Ryan Streeter on The Republican: The mathematician vs. the rhetorician: Why Paul Ryan has become Barack Obama’s biggest headache

John Rossomando interviews Ga. Congressman Tom Price: Obamacare will fall if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional (With audio)

Dems seek $1T tax hike, $3T deficit cut from supercommittee - The Hill

• In budget talks little agreement between Democrats and Republicans but both support lower cost of living adjustments for public benefits - WSJ
• The top 1% earn about 17% of taxable income but pay around 37% in income taxes - PowerLine
• Why the rich get richer - FrumForum

Democrats confident of gains in House but winning back control "pushes the edge of plausibility" - Roll Call

NPR on why the Democrats are optimistic about making gains.

President Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly referring to the Congress as “Republican” even though their party controls one-half of the unpopular institution - The Hill

• McCain recycles joke about Congress' low, low approval ratings - USA Today

Republican officials complain that activist groups are too ready to give them "F" ratings - Politico

Romney's Finest Hour: He speaks the truth about housing and foreclosures - WSJ editorial

• Mitt Romney is '110% behind' Ohio law limiting union power - LA Times

Mitt Romney leads in first four states to vote - USA Today

"The TIME/CNN/ORC polls released Wednesday afternoon from the first four states on the 2012 Republican calendar paint a consistent picture of the Republican race. These polls show that the GOP race is being shaped by parallel but disparate movements: a more moderate and secular wing of the party is coalescing around Mitt Romney, while a more economically and culturally conservative wing continues to resist him, but remains more divided than the roughly other half of the party. That pattern is sufficient to place Romney in the lead comfortably in New Hampshire and Florida, and within the margin of error in Iowa and South Carolina, according to the surveys." - Hotline

Obama campaign delighted at Perry's attacks on Romney

"Romney is the opponent Democrats most fear, and whom Obama strategists view as the near-certain Republican nominee. Yet even among strategists who assume Romney will be Obama’s opponent, Perry’s newly feisty performance on the campaign trail has raised hopes that he may drag out the primary fight and bloody Romney ahead of the main event." - Politico

2012 in Brief:

• Rick Perry backed off the birther talk, but now calls on Obama to release his college transcript - Washington Post
• PowerLine on Perry's anti-debate remarks: "The idea that Perry could have stayed away from the debates, on the ground that he isn’t very good at them, and remained a serious candidate for the GOP nomination seems almost delusional." Also see HotAir.
• Steve Forbes has endorsed Rick Perry as the best GOP candidate to carry forward the media baron’s cherished flat tax, and tells Lloyd Grove the Texas governor will overtake Mitt Romney - Daily Beast
• "Cain’s current lead is evidence of a larger and longer-range trend that is both heartening and disturbing. I call it the revolt against the experts." - Michael Barone for NRO
• Cain appoints foreign policy team - The Cable
• Cain joins Palin and Perry as targets of Karl Rove's disapproval - Daily Caller
• Paul Ryan under pressure to reconsider presidential bid - Weekly Standard
• "Representative Paul Ryan’s speech to the Heritage Foundation earlier today once again demonstrated that he is, among elected public officials, the foremost intellectual defender of American conservatism." - Commentary
• The Washington Post continues its campaign against Marco Rubio arguing that putting the Florida Senator on national ticket could be risky bet for the Republican Party.

Opinion polls point towards victory for Obama but economic fundamentals suggest defeat - WSJ

• "Obama is past the point of being judged mostly on words. This time around, he'll be judged mostly on competence." - Karl Rove in the WSJ
• The WSJ looks at a World Bank survey which suggests America needs to be more pro-business.

Bloomberg should replace Timothy Geithner

"Naming Bloomberg Treasury secretary would be a bold move by Obama to seek a post-partisan truce against gridlock in Washington and to escalate an urgent bid to create jobs, revitalize housing and revive the economy." - Brent Budowsky at The Hill

Obama could create jobs if he worked with, not against, America's energy industry - Steve Forbes at Politico

"While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery -- especially horizontal drilling and fracking -- have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution -- at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half a trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home." - Victor David Hanson at RCP

Crony capitalism in America

"We face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives." - Nicholas Kristoff for the New York Times

Qaddafi’s dictatorship was preferable to an Islamist Libya - Andrew McCarthy for NRO

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