deforestation, reliance on fossil fuels for energy, species extinction, invasion of nonnative species, decreasing water resources. These are some of the direct ecological dangers we face.

Then, there are our economic models which, as we know from recent history, point up the shortcomings of unregulated capitalism and consequent concentrations of wealth leading to greater disparities between the richest and poorest of us.

Scarcity of planetary resources becomes a growing problem when the distribution of resources is as inequitable as it is in our present political and economic configuration.

There is now uniform scientific consensus that our planet is undergoing a period of climate change. 2010 is tied for the hottest year on record. It was also the wettest year on record in terms of average global precipitation. On January 11, there was snow on the ground in 49 of the 50 states excluding only Florida.

The change in consciousness needed regarding climate change is about understanding the threats posed as an ecological issue. The biosphere, i.e., the water, the air, and soil, and the organisms that live on the Earth are one integrated living system. What human beings are doing to this living system create dramatic imbalances. The green house effect through carbon emissions are one significant aspect of this.

Our current climate change is not something inflicted upon by mysterious cycles of space weather. We have the climate change that we deserve. That is to say, we have the climate change that we create through human activity.

And so we will have the 2012 that we deserve. The future will be exactly what we create through our collective human activity.

There is a tremendous challenge here that we need to take on. We can be proactive in creating the positive post 2012 future that we desire.

It is important to keep the true concerns of the 2012 time in perspective. This perspective is easily lost if we succumb to unfounded fears around catastrophic earth changes or equally unfounded fantasy around ascension. In both the disaster scenario and the miraculous evolution script, our future is being determined by outside forces totally outside our control.

These tall tales of 2012 about the end of the world or the sudden irrelevance of it engage our imaginations and so engender a whole industry of false prophecy. They can keep us in fear or fantasy.

To the extent that the credibility of these false prophecies wears thin, we’re vulnerable to discounting and disregarding the genuine concerns we face in the 2012 time. There is a danger that we’ll just close our minds to the whole issue.

This would be a grave mistake. For the world as we know is coming to an end. The changes happening in our collective consciousness and consequently in our culture and institutions are indeed profound. The world is not as we have known it already several times within the last decades.

The advent of personal computers, email, the internet, social networking media: these technologies have all changed the world in dramatic ways. So also have political and social developments: the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and relative peace in Northern Ireland.

And let us also not forget the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the war in Iraq, the economic crash of the Great Recession of 2008-2011, and the gulf oil spill.

More big changes are coming in the 2012 time and these will affect how we live and how we relate to each other.

It is no coincidence that the change in collective consciousness cited above is happening at a time when our survival as a species is threatened by ecological catastrophe. Our spiritual intelligence is growing in response to crisis. This effort is assisted by the spiritual direction we have in our connection with the Higher Self and from the realm of angelic support.

We are called upon to embrace the changes happening in our culture and to be the vision keepers, supporters, inventors, and creators of this change.

If this were to be the case, our country would be in serious jeopardy. We would then have a very right wing government. Social conservative issues would come to the head of the priority list for congressional action and it would be the Democrats who would be trying to stem this tide with filibusters.

In many respects, it would be like turning the clock back to the era when George W. was in charge. We cannot afford this type of government though in the 2012 time. The challenges we face on every front require a visionary and progressive response.

Global warming would be just one such challenge. Republicans are very close to making the denial of global warming part of their official platform. They deny either that global warming is happening at all or, if it is happening, they claim the activities of human beings are not responsible.

There is a strong anti-scientific bias on the part of conservative Republicans. If they dominate our government, we would have lost a great deal of our ability to adapt to the changing realities of the 2012 time.

On the economic side, a government of conservative Republicans would make big cuts in both spending and taxes. The effect would be that the middle and lower classes would bear even more of the burden of supporting government than is currently so.

Wealthier people though would get more tax breaks and benefits. There would be a broad rollback of social services across the board as governmental help to the disadvantaged portion of our society is cut back.

With respect to the presidential race, much depends on who the Republicans put forward as their candidate. The four front runners are Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich. There are many others mentioned, but the reality is that it takes so much money and other resources to win a presidential nomination that, if a prospective candidate hasn’t made a name for themselves by now, it’s already too late.

The best candidate the Republicans could put forward would be Marco Rubio. But, as he’s just been elected Senator, he won’t be running until 2016.

All the major candidates have liabilities. Newt Gingrich is an intellectual and someone whose moral character is so flawed that he is widely despised even by Republicans.

Mike Huckabee is a good candidate in some respects, but he’s the social conservative Republican candidate and that’s too narrow a base to win the nomination. Moreover, he’s been virtually invisible since 2008.

Mitt Romney is the establishment Republican with the best chance to win the nomination and beat Obama. But if the Tea Party doesn’t implode between now and 2012, he is going to be dead meat. Romney supported TARP and still supports it. He’s going to be anathema for the Tea Party people who make up a sizeable percentage of Republican primary participants.

Sarah’s main liability is a 52% disapproval rating among the American public as a whole. There are serious questions about her electability. However, she is widely admired in Republican circles and the darling of the Tea Party.

My reading is that she will run away with the nomination. She has made herself into a media star and been continually in the news since 2008. Moreover, she is more or less immune from criticism, at least in the eyes of her conservative base. She is like one of those science fiction monsters that just get stronger the more you throw at them as they absorb energy. Her appeal is emotional and symbolic. It has little to do with logic or arguments.

Palin’s nomination pretty much makes Obama’s reelection a cake walk. People are going to want someone they can trust for the chief executive. By 2012, some of the projections Obama has been subjected too will have worn off. These are both the projections that he’s the incarnation of the Messiah or that he’s is a socialist and the anti-Christ.

The 2012 election will not be like 2010 in one very important respect. More people are going to be motivated to vote with presidential candidates on the line. Many of the demographic groups which were under represented in the 2010 midterms will come back into play in 2012.

Less than 40% of the eligible voters turned out in the midterms of 2010. It was over 60% in 2008. Moreover, 2010 saw a dramatic decrease in the voting of demographic groups that favored Democrats in 2008. Participation by young voters was down 55%, African-Americans 43%, and Latinos 40%.

If we do indeed have Obama versus Palin, the scary prospect of Sarah Palin in the White House will jolt people out of voter apathy.

My reading is that the economy will continue to improve in 2011 and 2012. There will be modest growth and this will ease the deficit crisis to some extent. I see unemployment remaining relatively high at about 7.5 to 8.0 percent by election time in 2012. However, emergency measures to stimulate the economy will no longer be needed.

The Great Recession will finally be over and the sense of economic extremity will no longer be the only issue on voters’ minds.

However, this doesn’t mean we’ll be out of the woods economically. We’re looking at a 2012 trend of a problematic work force in the United States.

Manufacturing and lower skill work is being shipped overseas to cheaper labor markets. There will be job growth in highly skilled and technical fields, but the escalating cost of technical and higher education will make it more difficult for people to quality for these jobs.

There is economic turmoil in the entire world currently and this is going to continue between now and 2012. The issue is not scarcity of resources, but how these resources are allocated. The wealth inequity issue is a global concern. The world-wide capitalistic economic paradigm is creating a scenario where more and more people are becoming disadvantaged with respect to the Plutocracy.

The economic system of our planet is going to have to be restructured. How this is going to be accomplished draws sharp contrasts between progressive and conservative political factions.

The Republicans have had their wave and now they are going to accountable to the voters. They’ll have to put some specifics into their plans for the economy. When they get down to details, many of the independent voters who supported them in 2010 are going to be experiencing voter’s remorse.

With a divided Congress though, there will plenty of room for each side to blame the other for inaction and ineffectiveness.

Mitch McConnell, the Senator Minority leader for the Republicans was very candid when he said that the “single most important thing that we want to achieve” after the election “is for President Obama to be a one-term President.”

We’ll see then a continuation of the Republican strategy of opposing all Obama initiatives. Power becomes more important than policy and the country suffers as a result. The new Republican opposition to the START treaty is one recent example.

The incoming congress will mark a new low point in congressional gridlock. We can expect brinkmanship around budgets and increasing the national debt ceiling. My reading is that the Republican overreach will lead them to do the same kinds of things they did in 1994. For example, we’ll see a shutdown of the government over the issue of increasing the debt ceiling.

In some respects, the Republican leadership will follow the playbook of the Tea Party. Rather than confronting the real challenges we face, it’s much easier to seek distraction through acting out. Often symbolic moves take the place of substantive change.

The Republican initiative to have a moratorium on earmarks is one such move. If all earmarks are eliminated, however, it will only amount to one half of one percent of the budget. Moreover, it’s not really a cut in spending because federal agencies can still spend the money for the various projects anyway. This is because earmarks are sourced from money already appropriated.

The more partisan and ideological people are, the less open they are to taking in new information. Research on beliefs shows that often individuals actually become more intransient in their opinions when presented with contrary facts. A statement like: “Eliminating earmarks will not by itself reduce spending” would be an example of something super partisan folks just can’t accept.

There are still many people who believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the 911 attacks.

The political peril of the 2012 elections is that the Republican wave of 2010 will continue into 2012 and give us a government of ideological, conservative Republicans who are not open to changing their minds no matter what new information comes into play. This is surely what we don’t need for the tumultuous 2012 time.

Even with the reelection of President Obama in 2012, he is going to be unable to initiate any progressive change with a conservative Republican House and Senate. The Senate is especially vulnerable in 2012. There are 33 Senators up for reelection then and 23 of them are from the current Democratic caucus.

Moreover, there are several Democratic Senators up for reelection in red or purple states: Kent Conrad in North Dakota, Ben Nelson in Nebraska, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana, Jim Webb in Virginia, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

Also, it’s going to be difficult for the Democrats to win the 25 seats they need to take control of the House in 2012 once the Republican legislatures get finished gerrymandering all of the House districts from the 2010 census.

What’s not taken into account yet in the political forecast for 2012 is the impact of world events. Between now and 2012, we’re going to have disclosure of alien presence on planet Earth.

My reading is that this is now going to happen in early 2011. (This is a revision from my earlier forecast of November, 2010. There will be more on this in a future blog.)

This event will give us a more planetary focus. Who we are as a species will come into play. This helps shift the focus from who will be the best party to improve the economy and business to issues of values and priorities.

Moreover, with Sarah Palin as the implicit leader of the Republic Party as their standard bearer for 2012, we can have more attention placed on basic questions of what’s important, real, and true. It’s going to be an election about whose reality do you want to subscribe to.

The split up into different reality consensus groups is one of the features of the 2012 time frame. Eventually we’ll have more consensus groups than just progressives and conservatives.

But for the immediate future, we’ll have two competing realities. One reality will involve those who can embrace the transformations our civilization is going through. A second reality will encompass those who want to stop change from happening or go back to the way the world was in the past.

The nonpartisan, independent voters will be the deciding factor and they will have to choose which picture of reality they want to believe in.

Who would have thought that Sarah Palin would play such a pivotal role in the reinvention of civilization? Her presidential campaign will be a sharp contrast to Obama’s vision. This contrast will get people energized into political involvement.

I am still optimistic about the future and the political outcomes for 2012. The political cycles of which party has the wave on their side are happening in much quicker succession than ever before in history. This is part of the acceleration of change in the 2012 time frame.

However, progressives have to be careful not to succumb to the complacency of thinking that, with Obama as president, all is well with the world. The fraud that the Tea Party represents has to be exposed and the conservative-corporate conspiracy has be acknowledged and confronted.

What needs to be healed is coming to awareness in our culture. This is in part economic and political dysfunction.

It’s disheartening to reflect on what political darkness we need to succumb to before we will yearn for the light. Without the Bush presidency, we would not have a progressive visionary like Barack Obama as our president. And without Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and the rest of the Tea Party political zealots, we would be still be stuck in the illusion that there is no conservative-corporate conspiracy.

Big changes are needed in our world. Therefore, we unfortunately seem to need big turmoil and truly frightening political possibilities to awaken us from our political slumber and mobilize us into action.

The transformation of culture and civilization that is part of the story of the 2012 story was never going to be a smooth, incremental progress. The reactionary elements of our society are going to push back and try to arrest and reverse change and restore some idealized past that is no longer either functional or possible.

Yet, we still have some semblance of a democracy in our country. With complacency no longer an option, my reading is that there will be a Democratic Party wave in the 2012 elections.