Ted Cruz's victory in the Iowa Republican caucus proves you can win that state while opposing ethanol subsidies. That's pretty good news. I'm not the first or only person to observe this, but it's a point worth mentioning, anyway.

Michael Bloomberg's potential presidential run is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Item one: two New York Times editorials — "Monopolizing Beer," October 7, 2014, and "How Mergers Damage the Economy," October 31, 2015, contending that the government should use antitrust law to block anticompetitive consolidation in the beer industry that would hurt consumers.

Item two: a Super Bowl preview article on the front of the Times sports section headlined, "For Beer, Color of Competition: Red and White," about how "wine sales have been steadily growing faster than beer sales, especially around Super Bowl time, a reflection of the changing preferences of younger fans and an increase in women who watch the country's biggest sporting event."

Again, this is a bit far afield from our usual topics here, but some readers may be interested in my dispatch for the New York Sun about Natan Sharansky's visit to Brown University. The link is here.

In his New York Times column, Paul Krugman acknowledges a problem with the claim of many on the left that American politics are somehow dictated by the super-rich. "The 1 percent has no problems with immigration that brings in cheap labor; it doesn't want a confrontation over Planned Parenthood; but the base isn't taking guidance the way it used to," he writes.

Or, as Charles Koch put it a few weeks ago, "You'd think we could have more influence."

This reader is noticing more and more dangling modifiers. It's not clear whether they are the result of poor education, cutbacks in editorial staffing, or something else. Here are three examples:

From a section-front Wall Street Journal article headlined, "The Power of Daily Writing in a Journal": "His collective writings consume about 15 feet of shelf space in a storage unit in Manhattan, Kan., where he lived before moving last year." Never mind the writings, tell us about how the guy lived in a storage locker.

From a front-page New York Times article headlined, "Donald Trump Takes To Solo Stage Instead of G.O.P. Debate": "Flying into Des Moines in his gold and leather-lined 757, he held his own one-sided debate, before an adoring crowd of 700, and mused about how his lesser opponents across town were coping with his absence." Never mind the gold and leather, tell us about how Mr. Trump managed to fit 700 people on a Boeing 757.

This is a bit far afield from our usual topics here, but some readers may be interested in my dispatch for the New York Sun about Natan Sharansky's visit to Boston. The link is here.

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate is hiring. From the job listing: "These are part time positions with a varying work schedule not to exceed 20 hours per work week, to include weekend scheduling. These positions are not eligible for benefits."

I'm not sure whether to blame RomneyCare or ObamaCare, but one wonders whether during Senator Kennedy's long battle to expand healthcare coverage via federal law, he really meant to essentially incentivize institutions like the one named after him to create part-time jobs without benefits, thereby shifting the burden of coverage onto individual workers and, through subsidies, other taxpayers.

In the midst of a really terrific Conrad Black column about Donald Trump and what Black calls a "conservative highbrow attack" on him, comes this:

If the Republican-party regulars, reinforced from the ideological right, want to stop Trump and promote someone they regard as a suitable and presentable candidate, they will have to put all their chips on Marco Rubio soon. Or they could try a broader-based draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan (who was drafted to the speakership), a dark horse of Wendell Willkie, if not James K. Polk, proportions.

And at the end of a front-page New York Times article about establishment Republican panic at the prospect of Trump or Cruz winning the nomination comes this:

National Review's attack on Donald Trump is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here). I've gotten more reaction to this column, both positive and negative, than to anything else I have written in quite a while.

Also on the Trump front, this analysis from Rush Limbaugh is interesting:

The governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, a Republican, delivered his state of the commonwealth speech last night taking stock of his first year in office and looking ahead. The text is here and worth a look. I was watching on television here in Boston, and one striking thing is that, unlike President Obama's state of the union address, where Democrats stood and cheered while Republicans sat stonefaced in silence, Mr. Baker's speech had both Republicans and Democrats — including even Democratic U.S. Senators Markey and Warren — standing and clapping at the applause lines. One highlight:

As the administration ends its first year in office, some have lamented how boring we are. I'll admit: that makes me smile.

No fights. No yelling. No partisan scrums.

I had a basketball coach in high school who was fond of saying: Don't confuse effort with results. Work hard, but work smart.

Ted Cruz's John F. Kennedy imitation and claim that Kennedy would be a Republican if he were alive today is "a regular part of his repertoire on the campaign trail in New England" and is drawing an objection from JFK's grandson, Boston.com reports, without mentioning that there is a book all about this.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Polling suggests that Democrats might not be all that bothered by Mr. Sanders's socialist roots. A new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll showed that 43% of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers saw themselves as socialists, compared to just 38% who called themselves capitalist.

Bloomberg's Matt Levine — whose bio says "He has worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz...spent a year clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and taught high school Latin... has a bachelor's degree in classics from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale Law School" — has written a couple of mostly smart and interesting pieces lately about insider trading enforcement and law.

The most recent one, about the Supreme Court's decision to take up the issue, is here:

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with John Skipper, who is the president of ESPN, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co. From the interview:

WSJ: What's the value of niche sites like The Undefeated and FiveThirtyEight​?
Mr. Skipper: At the Undefeated, the play is about content. If you do a time-lapse of the last two or three years in sports, you'd see more stories pop to the top about race and sports than anything. It is an important area to explore. There is a business reason: among our most important consumers are African-Americans. There is not right now a go-to site for black fans, other than just ESPN sites. [The Undefeated] will be a black-run and black-staffed site.