Disapproval of President Obama’s handling of the economy is heading higher — alongside gasoline prices — as a record number of Americans now give the president “strongly” negative reviews on the 2012 presidential campaign’s most important issue, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

There is one area, besides copper mining and home foreclosures, where Arizona is a national leader. It’s at the front of a movement by states and local governments to seize control of immigration from the federal government. In 2010 it passed a law, S.B. 1070, that made the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants its official policy with a grab bag of enforcement schemes that turned federal immigration infractions into state crimes. Among other things, the law required immigration checks by local police, required immigrants to carry papers with them, and made it illegal for the undocumented to live or look for work in the state, or for people to knowingly hire, harbor or transport them.

Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income. Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive,” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile. Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It,” puts it succinctly: “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”

There's a seeming paradox in the way Americans view the healthcare law that President Obama and the Democrats passed two years ago this month. Most people tell pollsters they like the parts of the law that have gone into effect: health insurance for people with preexisting conditions, a clause that allows children to stay on their parents' health plans until the age of 26 and discounts for prescription drugs on Medicare. And, as time goes by, Americans seem less worried that the law will have a negative effect on their own medical care; in an AP-GfK poll released last week, most people said they expect their healthcare will stay pretty much the same — a big change from two years ago, when many expected dire consequences.