Everyone seems to be pessimistic about America these days. In poll after poll, Americans worry about their future. Pundits, myself included, write despairingly about the monumental challenges we face. Academics plan seminars on America's decline.

Evan Bayh's surprise announcement that he would not seek a third term has sent shockwaves through the pundit class on an otherwise quiet President’s Day.  It also upset a year’s worth of comfortable predictions that Republicans would never take back the Senate in 2010.  This, combined with other recent political developments, places a 50-50 Senate within reach for the Republican caucus.

WASHINGTON -- Only two things are infinite -- the expanding universe and Democrats' hostility to the District of Columbia's school choice program. Killing this small program, which currently benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large -- the Democrats' dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.

Shake-ups raise risk for Democrats...

It was another week, another telltale of the turbulence besetting New England Democrats.

One of the party’s biggest names, US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, announced he will not seek reelection, 37 days after Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut did the same. In between, a little-known Republican, Scott Brown, knocked Washington off-kilter by winning the Massachusetts Senate seat of Kennedy’s late father, Edward M. Kennedy.

WASHINGTON -- In 2013, when President Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor, is counting his blessings, at the top of his list will be the name of his vice president: Paul Ryan. The former congressman from Wisconsin will have come to office with ideas for steering the federal government to solvency.

WASHINGTON -- In all the recent reports, speeches and news conferences concerning the federal budget outlook -- including the administration's proposed budget for 2011 -- hardly anyone has posed these crucial questions: what should the federal government do and why; and who should pay? We ought to go back to first principles of defining a desirable role for government and abandon the expedient of assuming that anyone receiving a federal benefit is morally entitled to it simply because it's been received before.

Last December, facing an 11-seat climb back to power, the GOP's most optimistic outlook in the Senate was to win back 4 or 5 seats, enough to break the filibuster-proof Democratic majority and diminish the majority's stranglehold on the Senate's legislative agenda.  Then came Massachusetts.  Scott Brown's stunning victory there assured Republicans 41 seats heading into November's elections and provided ample speculation about what could happen.  Could the GOP win the House?  I've been optimistic on that point, stating the odds to be pretty close to even money.

The federal budget deficit has long since graduated from nuisance to headache to pressing national concern. Now, however, it has become so large and persistent that it is time to start thinking of it as something else entirely: a national-security threat.

A remarkable thing happened in New York recently: the state legislature, in effect, turned down the chance to win $700 million in federal money. No one does that, except extremely conservative Southern governors (who inevitably relent and take the money) — oh, and occasionally teachers' unions. A few years ago, I wrote here about the Detroit union that forced the local government to reject a $200 million philanthropic gift to build 15 charter schools using a model that was already succeeding in the city.