This morning, some conservative groups expended a lot of energy hyping a document that seemed to show the Office of Management and Budget -- and hence the Obama administration -- opposes the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant. That was a bad idea, because it's just given the OMB a high-profile opportunity to restate its support for the EPA's finding. Peter Orszag, the director of the OMB, explains. And he also links to this April 17th post where he calls the EPA's decision "important" and writes that "the proposed finding is carefully rooted in both law and science."

The Annual Trustees Report is out today, telling us something akin to what we already knew: Medicare and Social Security are in bad shape, and getting worse. The headlines will emphasize the dates of insolvency. Medicare runs out of money in 2017, two years earlier than anticipated by last year's report. Social Security falls in 2037, four years earlier than predicted in last year's report.

One of the reasons I like reading Patrick Ruffini is he has a tendency to grapple with, rather than downplay, troublesome evidence. Here he is, for instance, on Obama's personal popularity:

Obama's personal popularity stayed remarkably stable throughout the course of the campaign, and the average unfavorable rating barely ever cracked 35%. Obama the campaigner looks downright polarizing compared to Obama the President, who now sports a 65/25 fav/unfav in the Pollster.com average.

I don't really like writing defenses of "comparative effectiveness review." It makes me despair for our country. We're literally talking about the process of gathering evidence so we know how well various medical treatments work. It's worth saying, however, that there are two types of objections to gathering evidence, and they're being unfortunately conflated.

I know that Janet Napolitano is floating around on the White House's short list. I don't really understand why: She's neither very liberal nor a great legal thinker nor armed with radically different life experiences than most members of the governmental elite. Rather, she was an effective moderate politician and, before that, an apparently skilled attorney general. But nevertheless, she'd be an enormously controversial nominee on the Court itself. Her early rise to prominence came as the attorney for...Anita Hill. So I guess what you can say about her is that there's probably no nominee in the country who would do more to piss off Clarence Thomas.

I've argued before that you can compare a perfect-world carbon tax to a perfect-world cap and trade proposal, or a realistic carbon tax to a realistic cap and trade proposal, but you can't compare a perfect-world carbon tax to a realistic cap and trade proposal. Today, Kevin Drum draws that argument out at length: