President Obama

Anyone who’s been to a gas station recently knows the feeling. There you are, about to refuel, when you see the price of regular gasoline: about $3.52 per gallon, up 77 cents since 2010. Your pulse quickens. Your stomach sinks. Because this is not a dream. The days of $4.00-a-gallon gas are about to return.

Hey everybody--it's the Age of the Electric Car! Sales numbers for the Chevy Volt are out and you'll never guess how many of these future machines consumers gobbled up in the month of February. Go ahead and try. I'll wait.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is forgotten but not gone. It’s housed, quietly and temporarily, in the Treasury Department as it prepares to become an official, stand-alone federal agency on July 21. The CFPB is hiring. It already has an acting director, an enforcement chief, and a growing staff. They’re eager to come to the aid of borrowers and credit card holders.

Back when he was running for president, Barack Obama cited his relationship with Senator Richard Lugar so often that Lugar came to be known in the political press as “Obama’s favorite Republican.” Photos of Lugar even appeared in campaign ads that helped Obama (narrowly) carry Indiana.

After a depressing week—a horrible shooting that killed 6 people and wounded 14 others, followed by days of demagoguery and idiocy surpassing even the normal standards of our power-without-responsibility punditocracy—recent days have brought encouraging news. The medical prognosis for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seems more hopeful than had been thought likely. And the American people have once again demonstrated their good sense in the face of efforts by the media to stampede them toward foolishness.

As President Obama prepares to welcome China’s Communist party general secretary Hu Jintao to Washington for a state visit on January 19, it’s easy to get nostalgic about an earlier era in U.S.-China relations. Throughout the 1990s, there was at least the prospect that America would use the political capital of a summit meeting to force concessions on human rights.

The Senate plans to hold a cloture vote today on the tax deal between President Obama and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. TWS supports the deal, for reasons explained in our editorial. Here are some more reasons to support the deal, from some of our favorite bloggers.

Keith Hennessey:

The omens are everywhere. Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons. The eurozone is in crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is near 10 percent. America’s social insurance programs threaten to bankrupt the country. And—most unusual—the Washington Nationals are above .500.

Liberals keep voicing amazement that the debate over financial reform is proceeding much more quickly and more smoothly than the debate over health care. The reason is simple: Health care was a clash of two competing governing philosophies, whereas most everyone agrees that something went seriously awry with our financial system in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The negotiations in the Senate are a good-faith attempt to work out the differences.

AP reporter Erica Werner on Obamacare:

The legislation remains in limbo. Reps. Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, moderates from California who voted for the House bill, burst out laughing when asked about the issue's fate. 

These are members of Pelosi's state delegation. She simply does not have the 218 votes necessary to pass the bill.