So, apparently, Jeb Bush used to think he was Hispanic. At least, that's the box he checked when he registered to vote, a few years back. While immediately created much online amusement (my favorite: "It's pronounced 'Heb' Bush"), it does raise an interesting but tangential question -- and not just for Bush -- in the upcoming presidential primary process: Do Republican ballots in all states require full legal names for candidates?

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It's becoming accepted conventional wisdom in Washington that Hillary Clinton is quite likely going to skate to the Democratic nomination for president. This disappoints many, since pundits love conflict in politics above all else. No conflict means having to write a whole lot of stories about a primary race that is over before it begins, which no political writer wants to do. But is there an even bigger buzzkill out there for political writers? Is the 2016 presidential election almost as easy to predict as the Democratic nominating contest?

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Senator Rand Paul announced today (to absolutely nobody's surprise) that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination for 2016. He joins only one other official candidate, Senator Ted Cruz, who made his own announcement a few weeks ago. On the Democratic side, nobody has officially thrown their hat in the ring. Such announcements are happening much later this presidential cycle, due to quirky financial advantages of our crazy campaign finance legal system (if it can even be called that, anymore, after the Supreme Court's evisceration). But I'm getting distracted, and veering off the topic at hand, which is paying proper attention to those candidates who actually are declared candidates. Since nobody else has officially stepped up to the podium yet, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul deserve at least a moment in the spotlight.

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Barack Obama's job approval poll numbers slipped a bit in March, ending a streak of good news in polling for the president which reaches back to last September. But while the numbers turned slightly negative, the overall outlook for Obama was looking up by the end of the month. This means Obama has a better than even chance of gaining ground again in April. But before we get to predicting the future, let's first take a look at the chart of the recent past.

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For the uninformed, Pi Day is a yearly celebration of a date on the calendar, for its numerical significance. It ranks up there among geeky holidays with the fourth of May ("Star Wars Day," since you can go around wishing everyone "May the Fourth be with you!"). The significance is it will be "3/14" (at least in the United States, as Europeans write their dates differently). These are the first three digits in the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, or "pi."

But this year's Pi Day will be the best one for the next 100 years, because a whole bunch of digits will come into play. Pi's value is, to 10 digits: 3.141592653. This year's Pi Day will be 3/14/15. Taking it a step further, just before 9:30 AM tomorrow morning, the date and time will read: 3/14/15 -- 9:26:53. Woo hoo! Best Pi Day of the century!

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Forty-seven Republicans in the United States Senate caused an uproar this week when they sent an "open letter" to the people running Iran's government. This action was roundly condemned, both here and abroad, for being (at the very least) undiplomatic in the extreme. The Iranian foreign minister dismissed it as a cheap attempt at propaganda, which is to date possibly the most poignant description of the letter. After a few days, even some Republican senators who signed the letter were beginning to admit that it probably hadn't been a good idea.

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I guess the easiest way to begin this column is with the most probable presidential headline for next year: "Clinton Versus Bush." Which is really somewhat of a cheap trick, since (to be fair) the 1990s were two Bushes and one Clinton ago, really. Still, if this is the way the next election pans out, it will indeed have somewhat of a time-machine flavor to it. It's technically not "back to the future," but instead the flip side: "forward to the past."

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Hillary Clinton, by some accounts, wanted the luxury of waiting as long as possible before officially becoming a 2016 candidate for president. There were good reasons for her to wait, the most prominent being that she could pick and choose which day-to-day political issues to address, and which she could safely ignore for the time being. So the extent of her campaigning, so far, has largely been an occasional Twitter message. It seems, however, that this luxury is about to come to an end. Hillary's soon going to have to give the public more than 140 characters, whether she officially tosses her hat in the ring or not.

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The February jobs report is out, and -- once again -- Obamacare has failed to kill all those jobs Republicans warned us about. But we'll get to all of that later, in the talking points, so you'll just have to wait for that.

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Recently Republicans seem to have discovered the struggles of America's middle class. Out of nowhere, they're suddenly talking about this problem. Well that's great, but talk is cheap and when it comes to action, these Republicans seem to have amnesia about what they've actually done to hard-working Americans. Republican trickle-down policies created tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy while leaving working families to pick up the pieces. I'll believe Republicans care about what's happening to America's middle class when they stop blocking legislation that would require billionaires to pay taxes at least at the same rate that teachers and firefighters do. Republican trickle-down economics blocked increases in the minimum wage that would have lifted 14 million people out of poverty.

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