A grim surprise was tucked inside the Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget outlook. Economic growth, it said, will be 2 percent in 2012, falling to 1.1 percent in 2013. That’s horrible.

It’s far beneath the growth rate required for the economy and the job market to recover. But it’s also probably wrong— provided that Congress wants it to be wrong. Because the CBO isn’t saying the economy can’t grow faster than that. It’s saying the economy won’t grow faster unless Congress makes some hard decisions, and soon.

LAS VEGAS — Mitt Romney answered his last question from a voter three weeks ago, and just about every day since then, he has swept through towns across America like a whistling train conductor proclaiming, “All aboard.”

Days before the U.S. Postal Service announced record-setting losses in September, the nation’s top postal regulator traveled to Scotland for meetings with European envelope manufacturers.

A few weeks later, Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman Ruth Y. Goldway visited Portugal, Switzerland and China to meet with international postal regulators.

President Obama said Sunday that he deserves to be reelected because his administration has made progress on the economy, but he acknowledged there is much more work to do.

“I deserve a second term, but we’re not done,” Obama said during a pre-Super Bowl interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer.

Is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani sorry that he’s not trying again this year to win the Republican presidential nomination?

In a word: No. And to be precise, it’s more accurate to add an exclamation mark, as in, ”No!”