A Bloomberg News article about the dismal state of Canada's newspaper industry ends with the following paragraph, including a quote from Phillip Crawley, the publisher of the Globe and Mail:

Another element unique to Canada is the presence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which received about C$1.04 billion in government funding in the fiscal year ended March 2015.

"I resent the fact that I'm competing with something I'm paying for with my own taxpayer dollars," Crawley said.

This is an excellent point, but it is, alas, not "unique to Canada." Britain has the BBC, and the United States has NPR and PBS, which use my tax dollars to compete with me.

At first glance, it's hard to fault Senator Ted Cruz and his supporters for arguing that the Republican presidential candidate from Texas is a natural heir to Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court Justice who died over the weekend.

Cruz is the son of an immigrant from Cuba; Scalia was the son of an immigrant from Italy.

Cruz was a champion debater at Princeton; Scalia was a champion debater at Georgetown.

Scalia graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review; Cruz graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Scalia worked as a lawyer at a private law firm, as a government lawyer in the Nixon administration, and as a professor at the University of Virginia. Cruz worked at a lawyer at a private law firm, as a government lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, and taught at the University of Texas law school.

Cruz was involved in the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group; Scalia was a faculty adviser to the Federalist Society chapter at the University of Chicago.

Hillary Clinton's plan to raise the payroll tax — a plan she hasn't yet announced, but that Bernie Sanders more or less dragged out of her at the most recent debate — is the topic of my latest column:

Clinton has already proposed a 4 percent surcharge on high-income taxpayers, bringing the top marginal income tax rate to 43.6 percent. Slapping a 12.4 percent payroll tax on top of that would bring the top marginal federal income tax rate to 56 percent, meaning the federal government would take away more than half of every additional dollar that a high-income family earned. Add in state and local income taxes — 13.3 percent in California and 12.7 percent in New York City — and personal income taxation reaches a confiscatory 69 percent, or more than two thirds of every marginal dollar....It's no wonder that Clinton hadn't deigned to tell voters about this under Sanders dragged it out of her in a debate.

Richard Epstein's remembrance of Antonin Scalia includes the fact that TGS turned down an offer of a spot on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. "Shortly thereafter, he was offered a position on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia." Not for everyone, but for some people, at least, it works out when you wait for the job you really want rather than settling for what is on offer.

Plenty of people on the center-right, including me, mocked Donald Trump when in a recent presidential debate Mr. Trump cited the liberal Harvard law professor (no, that isn't redundant) Laurence Tribe as his legal authority for the idea that Senator Cruz, born in Canada, may have trouble fulfilling the Constitution's requirement that a president be a natural born citizen of the United States.

My thought was that the reference to Mr. Tribe wouldn't exactly help Mr. Trump with his audience of Republican primary voters. But I may have spoken too soon, for, after this week's order from the Supreme Court blocking the Obama administration's unconstitutional crackdown on coal, Mr. Tribe may wind up as a hero in the conservative legal pantheon right up there with TGS (the editor of the New York Sun's term for "The Great Scalia"), Kenneth Starr, or Theodore Olson.

Somehow I missed this last month, but what a great symbol of how unclear insider trading law is and how capricious the enforcement of it is: the news that the Securities and Exchange Commission is going to refund the $21.5 million that Level Global Investors paid as a settlement to the SEC after that firm was raided and shut down. The Second Circuit ruled that prosecutors were wrong to go after the firm and its personnel for behavior that was not illegal.

Morton Kondracke has a Wall Street Journal article about Mike Bloomberg's presidential possibilities that makes some sound points:

Mr. Bloomberg also closed New York City's $6 billion deficit in 2002 and left his successor with a balanced city budget in 2013. He battled teachers unions to improve New York public schools, and championed tough anticrime and antiterrorism policies. He's emphatically pro-business and pro-free trade. He is not, in other words, a knee-jerk liberal. He is a moderate....If Mr. Bloomberg is, as rumored, willing to spend $1 billion on a presidential bid, he shouldn't devote it all just to a single election. He also should establish something lasting—perhaps modeled on the Democratic Leadership Council that (temporarily) shifted the Democratic Party toward the center in the 1980s and provided Bill Clinton with a base to run in 1992.

The Federalist has published a piece I wrote arguing that, notwithstanding the critics, the Financial Times was actually the perfect place for Michael Bloomberg to talk about his presidential possibilities:

For one thing, the FT is a business newspaper at a time when a stock market downturn is heightening America's already formidable anxiety about the state of the economy. Bloomberg sends the message that he is sophisticated about markets, unlike the other presidential candidates, who are either career politicians, socialists, or the real-estate-mogul-turned-reality-television star.

FT's global nature highlights the contrast between Bloomberg's internationalist approach and the inward-looking policies of his would-be rivals.

For another thing, the FT's global nature highlights the contrast between Bloomberg's internationalist approach and the more crimped, inward-looking, perhaps even xenophobic policies of his would-be rivals for the presidency.

Our sister site SmarterTimes.com has coverage of a problematic New York Times column. The Times column claims "chances are slim that anyone connected to Wall Street has a prayer of securing a top post" in the next presidential administration.

CNN reports:

Median income would soar by more than $22,000. Nearly 26 million jobs would be created. The unemployment rate would fall to 3.8%.

Those are just a few of the things that would happen if Bernie Sanders became president and his ambitious economic program were put into effect, according to an analysis given exclusively to CNNMoney. The first comprehensive look at the impact of all of Sanders' spending and tax proposals on the economy was done by Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor.

This more sweeping analysis was not commissioned by the candidate, though Sanders' policy director called it "outstanding work." Friedman has worked with Sanders in the past, but has never received any compensation.

CNN does quote a few more skeptical voices toward the end of the article.

Michael Bloomberg has an interview with the Financial Times about his consideration of a presidential run. He doesn't show much leg, but he keeps the story alive. If the electorate were FT readers, Mr. Bloomberg would probably win in a landslide. Says the former mayor of New York: "I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters."

The debate in the presidential campaign over whether to privatize health care for veterans is a fine example of the ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats, I write in my column this week:

Republicans don't trust the government; they think it's a bloated monopoly run by overpaid, inefficient bureaucrats. Democrats don't trust the private sector; they suspect overpaid corporate executives just want to siphon excessive profits out of government programs. Neither party is perfectly consistent about this...But these are the fundamental instincts and tendencies, and they run deeply.

Please read the whole column at CapX (here), the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Michael Bloomberg's pollster, Douglas Schoen, who also worked for President Clinton, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal laying out the reasoning for a Bloomberg presidential campaign:

Commentators have mistakenly characterized Mr. Bloomberg's mayoral tenure as exclusively focused on a relatively limited (but widely known) social and public health agenda, including laws to prevent gun violence and discourage smoking. They're missing the bigger picture. Over more than a decade in office Mr. Bloomberg governed with (and articulated) sensible alternatives on reforming taxes and government services, as well as revitalizing the economy. He kept New York safe from a terrorist attack for 12 years and stood firm with law enforcement to reduce crime by 32% and make it the safest big city in the nation.

A Bloomberg candidacy would make no effort to kowtow to the religious right or labor unions.

Steve Forbes talked about time and money in an interview about his recent book Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code and Reforming The Fed will Restore Hope and Prosperity:

I think the key thing now is to get the dollar fixed in value, which we propose in that book, whether it's a thousand dollars an ounce or eleven hundred dollars an ounce.

"Sadistic" is the word that Barrington Parker, a judge who rides the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, used to describe the position by federal prosecutors in New York that money manager Doug Whitman should remain confined even as the Supreme Court hears a case that could clarify insider trading law in a way that overturns his conviction. Bloomberg (here) and Reuters (here) have the details.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, has gotten a lot of favorable press in New York City and nationally. But sadism is not a quality that is particularly attractive in an officer of the court, especially when the law being enforced is unclear enough to be the subject of a circuit split.