Etc.

It shouldn't be surprising a reactionary court would uphold a reactionary law:

While individuals can be fined by up to 2 percent of their income if they do not have coverage, the fines for employers who fail to offer insurance to their employees are so low as to create an incentive for companies to drop their insurance programs. That will force workers to buy individual policies offering reduced coverage. One recent study showed that as many as 9 percent of businesses plan to drop coverage for their employees by 2014.

The fact that such a regressive measure is passed off as a progressive reform says a great deal about 21st century America, as does the Supreme Court ruling that upheld it. The decision—written by the right-wing chief justice, John Roberts, and endorsed by the four nominal liberals on the court—reflects the fact that the corporate establishment is heavily invested in the legislation.

Employer-paid health insurance is going the way of traditional pensions. Not good in absence of a national health insurance program.
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Michigan has really gone to pot in the past few years, and its legislature passing anti-abortion legislation is proof something the hell is wrong.
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It's not about "southern values" making a comeback, it is instead about a neoliberal political and economic philosophy which favors the elites over everybody else and at the cost of human misery.

Northern elites, southern elites. It doesn't really make a difference. Policies are in place that favor both to the exclusion of everybody else.

THAT is the problem.
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Obituary: Former Israel prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, 96, of Alzheimer's disease, which he had for six years:

Stubborn and laconic, Mr. Shamir was by his own assessment a most unlikely political leader whose very personality seemed the perfect representation of his government’s policy of patient, determined, unyielding opposition to territorial concessions.

Many of his friends and colleagues ascribed his character to his years in the underground in the 1940s, when he sent Jewish fighters out to kill British officers whom he saw as occupiers. He was a wanted man then; to the British rulers of the Palestine mandate he was a terrorist, an assassin. He appeared in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi. But Mr. Shamir said he considered those “the best years of my life.”