Nate Silver has an excellent post on his New York Times blog, explaining that Barack Obama’s approval rating have been running unusually high as compared to people’s assessments of how things are going in the country. He thinks this effect will be reduced somewhat by November 2012, but that it will still be a factor. Read More

On Wednesday the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in the appeal from federal District Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling in a case brought by 26 states that Obamacare is unconstitutional. Courtroom observers will watch the oral argument closely; two of the three judges on the panel were appointed by Bill Clinton, one by George H. W. Bush. Read More

In a blogpost earlier today, I suggested that Barack Obama’s April 13 speech at George Washington University, in which he signaled that he would be in campaign rather than governing mode for the remainder of the 2012 campaign cycle, triggered the economic slowdown clearly indicated by the numbers that have been coming in this week. Read More

Is Paul Ryan thinking of running for president? I caught up with the House Budget Committee Chairman last night when he spoke at the Washington chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society at the St. Regis Hotel, three blocks north of the White House. Interestingly, Ryan spoke largely about foreign affairs. He began by noting our “unsustainable trajectory of government spending” and segued to foreign policy, citing Charles Krauthammer’s 2009 warning that “decline is a choice” and a choice we don’t have to and should not make. Read More

“Unexpectedly,” as I noted in my Sunday Examiner column, is a word that often appears in mainstream media accounts of negative economic developments. Or “unexpected” or even “a real surprise.” Glenn Reynolds, the eagle-eyed Instapundit, has spotted yet another example. Read More

You’ll have a hard time finding it on the Washington Post’s website (it's not included with the other column that appeared in the print edition) but Democrat Matt Miller’s column in today’s Washington Post makes an interesting point: Democrats may be making a serious policy and political mistake in attacking the main mechanism—premium support—of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan. Read More